When You See a New Obsidian Productivity System— Taste, Don’t Swallow
And I’ll want 500+ words on why you want to change things up, on my desk by Monday
This morning I watched Nicole van der Hoeven’s enlightening new video detailing her time management system in Obsidian.
Perfect! I thought. Another opportunity to practice sketchnoting (I’m part way through this course). iPad out and Concepts app open, I watched, listened, and sketched away.
Five things I learned from this video
- It takes me a lot longer than 20 minutes to sketch note a 20 minute video. I’m optimistic this will change with practice.
- Requirements Traceability is a cool term with an even cooler definition. It means making sure that your lower level requirements (tasks) can trace back to and support your top level requirements. These in turn must be in harmony with your core values.
- It’s okay if normal task lists don’t work for you
- It’s smart to schedule a chunk of time in your calendar for 2-minute tasks. I knew it! This will work better for me than the GTD approach (if it’s going to take 2 minutes or less, do it now).
- It’s time for me to stop putting off trying out Projects in Obsidian. Nicole uses it instead of the Kanban plugin.
Those were good; these are life changing
Those were great take aways, I think you’ll agree, but they pale into insignificance in the presence of these two:
- Nicole’s system, as it currently stands, is not for me. Trying to maintain all that would make me want to scratch my eyeballs out. — And that’s okay. (Uh, it’s okay that it’s not for me. It’s never okay to be mean to your eyeballs.)
- I need to define my Core Principles, and check in with my current projects and tasks to see if they affirm and support them.
Your takeaway doesn’t look like mine
And neither should it.
Even if we’re of a like mind about this kind of system, the way you’ll put your takeaways into practice will be tailored to your unique needs. To your style, hangups, stage of life, and time demands.
The next video I can hardly wait to get my sketchnoting chops into is this one, by Kiwi productivity nerd, Sam Matla. Looks like just what I (and many others) need right now.
Edit: And here it is—
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