Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. A couple of years ago, I built my own habit tracking dashboard in Obsidian. But looking back, that version had a few problems: It relied on a plugin called Tracker that added friction (and occasionally broke when Obsidian updated) It was painfully slow to load whenever you viewed your data Customizing the charts was a pain and meant digging into hard-coded snippets So with an assist from Claude, I rebuilt the whole...
3 days ago • 8 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: From a Full Day to an Hour — How I Hired Claude as My YouTube Script Writer I’ve wanted to make book summary videos for a long time. I’ve read the books. I’ve taken detailed notes in Obsidian. I’ve spent 90 minutes on the Bookworm podcast discussing each one at length. The material was all there. But every time I thought about actually making these videos, I ran into the same wall: they took me an...
10 days ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. A picture of someone using Obsidian on a laptop. Want to give your Obsidian vault an instant upgrade? In this short newsletter, I want to share 10 quick tips that can help your vault start to feel a little more powerful and a lot easier to use. Use the Quick Switcher — Navigate to any note instantly with ⌘-O, no file browsing required. Bonus tip: configure this to be your mobile quick action for navigating notes easily...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. Here’s a question most productivity people won’t ask you: What if your system is doing more harm than good? As in burning you out, stealing your life, and turning you into a person who checks their calendar before going to the hospital. That last one actually happened to author and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments. She was working her way up the success ladder as an...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Want to read (or listen to) this post in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Every manual step in your workflow is a chance for things to go wrong. Templates eliminate that risk. Templates are much more than just snippets or text expansion. They can also be productivity-forcing functions, make sure you capture data the right way every time, and actually kickstart the creative process. One problem I see often from people who use templates in Obsidian is that they create them but often...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Want to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. I run my entire life out of Obsidian. It's not only my favorite app, but I personally believe it's the best note-taking app on the planet. And today, I'm grading every aspect of Obsidian, and unfortunately, not everything gets an A. In this newsletter, I break down my ratings of every Obsidian category and share my personal ratings. But if you want to full review, check out my blog post (~4000 words, far too long for an...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Information Is a Commodity. Transformation Is the New Product. I just got back from the New Media Summit, and I came home with a lot to process (and a lot of sketchnotes 😉). Some of my sketchnotes from the New Media Summit. I went to learn about the creator economy, but I realized that the world of personal knowledge management (PKM) is dealing with a lot of the same issues: AI is commoditizing...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The AI Revolution Requires a Different Set of Skills. Last week, I fell down a vibe coding rabbit hole. It all started with a conversation between my wife and someone else at church about planning our pastor's Birthday party. They wanted some sort of Jeopardy-style game setup based on some of our pastor's favorite movies. So in about 30 minutes, I vibe-coded a Jeopardy Board app that we could project on...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Burnout is a PKM Problem I just finished reading a book about burnout, and it opened my eyes to a couple of things: Many of us are much closer to burnout than we’d care to admit An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure Today I want to consider burnout from a PKM perspective, and share what I’ve learned from getting way too close to it. The Burnout Spectrum According to researcher Christina...
2 months ago • 4 min read