Two pages of a notebook, each divided into thirds, showcasing the Cornell style of taking notes on a book titled "The Philosophical Baby" by Alison Gopnik

Diary 02

I realize now how suspenseful it may have been to end a diary entry with, “I just tested positive for COVID-19,” and not follow it up with any kind of reassurance later. For that, I apologize. COVID hit the Hayes household and although it was disruptive and unpleasant, no one suffered any serious symptoms, and we’ve all made full recoveries.

A month has gone by—a month in which my son spent two full weeks home from daycare, a month in which I celebrated my thirty-seventh birthday (and first full year nicotine-free since 2004,) and a month in which I struggled valiantly against my self-imposed obstacles to reading. Let me tell you about what I was trying to do and what I ended up doing instead.

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Slaying the Obsidian Dragon

Trying to be productive, efficient, and organized is an Achilles’ Heel like no other—it suckers you into endless procrastination in the pursuit of a method to end procrastination once and for all, creating a vicious cycle of identifying a system for getting things done, implementing it to the best of your ability, then discovering a different potentially better system that requires you to subtly (or substantially) modify all the work you’ve already done for the sake of becoming more efficient and productive than you were before.

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A column of smoke rising in the distance behind an elementary school, blotting out the sun in an otherwise blue sky, with an adjacent sidewalk receding in the same direction.

Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Writing Fiction

This is part 5 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews the process I use to turn my ideas into prose for both short- and long-form fiction. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.

Planning and incubating my fiction is all well and good, but how does that translate to actual words on a page? While the majority of my focus is finishing that one novel I’ve been struggling to pass like a kidney stone for past decade, I’ve also been experimenting with short stories recently, especially since Obsidian enabled me to carry more of my ideas to fruition. The process I use is slightly different for both my short and long fiction, but they follow the same ideological practice of breaking down a large, seemingly impossible task, like “Write a story,” into smaller, more manageable chunks, like “Identify the problem or crisis the protagonist faces.” I’ll also highlight the similarities between my short- and long-form fiction where relevant.

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Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Fiction Planning and Incubation

This is part 4 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my workflow for collecting and acting upon story ideas, turning premises into polished prose. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.

Where do I put my ideas?

You know how it goes. You have a “story ideas” journal, or you’re like me and you write everything down in the same Leuchtturm 1917 notebook, but all that seems to be good for is accumulating things you may not ever come back to. I don’t have a good portion of my day to “sit down and come up with ideas,” I just write them down whenever I have them and hope for the best.

Digital note-taking tools promised to help with this, but I ended up just dumping everything into an “story ideas” file that would grow increasingly larger, such that every time I looked at it, I was bored by the same first entries that appeared every time I opened it, and eventually became overwhelmed by the number of ideas I had to tackle. I needed a system that would allow me to seamless drop my ideas into it, trusting that they would resurface later when they felt exciting and fresh again.

Then, once I had an idea that I wanted to develop into a full-blown story, either a short story or a novel,I wanted it to be frictionless to apply some of my favorite story construction frameworks to them. As nice as it would be to have “Write the story” be a single action-item that I could put on my to-do list and then cross out, there’s actually quite a lot more to it than that, and I needed to be able to break the project down into its constituent tasks that I could then schedule out into the future to ensure I actually wrote the damned thing.

Fortunately, all of this is totally manageable within Obsidian, and it doesn’t even take a lot of plug-ins to make it work.

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Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Morning Pages and Daily Notes

This is part 3 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post details how I make use of plugins like Periodic Notes, Templater, QuickAdd, and Dataview to manage my Daily Notes Page and Morning Pages writing practice. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.

The primary activity I use Obsidian for is writing. In terms of volume of words and time spent in the app, the majority of this writing would actually be classified as journaling. Journaling is what brought me to Obsidian in the first place, the promise of being able to see connections between different entries across the months and years of my writing, and it has certainly paid off to be able to to journal in this way.

Journaling Workbench
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Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — From Evernote

In Search of a Better Journal

This is part 2 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my history with journaling and digital note-taking tools, accounting for how I arrived at Obsidian from my first digital database, Evernote. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.

How to Record Everything?

I haven’t always been so interested in writing everything down, but I have always had an interest in writing something down. When I was in college, I needed a notebook primarily to keep up with assignments and follow classroom discussions. (It was an entirely discussion-based curriculum, and the rules of decorum meant that if you didn’t have a way to keep track of what was said and what you wanted to say, you may never end up participating at all.) This was back when I was an aspiring musician as well, so I soon found myself relying on a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook I carried with me wherever I went so I could parse out song lyrics, doodle when I was bored in school, and write down assignment deadlines.

When I got an iPod Touch, sometime in 2008 or 2009, I installed Evernote, sold on the idea that I would be able to store—and recall—well, everything. That was the promise of the Information Age, wasn’t it? To leverage the awesome storage and computing power of technology to record and interpret data about our world in ways never before thought possible?

Classic Evernote, c. 2008
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Writing and Reflecting in Obsidian — Overview and Index

This is the first part of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post serves as an overview and index for the rest of the series, which will explore in depth how I use Obsidian for note-taking, journaling, and creative writing. I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021-02-06, and it has completely revolutionized my writing process. New posts every Wednesday until the series is complete.

My graph as of 2023-01-01

In Search of a Digital Note-Taking Analogue

What are the primary virtues of analog note-taking? Immediacy, for one. A notebook requires no loading time (aside from locating said notebook,) no power source (if there’s sufficient light,) and creating a new note is as fast as turning the page. Geography is another one. Our brains evolved to remember the relative locations of things, and physical books maintain that sense of space—the pages exist in an immutable order that becomes familiar over time. Then there’s portability. I used to keep a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket at all times, and my current Leuchtturm 1917 notebook fits as easily in my small café bag as it does in any of my backpacks.

But there are some disadvantages to analog note-taking that left me wanting more. While my Leuchtturm has page numbers that enable me to create an index of its, that index is only really useful for that single volume. I’m currently on my twelfth volume, so unless I’m going to maintain an independent index, I can no longer keep track of where all my writing lives. Another disadvantage is impermanence. On the one hand, we still have Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks some five hundred years after his death, but on the other hand, I lost one of my Field Notes notebooks on a bike ride back from the climbing gym and I never saw it again. Thirdly, so much of what I read now is digital that it would be much simpler for me to copy and paste excerpts to add commentary than to painstakingly write down every piece of information I want to recall—and then index it.

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