Welcome back to PZTL – this week I wrote some articles, kept pressing on with the book manuscript and perhaps most strangely, locked myself inside of Obsidian. Here’s the scoop…
Locking myself inside Obsidian…
Just the other day, when I was coming back from the gym, I had this bright idea to up the stakes for a YouTube video, and come back to releasing content over there with a bang.
The raised stakes in question were essentially to use an app blocker (the strictest app blocker might I add), and lock myself out of anything that wasn’t Obsidian, for an entire week.
Now I thought this would be fab, and so I rushed home, showered, clipped on my microphone, booted up my laptop and began filming. I opened Cold Turkey Blocker, made a block that would last for a full seven days, allowlisted Obsidian and Proton Pass (thank goodness), and clicked to lock it in…
At that moment, my recording software shut off, as did the 100 other smaller programs that I normally run to keep my work flowing smoothly, leaving me with nothing but an Obsidian window.
…So that’s how things have been for the last few days - I’ve been locked into the app and having a real-world stress test on how my note-taking system and the Obsidian app would funnel an entire day’s worth of work.
And things haven’t actually been too bad (thank you, Web viewer plugin), which is lucky on my part, because I didn’t put remotely enough thought into whether things were going to be sustainable this way, and I thought even if I blocked all the other apps, they’d still be running and I could make use of their services.
I’ve taken quite a big hit to the convenience of everyday work, but things haven’t fallen to pieces, and I hope that they won’t. Because of this, the video’s still on (I re-recorded the intro after the block crashed things) and I’ll let you know when it’s available to watch!
Aside from this, I’ve still published a couple of articles…
I stopped trying to journal in my daily notes. Now they capture the context of the work while it is still there.
Obsidian seems to have completely broken out in the competitive field of note-taking apps, and here's my take on why...
And I’ve been working a lot more on the manuscript for the Minimal Note-Taking book. That’s coming very soon, and I hope to give you more details (and perhaps a chapter to read) in the next issue.
See you then!
– Theo
