PTPL 045: Dashboards in Obsidian Canvas, and Why PKM Apps Aren’t Necessary

PLUS a plain text accounting update, and a scary experiment

Mar 26, 2023

Plain text, Paper, Less Productivity Digest text graphic by Author

Welcome to the Plain Text, Paper — Less Productivity Digest! A once-a-week taster of the unusual, the helpful, and the delightfully mundane, as well as the next instalment in my quest to future proof and simplify my digital-analog workflow.

This week —

Using Obsidian Canvas to build your own Notion-esque dashboard
Why personal knowledgement apps aren’t necessary
An experiment to test just how app-agnostic I really am
Plain text accounting: I’ve started using Beancount, and it’s great!

Productivity Tips and Inspiration

How to Build Beautiful Dashboards With Obsidian Canvas

Check out the great Obsidian info and beautiful typography on Trevor Tarakjian’s Product Nook website! In this piece he explains how to use embedded Obsidian queries to build your own personal dashboard. You’ll find yourself saying, “Notion? Who needs Notion?”

I especially like the way Trevor uses simple queries, rather than the more complex Dataview. High-five for keeping things lightweight! He’s right, Canvas truly is your oyster. I’m looking forward to trying some dashboard ideas out when bandwidth allows.

Personal knowledge management apps aren’t necessary

These thoughts were inspired by this article, from a link in Curtis McHale’s weekly PKM newsletter.

If we’re searching for the right app to manage our thoughts in note form, we’re focusing on the wrong thing.

Taking notes and storing them in a way that we can find them again is important, but no app is able to make connections our unique way of thinking can.

AI-driven apps can be helpful for making connections we mightn’t otherwise have seen, but relying on an external source of intelligence to process our thoughts tends to weaken our own context-driven ability to turn data into knowledge.

Adventures in Plain Text (and a little paper)

Could I use Text Edit as my notes app for a whole week?

This week a scary thought came to mind. Could I interact with my notes using nothing but a simple text editor (like Text Edit, or even VS Code) for a day? What about a week?

I’ll be interested to observe where the main friction points crop up. It might be a good idea to remove Obsidian and iA Writer from my devices for the duration of the experiment because of muscle memory. This will be a great experiment to document, when I get the courage to do it.

What do you think? Is this something you could do, or does your current note taking setup rely too heavily on app-specific features?

Plain Text Accounting update

Things are going well in plain text accounting land! I’ve settled on Beancount, because it’s beginner-friendly and its documentation has just the right amount of detail for my needs.

This week I learned the basic principles of bookkeeping from this site, and used the Terminal to install Beancount following these instructions. This involved entering the following into Terminal, and letting it do its thing:

sudo -H python3 -m pip install beancount

Feeling rather chuffed that it worked!

The Fava interface is brilliant. No need to use Terminal at all for reports if you don’t want to. I’m still very much a beginner, but enjoying the journey! It’s good to know there’s some knowledgable folk on Mastodon I can go to for help when needed.

Plain Text. Paper, Less.

Enough is a perspective, not a sum (except when it comes to notebooks!)

If you’re struggling through lack of air, water, food, shelter or safety, nothing else is going to matter until the basics are covered. With regards to other things, you can change your perception of how much you have by walking around to see it from a different angle…

2 years ago · 1 like · Ellane