Four lessons from four decades of note-taking In the fall, the Little Miss will be heading into 7th grade. Forty years ago, I too, was spending my summer what 7th grade would be like. In the Los Angeles Unified School District at that time, 6th grade was the last year of elementary school, while 7th…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. A couple of months ago, in Episode 15, I wrote about how I use daily notes as an index to my life. I was impressed by a post I’d read on someone who kept all…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. This episode is less of a “how-do-I” and more of a “how-I-struggle with…” post. I have been working with tags for more than a decade and still struggle with them. I wanted to give…
There was a thread I saw on Reddit (that I can no longer locate) that asked: why take notes? The thread contained the usual answers that I’d expect to see, but it made me think about my own notetaking and I thought I’d try to answer the question here. Prior to my junior year in…
Way back in February, I wrote a post on how I capture my reading notes in Obsidian. I had been using Obsidian for a little over a month and was blown away by its features. It had just about everything I’d been looking for in a notes tool. I quickly hacked together some scripts and…
We headed to the beach this past weekend for a mini-vacation. Late on Sunday afternoon we wandered into a Hawaiian-style restaurant, Nalu, for an early dinner. I did my usual thing: after scanning the menu to decide what I wanted, I jotted it down in my Field Notes notebook. I do this for two reasons:…
My morning routine was a little out of whack yesterday. On Saturday, we made a long day trip to Lancaster, PA, about a 2-1/2 hour drive north. We spent the day at an amusement park for the Littlest Miss’s birthday. We left the house at 8 am on Saturday and were home just before 10…
When I wrote recently about print vs. cursive, I said the following: I tend to use a lot of shorthand in my journals. I rarely spell out names of my immediate family, resorting instead to first letters. I have dozens of shorthand codes for words and phrases I use commonly. I was surprised by the…
For the last six days, I have done almost no reading, a thing virtually unheard of for me. Instead, I have been obsessively listening to back-episodes of the Tim Ferriss Show Podcast. Tim Ferriss is the author of the Four Hour Work Week, a book that I skimmed, but never finished. I have, however, read…
Since I am on vacation and happened to find myself with an empty hour this afternoon, I managed to clean up my code enough to where I was willing to put my Obsidian daily notes automation script on GitHub. This is the script that I use to automate the creation of my daily notes in…
For the last several days, I have been playing around with Obsidian in Vim mode. Vim, for those who don’t know, is a powerful text editor that can take some getting used to. It uses different “modes”: for editing, for navigating and issuing commands. It’s keyboard commands are designed for touch typists so that you…
While reading Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Code Breaker, I was particularly struck by some seemingly minor details. The book is a fascinating look into the modern process of scientific discovery, and there was some discussion of how a discovery written in a lab book and then signed by witnesses in order to document the…