I’m fairly dangerous at being an worker. I brazenly 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 curious about how my work impacts quarterly projections—I need to write issues that individuals discover useful and entertaining.

So, yeah, I’m a freelancer.

I write for 5 publications, together with the one you are studying now (clearly my favourite). The upside: I’m by no means in conferences. The draw back: There’s lots to maintain monitor of. I’ve to handle relationships with 5 editors. It’s a problem, and I’ve tried a full array of programs through the years, from spreadsheets to index playing cards, apps like Trello, and method too many to-do record apps.

None of them fairly did the trick, till I found Obsidian a few years in the past. This utility has slowly gone from being a bizarre app I did not perceive to at least one I can not think about functioning with out. It’s the place I do all of my writing, sure, but in addition how I preserve monitor of my ongoing articles as they transfer from brainstorming to pitching to publication.

This is not a evaluation of Obsidian (I already wrote one). This is a top level view of how I exploit this software to get issues accomplished. Hopefully studying it provides you some concepts for the way you would use it.

Everything Offline All at Once

First of all, what’s Obsidian? The utility payments itself as a “second brain,” however you would it put in the identical class as note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote. Unlike these purposes, although, Obsidian shops all the things—notes, attachments, and even plugins—as easy textual content paperwork in a folder in your laptop. This means you need to use 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 information are totally in your management: If Obsidian stopped present tomorrow, I’d nonetheless have entry to my notes. For one other, all the things works offline. My favourite factor about Obsidian, although, is the in depth plugin ecosystem. There are over a thousand Obsidian plugins, and I rely on a number of of them. There’s Kanban, which lets you create a board of playing cards you may transfer between tiles. There’s Extract URL, which might seize all textual content from any web site and switch it right into a notice. I might record plugins for a very long time. But the purpose is that you may customise Obsidian to work principally any method you need it to. I’ve accomplished this to create an ideal setup for my workflow—one that permits me to do my planning and my precise writing in the identical utility.

My writing course of has a development: brainstorming concepts, pitching these concepts to editors, researching, writing, enhancing, and invoicing. Here’s how I transfer by way of these steps in Obsidian.

Brainstorm

Every article begins with an concept. I get these from all types of locations. Sometimes I’m simply utilizing my laptop, discover one thing that annoys me, endlessly analysis an answer to that situation, after which resolve to write down about it. Sometimes I discover a cool-looking app whereas studying the information or shopping Reddit. And generally I simply spend a number of hours brainstorming concepts. Whatever the case, I compile my concepts in a devoted Kanban board on Obsidian. Every card on the board hyperlinks to a devoted doc the place I embody any related hyperlinks, increase on the thought, and notice 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’m going to pitch to which editors and drag them to a column for that publication. If the pitch is accredited, I drag the cardboard over to my “article queue” board, if not, I think about pitching it to a different publication or put it in my “idea jail” to doubtlessly revisit later.