For those who don’t know me, I’m a Workflow Guy. For those who do know me, the fact that I’m a Workflow Guy is probably pretty obvious from everything about me. I’d like to think my journey towards becoming a Workflow Guy was a nobler one than most (a radical systemic response to what is probably undiagnosed ADHD among other developmental issues as opposed to Getting My Money Up), but I still have the standard Workflow Guy problem of thinking more about the Workflow than the work.

As a result, I’ve tried to resist radically changing my productivity stack for the last five years or so in order to avoid getting stuck into optimization hell and never actually getting any work done. That stack has been, more-or-less:

1. OmniFocus (for task / project management);
2. Toggl Track (for time tracking);
3. Google Calendar;
4. and, the topic of discussion today, Obsidian (for note-taking and writing)

I love Obsidian. This is not an Obsidian hate post. In fact, there’s probably a lot of people reading for whom Obsidian would be a game-changing application to add to their workflow, and if I were a normal writer or researcher working on huge, long-form projects I’d probably use it for everything.

Unfortunately, I’m a genetic freak, I’m not normal, and Obsidian (and probably some of these other apps) has outlived its usefulness for me specifically. Sometimes, it is the time to think about the Workflow.

There are a few extremely niche and highly personal reasons for this that probably apply to absolutely no one else on Planet Earth but myself, but I’d like to outline my thought process anyway because (1) the general principles might be useful and (2) I promised myself I’d try to write at least 1000 words a day starting today (lol).

i don’t use obsidian’s linking features (and i don’t feel like changing my workflow to accommodate them)

Obsidian’s killer feature (and basically the one thing separating it from other good markdown editors) is its “internal links.” The app lets you link documents together and has lots of functionality and plugins built atop this feature.

I think if I was a grad student, or a dungeon master, or fantasy author, I could get a lot of mileage out of Obsidian’s internal links. Unfortunately, I’ve found that I mostly ignore the functionality and use the graph view mostly for peacocking (many such cases among programmers, I find.)

The reason for this is two fold:

1. Obsidian’s graph view and links are usually framed as a more “natural” way of thinking - we don’t have the Desktop Metaphor in our brains, so it doesn’t make sense to make late 20th-century office organization the model for our thought. Here’s the problem: I do actually have the Desktop Metaphor in my brain, at least as far as digital projects are concerned. This is probably because I am as digital as digital natives come - I was using computers by four and surfing the web by six (not recommended). I am pretty comfortable with just putting things in hierarchially-organized files and folders, and I find the associative graph approach to be the thing that is unnatural and alienating.
2. My thoughts are pretty disposable, and writing them in something that’s supposed to be a personal “Wiki” makes me put too much pressure on them. I watched this Westenberg video a while ago about why he deleted his entire Obsidian database, and found myself relating to one of his core insights: most thoughts aren’t worth preserving. Your brain is pretty good at naturally filtering for the information that’s actually relevant to you, and using an app that encourages you to arrange every idea that you have (and reading list, and personal project, etc.) into a permanently preserved database that is linked to every other idea can get hairy pretty quick. It’s the difference between writing something in your hand on marker to remember it and getting it tattooed on your body.

i am getting terminally terminal-pilled

I actually had a whole spiel about why having a terminal-based workflow appeals to me, but then Bread On Penguins dropped a video as I was writing this that made the case better than I ever could. Tl;dr, the terminal is cool because:

1. Terminal & CLI apps have consistent (or universally configurable) keybindings and design logic (bc they’re all meant to run on the same limited platform);
2. They let you leverage scripting for basically everything, rather than a narrowly-prescribed subset of tasks that the developers have specifically added support for;
3. They run on basically any machine (which is increasingly a concern of mine as my M1 Macbook Air threatens to give out on me and I may have to downgrade to a significantly less powerful computer soon);

The thing that has accelerated this terminal-pilling more than anything have been my switch to Neovim as my code editor (which may be the subject of a blog post on its own later) and my adoption of Yazi, which I prefer over MacOS’s Finder for file management for so many reasons that I won’t bother to list them here. Not only are both of these apps great on their own merits, but they link together in such a way that makes an amazing case for a terminal based workflow. For example, it’s actually a huge pain in the ass to get Finder to open text files in Neovim, whereas it took about five seconds to configure it in Yazi. There’s benefits in reverse too: it was trivial to set up Yazi as my integrated file manager within Neovim, and because they’re both terminal-based apps made by exactly the same species of dweeb, they both share the exact same (Vim-based) keybindings.

With the value of the terminal’s configurability and modularity in mind, it actually takes a lot for a new GUI app to justify its presence on my computer these days if it’s not an app specifically made for editing graphics in some way (I’m not in the market for a terminal-based photo or video editor … yet). Obsidian - though it does have Vim bindings and an integrated terminal - just isn’t quite as convenient for general-purpose text-editing as Neovim is, especially because (as far as I’m aware) you can’t yet use Obsidian to edit markdown files outside of a vault (Obsidian folder).

---

I think those are the two big reasons, but in general I’m trying to build a workflow that is as modular as possible - Obsidian is a very big app with very big use cases, and in general I’m trying to move towards smaller apps that do what they do extremely well and nothing else. Obsidian does a lot of things pretty good, probably good enough for most people, but not quite good enough for me any more. As for some of the other apps I listed… I’ll probably write more about them in the future. To put it mildly, I’m less enthusiastic about their continued presence.