Recently, I took a look at my digital bullet journal (BuJo) setup that had evolved over the years. The system consisted of multiple tools:
- Google Docs—This was the “home” to my actual BuJo documents. I had one document—structured through a series of nested tables—which contained a record of my week in one place.
- Google Calendar—I use multiple calendars to track various categories of appointments (personal commitments, blog post schedules, a household calendar, the day job, etc.) as well as to subscribe to calendars for sports teams and other events.
- Remember the Milk—A powerful task manager that allows for tags, marking locations, and creating recurring tasks. Additionally, the free version included all the features I needed.
- Assorted text files are scattered across my devices.
Until about a year ago, I was using Evernote as an alternative to Google Docs. However, after years of significant price increases and (in my opinion) decreasing quality, I cancelled my Evernote subscription and moved on.
However, I have recently noticed issues with this workflow.
- Google Docs occasionally would hang up while I was in the midst of typing my daily highlights (AKA journal notes), resulting in an interruption of my flow state and lost ideas.
- To create the journal entries, I had to allocate time every Sunday for my weekly planning. This included manually adding calendar items and tasks to each day’s section of the BuJo. Any functions that rolled over or appointments that got cancelled on the calendar had to be manually updated in the BuJo.
- The Google Docs app isn’t the most user-friendly on the iPhone when I am away from my home computer. If I wanted to journal something, it was easier to enter the text in my phone’s Notes app and then copy and paste it into the BuJo on my computer.
- There was a significant amount of manual intervention required to create and maintain the system.
When I was going through an old hard drive and came across the files from the Todo.txt system I had used several years ago, I began thinking about revisiting a more modern version of this approach.
The Todo.txt setup I had ran on a MacBook and utilized a series of Terminal scripts to dynamically update a series of text files (hence the name) that contained my task management workflow.
Since I am at the point that I need a cross-platform solution that works well regardless of the device I have at my fingertips, I knew that old configuration wouldn’t work. But it led me down the path of some online research and to Obsidian.
Obsidian is available to all of my devices. It offers a paid solution for online syncing through a subscription model. However, a strong developer community has created extensions that enable syncing with other cloud-based services, such as iCloud, Dropbox, and Amazon AWS.
At its core, Obsidian utilizes a series of Markdown files, allowing them to be accessed through any text editor if needed.
Speaking of extensions, there is an extension available that automatically pulls and captures my calendar events, adding them to the daily BuJo file. A second extension reads my master task file to retrieve the day’s tasks, along with those that are overdue (from previous days).
I have been running Obsidian side-by-side with my manual process for a couple of weeks already and have been refining my Obsidian template to get things in my familiar structure, as well as removing a good chunk of the manual intervention in setting up the BuJo entries.
On Monday, I’ll be unleashing the Obsidian system independently and saying goodbye to the multi-app approach. I’m sure there will be a few growing pains along the way, but I am feeling confident in this system and look forward to continuing to learn about what else I can do with it.
PHOTO CREDIT: Obsidian open with a chemistry note, graph view, and calendar open. (by Langstonzac25 via Wikimedia)
