Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: How Sahil Bloom Created a New York Times Bestseller Using a Pocket Notebook The author of an instant New York Times bestseller. A newsletter with more than 800,000 subscribers. A back-cover endorsement from the CEO of Apple. These are pretty impressive accomplishments for any creator. And Sahil Bloom proves you can achieve these kinds of results without a complicated system. He doesn’t have a vault of...
7 days ago • 10 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: You Need an Ideal Week Template For years, I’ve been doing something every quarter that almost nobody else I know does. It’s not flashy. Twenty minutes of work sets the architecture for the next twelve weeks of my life. It’s quietly one of the most important planning rituals I have, and the one that makes the biggest difference in whether I actually have time for what’s most important. I sit down with a...
14 days ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Playing to Play vs. Playing to Win I love me a good quote. I’ve got a whole collection of them inside my Obsidian vault. And the other day, I came across a doozy by Rick Rubin (author of The Creative Act): “We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun.” When I heard that, it kind of stopped me in my tracks. Because I think most of the PKM advice out there quietly...
21 days ago • 4 min read
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...
28 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...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. Most Obsidian users I talk to don't really know what to do with properties (the YAML metadata at the top of their notes). Which is a shame, because properties are one of the most powerful features in Obsidian for driving a PKM system that actually works. A MacBook Pro with highlighted Obsidian properties. Simply put, properties are structured metadata attached to your notes. They let you organize, sort, filter, and...
about 1 month ago • 2 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...
about 2 months 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 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 2 min read