I am fairly unhealthy at being an worker. I overtly despise conferences, I say precisely what’s on my thoughts, and I sincerely imagine that many managers exist solely to waste the time of in any other case productive folks. I additionally couldn’t be much less all in favour of how my work impacts quarterly projections—I wish to write issues that individuals discover useful and entertaining.
So, yeah, I am a freelancer.
I write for 5 publications, together with the one you are studying now (clearly my favourite). The upside: I am by no means in conferences. The draw back: There’s rather a lot to maintain observe of. I’ve to handle relationships with 5 editors. It is a problem, and I’ve tried a full array of programs through the years, from spreadsheets to index playing cards, apps like Trello, and manner too many to-do record apps.
None of them fairly did the trick, till I found Obsidian a few years in the past. This software has slowly gone from being a bizarre app I did not perceive to 1 I can not think about functioning with out. It is the place I do all of my writing, sure, but additionally how I maintain observe of my ongoing articles as they transfer from brainstorming to pitching to publication.
This is not a overview of Obsidian (I already wrote one). That is a top level view of how I exploit this instrument to get issues carried out. Hopefully studying it provides you some concepts for a way you possibly can use it.
All the pieces Offline All at As soon as
Initially, what’s Obsidian? The appliance payments itself as a “second mind,” however you possibly can it put in the identical class as note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote. Not like these purposes, although, Obsidian shops the whole lot—notes, attachments, and even plugins—as easy textual content paperwork in a folder in your laptop. This implies you should utilize the appliance totally offline or sync the paperwork utilizing the cloud storage service of your selection.
This has a number of benefits. For one, your recordsdata are totally in your management: If Obsidian stopped current tomorrow, I might nonetheless have entry to my notes. For one more, the whole lot works offline. My favourite factor about Obsidian, although, is the intensive plugin ecosystem. There are over a thousand Obsidian plugins, and I rely upon a number of of them. There’s Kanban, which lets you create a board of playing cards you’ll be able to transfer between tiles. There’s Extract URL, which might seize all textual content from any web site and switch it right into a be aware. I may record plugins for a very long time. However the level is that you may customise Obsidian to work mainly any manner you need it to. I’ve carried out this to create an ideal setup for my workflow—one that permits me to do my planning and my precise writing in the identical software.
My writing course of has a development: brainstorming concepts, pitching these concepts to editors, researching, writing, enhancing, and invoicing. This is how I transfer by way of these steps in Obsidian.
Brainstorm
Each article begins with an thought. I get these from all types of locations. Typically I am simply utilizing my laptop, discover one thing that annoys me, endlessly analysis an answer to that difficulty, after which resolve to put in writing about it. Typically I discover a cool-looking app whereas studying the information or searching Reddit. And generally I simply spend a number of hours brainstorming concepts. Regardless of the case, I compile my concepts in a devoted Kanban board on Obsidian. Each card on the board hyperlinks to a devoted doc the place I embrace any related hyperlinks, increase on the concept, and be aware a bit about potential angles for the article.
When it comes time to take these concepts into the world, I resolve which of them I’ll pitch to which editors and drag them to a column for that publication. If the pitch is accepted, I drag the cardboard over to my “article queue” board, if not, I contemplate pitching it to a different publication or put it in my “thought jail” to probably revisit later.
