I have joined the TODO.txt movement. Single plaintext file (markdown for me, because I am not an animal), for each year. Divided into quarters, months, weeks and days using headers. A few keywords (TODO, NOTE, DONE, NOW) to facilitate search. Intentionally kept only on my laptop to reduce junk.
It’s called an AI assistant not an AI slave. Don’t tell AI to do the work for you. Do it yourself first, then identify steps that can be automated. Leverage the true power of LLMs (which is language, duh). Brainstorm search queries for Scholar, rewrite and rephrase text you authored. Do the work.
Using a tiling window manager has been the best productivity booster for 2025. All my frequently used apps are arranged into dedicated virtual workspaces (using pneumonic like “S” for social and “N” for notes). I have my text editor at 1 and terminal at 2. No more Cmd+Tab to find the right window!
Really enjoying Lilex as a monospaced font these days. It’s a serious contender to Source Code Pro, which has been my monospaced font of choice for nearly a decade.
What I am increasingly recognizing is that having a sophisticated system to manage your tasks does not make you productive. What matters is the willingness to execute on the tasks that are piling up, regardless of how I “feel” about working in the current state. You see, the last year I wasted countless hours, refining, tweaking and experimenting with various way to accumulate tasks. So I don’t “forget” them. But that’s all that it, an accumulation of things to do.
Is to remember the people behind the content. Often, I find something interesting, I go to the author’s website and find a treasure trove of information. Remember the people. Ultimately its the human you need to reach out to for anything.
The more I detach myself from the use of AI, the more grounded and creative I feel. I remember when I produced entire research papers with just pen, paper and a simple text editor. The more tools and gizmos and gadgets I incorporate into my workflow, the more my brain atrophies.
I wonder what the arguments against connected note taking are? The fundamental idea behind Logseq, Roam and Obsidian is essentially regex patterns and search. I think what would be more interesting is to identify potential entities automatically. Maybe ML can do this already?
I do like the declarative style of configuration though, it definitely fixed my system config itch. I have stopped tweaking my config every 5 minutes since building the entire system using sudo nix-darwin switch is just the right amount of resistance to make me think for a minute.
I am unsure about using Nix for system and package management. I think the benefits did not outweigh the cost of setting it up in the end. Maybe if the Nix language itself was not so obscure? Also it feels that things are not as transparent as with homebrew and dotfiles.
Wondering what’s the best way to group related entities together. I am debating between using tags and folders. With tags, I get to keep a flat directory structure inside obsidian. I don’t see a clear winner here because with the search features, I can narrow down the notes I want either way.
AI cannot innovate. It may be able to write code, but it can’t figure out what to write code for i.e., it cannot identify problems to solve. A deeper reason for that is because it cannot talk to humans, accumulate knowledge and be proactive.
DHH just released Omarchy 2.0 as a Linux ISO. Boy does be know how to market his products. People have been ricing Linux for decades and along comes this guy, puts his dotfiles in GitHub, spreads the word amongst his followers and lift off. Amazing.
Obsidian follows standardized format of storing metadata related to notes using the YAML frontmatter. I find this design decision better compared to Logseq which introduced its own format.
Vivaldi had a horrible user interface. It feels like a bunch of developers got in a room together and built it. Nothing against doing that, just did not appeal to me as a polished product. Back on Arc.
My mind feels unlocked. Its only been a day since I started using Obsidian and I feel like the movie Limitless. When I let my mind ponder, jump and hop without restrictions I am discovering so many interesting and wonderful things.
What distinguishes the Knowledge Graph I am creating within obsidian, from say wikipedia is that the entities here represent my interpretation and are related to how I perceive and use the information.
I think a limitation of obsidian’s alias plugin is that it does exact word searches. I think a more powerful alternative would be allow cycling between a regular search and a regex search. This is akin to emac’s DWIM functionality.
What is the point of explicitly creating links between notes when the unlinked mentions section automatically does a good job of showing connections between notes? It seems to be that the 8020 approach here would be to thoughtfully create these entity notes.
Wondering if I can view notes that were created/modified in a given date range. This would allow me to get an overview of what I have been thinking about in a given week/month (e.g., during my monthly reviews). I can do this using the bases feature which allows you to filter based on modified time.