I am fairly dangerous 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 individuals. I additionally couldn’t be much less interested by how my work impacts quarterly projections—I wish to write issues that folks 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 methods through the years, from spreadsheets to index playing cards, apps like Trello, and means too many to-do checklist 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 at least one I can not think about functioning with out. It is the place I do all of my writing, sure, but additionally how I hold 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 performed. Hopefully studying it provides you some concepts for a way you could possibly use it.
All the pieces Offline All at As soon as
To begin with, what’s Obsidian? The applying payments itself as a “second mind,” however you could possibly it put in the identical class as note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote. In contrast to these functions, although, Obsidian shops all the things—notes, attachments, and even plugins—as easy textual content paperwork in a folder in your laptop. This implies you should utilize the applying totally offline or sync the paperwork utilizing the cloud storage service of your selection.
This has a couple of benefits. For one, your recordsdata are totally in your management: If Obsidian stopped present tomorrow, I might nonetheless have entry to my notes. For an additional, all the things 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 may transfer between tiles. There’s Extract URL, which may seize all textual content from any web site and switch it right into a observe. I might checklist plugins for a very long time. However the level is that you would be able to customise Obsidian to work principally any means you need it to. I’ve performed 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 means of these steps in Obsidian.
Brainstorm
Each article begins with an thought. I get these from every kind of locations. Generally I am simply utilizing my laptop, discover one thing that annoys me, endlessly analysis an answer to that challenge, after which determine to jot down about it. Generally I discover a cool-looking app whereas studying the information or shopping Reddit. And generally I simply spend a couple 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 embody any related hyperlinks, broaden on the thought, and observe a bit about attainable angles for the article.
When it comes time to take these concepts into the world, I determine which of them I’ll pitch to which editors and drag them to a column for that publication. If the pitch is authorised, I drag the cardboard over to my “article queue” board, if not, I take into account pitching it to a different publication or put it in my “thought jail” to doubtlessly revisit later.
