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Comment by BasilPH | Hacker News Reader

I'm doing something similar with Obsidian daily notes[^1]. I also have a weekly note that I use to plan the next week.

Similar to how the author talks about scheduling their next day the evening before, I've started planning the big tasks for next on Friday afternoon, as this gives me momentum on Monday morning.

Related: I've found the 3/3/3 technique from Oliver Burkeman[^2] and the concept of open and closed lists to be a great complement for this type of organization. It hits the sweet-spot of flexibility and consistency for me.

[^1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes

[^2]: https://ckarchive.com/b/e5uph7hx43mn

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Happy Obsidian user here. I love that the "vault" concept it uses is literally just a folder of markdown files, meaning I'm still in full control of my data. I don't use their proprietary sync service, I just drop it into a regular folder and let syncthing take care of cloning it to every device I own and a few extras for backup.

Obsidian itself has got to be the nicest markdown editor I have ever used, hands down. It gets so many of the little details absolutely right, down to tiny things like a quick shortcut to turn a list item into a checkbox (Ctrl+L) and then into a checked box (Ctrl+L again), without needing to even think about the underlying syntax. But you totally can, if you need that control. It's great.

Vaults are great. I compartmentalize all notes surrounding each consulting job as a self-contained folder/vault - that way I only have to search relevant information but still have access to it at a later time if I want to open that vault again.

I plan exclusively on paper despite using Obsidian quite extensively for taking notes. I also do weekly and daily planning.

Initially I tried to plan on Obsidian as well but it didn't work for me. Writing on paper is slow and not only it calms me down but also directly incentivizes me to state my tasks and goals concisely. Similarly, the limited space on a planning page helps me to be realistic in terms of things I set to accomplish.

Paper often wins for a lot of things.

Taking hard-copy printouts of code to study it for bugs, design or code review is one area some people I know use it for.

Edit: I guess even for non-code text files, though I haven't used it for that purpose myself, yet. Bet many authors do.

You can go through a text to be published 5 times on a computer, print it out and for any text of decent length, I guarantee you will find a ton of stuff you missed. I have never tried using an e-ink device for that to see if it has the same effect, but I would be curious of the feedback on that if anybody here has done so.

True dis.

I use Obsidian but it is unbearably slow upon when opening the app for me, to the point where I want to move away.

It’s also dare-I-say-it too customizable for me. I just want it to look nice and do standard notes stuff without having to spend hours tinkering.

The only thing keeping me is that it is just markdown. I don’t like the idea of being locked in with the proprietary formats of other apps

Curious, I have starting using Obsidian recently and one of the things that I love about it is that it's lightning fast on my systems, including startup time. Much snappier than other note-taking programs I've used, and than 95% of the programs altogether (only the likes of Notepad are faster).

Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?

Usually the slowness of Obsidian is caused by plugins.

Try to have 50+ plugins and you will feel the slowness even in a small vault.

What hardware/OS are you using? I have a shitload of plugins but it's lightning fast for me on Mac.

Intel Core i7-4790K, 32GB, Linux.

I currently have 147 community plugins installed. Is your shitload bigger than my shitload? :-)

I don't have all of them enabled though. Only about 2/3. :-)

It's not only the number of enabled plugins that matters. Some graphical plugins eat almost no resources. But then there are other plugins that are constantly rescanning files and O is not necessarily "n", but worse than that.

You can start with setting up the following plugins to their full potential and see how it goes. :-) Breadcrumbs Dataview Dynamic Table of Contents Filename Heading Sync Juggl Link Favicons Linter Omnisearch Spaced Repetition Supercharged links

May I suggest giving Trilium notes a try? It's like opensource obsidian plus typed notes plus self hostable sync plus a web frontend for places where you can't install it.

Slow on what hardware/OS? It's instantaneous for me on Mac, but can be painfully clunky on iPhone.

+1 for Obsidian, it's invaluable for my day-to-day AND long-term stuff

Those who are familiar with both Obsidian and Bear — what are the principal differences for this particular use case?

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