PTPL 073: Are You Obsessively Date-Format Opinionated? Sadly, I Am.

PLUS An Omnifocus–Obsidian workflow, and how one blind fiction writer uses plain text

Plain text, Paper, Less (PTPL) Productivity Digest, text-based image by Author

Welcome! I’m Ellane, and this is a once-a-week summary of things that are helping me to simplify and future-proof my digital-analog workflow.

Two inspiring plain text workflows

My plain text workflow as a fiction writer. — Robert Kingett

Robert is a blind writer of both fiction and nonfiction, on Windows. He lists Windows text editors that are full accessible to screen readers.

OmniFocus + Obsidian Workflows with Leah Ferguson

In this 2022 presentation, Leah shows us how she runs her life with a clever combination of Omnifocus and Obsidian.

Are you excessively (or obsessively) date-format opinionated?

This week I learned that the extent of my penchant for particular date formats goes way past an intellectual preference, into something that looks a lot like neurodivergency.

My strong reactions to what I perceive as auditory and visual noise probably may stem from a highly distractible brain — which deeply resents anything that draws its attention away from the topic at hand — rather than from the misophonia I’d thought I had. Thanks to Dean-Ryan “Dhry” Stone for this insight.

In fact, as I sat here trying to describe it to you for the upcoming PTPL, I found it blowing out into something way too big for a weekly productivity digest! Those raw thoughts will be published separately …or not at all; I haven’t decided yet.

The short version looks like this:

I looked into changing the way I format the date in the metadata of my plain text files, and tried a few of them out. They looked great! Intellectually, I was happy, but then something deep inside me woke up and started to scream.

Change it back! it said.

NOW!

Sigh. It’s back the way it was (again).

Well-established habits can be really hard to change, and I’ve concluded that in this instance, it’s fine to stick with the date that keeps my (confusingly opinionated) lizard brain feeling safe.

Two date formats that do the job. Image by Author

The format I’m using now looks like this:

year-month-date day 24h-time note-category - file name

eg, 2023–10–06 Fri 2048 L  -  Things I did today

There are many other valid options; please choose the one that feels right to and for you.

Remember that whichever format you choose, you’ll need to use it consistently so that searching for and sorting files will work well. If you’re using Obsidian Properties, YYYY-MM-DD is the only choice if you want your YAML to be recognised as a date.

Perhaps you’ll choose instead to store creation/modification dates in the body of your note rather than the file name, and make extensive use of saved searches to surface subsets of your notes. The important FKM (file-based knowledge management) principle is to keep your note’s metadata accessible, and portable across platforms, and impervious to having its creation/modification dates changed by the system you’re working with.

Check out PTPL 071 for why you might like to consider keeping metadata in file names in the first place.

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Ellane helps simplicity-focused Apple users to plan and learn effectively and autonomously.

Click here for things she’s written about Obsidian, and here for past issues of this newsletter. Non-Medium members can access a selection of past PTPL editions for free.

Download productivity goodies (including an Obsidian Planner demo vault) here.