PTPL 041: How a New Obsidian Vault Structure Is Helping Me Shape My Notes
PLUS the benefits of laziness, a plain text accounting update, and a Medium to Substack warning
This week —
The benefits of laziness
Making productivity beautiful (henry-codes)
Why you shouldn’t use Substack’s Medium importer
How my new Obsidian vault structure is helping me shape my notes
Plain text accounting update
Productivity Inspiration
The benefits of laziness
Anne-Laure Le Cunff believes that while laziness isn’t a label most of us would want to wear, it can offer some distinct benefits.
— The benefits of laziness: why being a lazy person can be good for you
Many innovations have come from lazy people looking for an easier way to do something
Active procrastinators work better under pressure, and show good overall performance
Focusing on high-leverage tasks increases the input to output ratio
Being intentionally unproductive can reduce stress
Lazy people tend to avoid burnout
A wandering mind can lead one to less obvious solutions
Leaving a problem alone for a time can cause it to resolve on its own
Noticing our tendency to be lazy can help us find better ways to approach tasks
Making productivity beautiful
This isn’t directly productivity related unless you’re into making websites, but I wanted to highlight how the spaces we live in while we work can affect our output. This website (on how to make a website) is simple, practical, and beautiful.
May Henry’s typography (and creative prose) inspire you to do something within the bounds of your job, or whatever project you’re working on, just for the aesthetic joy of it!
Surprise someone with the details. Surprise yourself.
Adventures in Plain Text (and a little paper)
News, and a warning
The itch isn’t going away. I love Medium for all its wonderful benefits, but it’s time for me to branch out and have my own space on the web as well, probably on Substack. All my posts also live in plain text in my Obsidian vault, in case you were wondering.
A word of warning for anyone looking to import their Medium posts to Substack: if you’ve been an active commenter on Medium, do NOT use Substack’s automatic importer for your posts! The importer brought in over 1000 of my “articles”, but more than 800 of them were all the one or two line comments I’ve made since 2020.
There’s no bulk delete function on Substack that I can see, so I’m having to click multiple times to get rid of the cruft. The upside: some of my long-forgotten comments were mini posts worth saving.
Only my own ideas
Last week I wrote about the impact this statement has had on how I keep notes in Obsidian —
When I search Obsidian, I only want to be searching my own ideas.
It’s taken a few days for the dust to settle, but I can honestly say that I’m loving my new digs. Before this change I had a lot of structure that felt organised (sort of), but was really just a structured mess.
Today my Obsidian vault is made up of two sections. Four PARA folders for what I’ve come to call my life operating system, and all my thinking notes. The folders sit at the top of the list so as to be unloseable, and the notes stretch below them into what feels like eternity.
I’ve never done so much work in my notes as I have since moving to an essentially flat structure, and I have to say, it’s a delight! I work on shaping my notes much more often because they’re right there in front of me rather than tucked away in nested obscurity.
The most powerful part of this system is that when I want to add a new thought to the pool, there’s only one place for it to go. Bye-bye decision fatigue!
FYI Drafts is still a big part of my workflow for getting notes into my vault, especially on iOS.
Plain text accounting update
I mentioned a couple of PTPL editions back that I’ve started learning how to do plain text accounting. It’s my attempt to overcome my aversion to anything math-related by channelling the activity through my pet topic.
Progress is slow, but as steady as the time I choose to put into it — which has so far only been about an hour or two a week.
This article shows how Gizra, an international web shop business, uses hledger to track forecasting and cash flow. They found that plain text accounting (PTA) has benefits that make the learning curve worth it:
The accounting file can be version controlled
It’s easier to track mistakes
It’s faster to get data from input
Simon Michael, he author of hledger, is approachable and willing to help
I can attest to the last point, as Simon saw my posts on Mastodon documenting my plain text accounting progress, gave me a warm welcome to the PTA club, and offered help if needed.