Postroll and thoughts on notes and tasks

Aug 12, 2025

Brace for stream of consciousness bullets...

Steven's The right (todo) app for me

• I keep coming back to Things, but I stopped using it for work stuff, for a few reasons:
  • Separation of work and personal.
  • Work is messy for me on a manager's schedule. Priorities and tasks are effectively infinite and continually shifting. Things is so clean and pretty, I think it was subconsciously making me feel bad for not being able to wrangle my work tasks into a clean and pretty state.
  • My personal tasks are much fewer and simpler. Things is great for those.
• I used Todoist long ago and am curious about trying it again, but I'm not allowed to use it at work, and I've already paid for Things at home. If it ain't broke...
• At work, I'm now using Obsidian Tasks.
  • It's kinda messy. And I'm good with that. See above.
  • I crave the ability to take notes right alongside my tasks. Keeping everything in Obsidian satisfies that craving.
    • Things has Markdown support for its task descriptions, but then my task notes are separate from the rest of my notes, which isn't ideal.
• A lot of nerds (term of endearment) recommend Org mode. Org mode is incredible. And it's the mother of all time sinks (when you include Emacs). Been there, done that, probably never again. Maybe in retirement if I'm bored.
• Some resources:
  • My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
    • Hacker News chatter
  • I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File
    • Hacker News chatter
      • Lot of Org mode recommendations in there. See above. Caveat emptor.

Kev's How Do You Take Notes?

• Kev's looking for systems, not app recommendations, but in case readers of this post are curious: I use Obsidian. I've previously used Notion, Bear.app, Emacs + Org mode, VSCode + Foam, Vim + Vimwiki, Google Docs, ... and I'm going to stop there because this is getting embarrassing. As far as apps go, Obsidian is solidly good enough for my needs.
  • I did try Logseq at work recently. It didn't stick. Really cool ideas. But the execution at this moment is lacking IMHO. There's still lots of working going into the app, and I'll be eagerly following along and rooting for the team.
• As for systems, as an experiment, I went all in on daily notes a few months ago, and that's working out well.
  • Daily notes optimize for rapid, in-the-moment note taking. There's no question of where the next note should go. It goes at the end of your daily note.
  • I use my own form of interstitial journaling.
  • In Obsidian, I use tags heavily to connect related content. I can just click on a #Danny tag to pop open a search of all my recent mentions and meeting with Danny.
    • This works particularly well with daily notes because it's easy to sort the results chronologically and see when I wrote a particular note.
  • There's still complexity and head-scratching with this method, but it's moved from the question of where to write a note to the questions of how to structure tags and how to use Obsidian's search features most efficiently.

My only piece of advice: experiment and figure out what works for you. I've yet to find another person's system that works perfectly for me. And be wary of the rabbit holes. So many rabbit holes.

(Edit: And in a nod to Ava, once you've found something that works for you, try to stick with it. I'm not the best role model there, but I'm getting better. 😉)

Gotta get to work. Byeeee 👋