Late last year, I set 3 goals for myself for 2023: (1) consolidate the apps that I use; (2) simplify; and (3) automate repetitive tasks. One repetitive task I’ve been dealing with for decades is maintaining and publishing my reading list. I started keeping my reading list back in 1996 in order to track a…
Over the years I have spent quite a bit of times on various experiments. In the 2010s, I considered the idea of the paperless office, embraced Evernote as a tool for paperless productivity, and wrote a popular series of posts on the subject. So far, in the early 2020s, my experimenting has shifted somewhat. I’ve…
There are some tools that I use that are so seamlessly integrated with my workflow that they are almost invisible. They work so well that I simply don’t think about them. That really isn’t fair since tools like these do far more than they get credit for. And since I had a particular tool in…
More than a year ago I began exploring the Shortcuts feature that Apple introduced to iOS (and later, into MacOS). It took me a while to figure out what the shortcuts were all about and longer to figure out a practical use for shortcuts. There were plenty of examples of things that people were using…
I’ve had a number of people reach out recently to inquire about my Obsidian automation scripts. I will get them posted to Github in the relatively nearly future. In their current state, they are not ready for public consumption. There are lots of hard-coded paths, to say nothing of the code is fairly ugly. I’ve…
Note: December 9, 2021: I wrote this post in February 2021 after I’d been using Obsidian for a little over a month. In the 10+ months since, I’ve learned a lot more and modified my reading notes process based on lessons I’ve learned in what you see below. If you are interested, you can check…
ETA: 4/1/2021: I have now posted my code for my daily notes automation script on GitHub. See this post for more details. For nearly a week now my Daily Notes file in Obsidian is generated automatically each night after midnight. I wrote a Python script that creates the note, and having the script running as…
Now that I have been using Obsidian fairly exhaustively for the last 5 days, I think I’ve got enough experience with it to share my initial impressions. I mentioned earlier that Obsidian was the notetaking tool I’ve been looking for all my life. That begs the question: what is it that I’ve been looking for…
hree recent experiences remind me that automation for the sake of automation doesn’t really do much. But if automation can be used to improve processes, eliminate repetition, and redundancy, then it is well worth investing the time to improve the automation. It is a personal pet peeve of mine whenever I have to supply the…