Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week, I took some days off to recharge. Weirdly, it felt both great and awful to do nothing at all for a few days. It felt great because it helped me forget about work, and it felt awful because a part of me wanted to get back to work and make progress. Habits are a powerful driver.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

Recently, I've made a lot of progress on the Knowledge Worker Kit. I'm building it in public, and sharing progress updates regularly on X (Twitter). I've completed the part about "Clarity":

That part focuses on the key elements that help bring clarity to one's life:

• Needs
• Values
• Principles
• Purpose
• Goals
• Non-goals
• Priorities

When those are clearly defined, everything changes:

• Decisions are more straightforward
• Actions are more aligned with who we are/who we want to be
• Motivation is intrinsic
• Progress becomes visible
• etc

In the guide, I've provided explanations, guidance/recommendations, templates and useful resources. In addition, members of our private community can further explore the topics.

Now, I've started working on the Personal Organization and Personal Knowledge Management parts. The cool thing with building a community is that members can share their ideas, wants and needs. That way, I get to deliver the content that serves them best, and they get to make the progress they need. Win-win!

If you're curious about the Knowledge Worker Kit, then please take a look at the product page on Gumroad.

New articles

No new articles this week.

Quotes of the week

• "Clarity of vision is key to achieving your objectives" — Tom Steyer
• "Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts" — Luc de Clapiers

Thinking and learning

This week, I want to try another approach for this section.

Hybrid Tools for Thought

There's been an interesting discussion going on X (Twitter) about hybrid PKM tools. The point was about the fact that more and more Tools for Thought (TfTs) now integrate text-based information store and linking, but also visual capabilities. We've noticed this recently with Obsidian, adding Canvas support to visualize ideas:

In the future, more and more apps will become hybrid, and I think that it is great. To me, the ideal PKM system (when focusing on notes and ideas) should be composed of a single app that works everywhere, is pervasive and versatile. It should be able to let met write, let me draw, let me record/transcribe my voice, let me capture images and videos (i.e., capture things on the go), add attachments, capture highlights, and more! And it should let me link, tag and organize everything easily.

Hybrid tools for thought matter because they enable different ways of looking at the same information. It allows for different modes of thinking. Exploratory when looking at things visually (e.g., exploring the branches of a mind map, or the connections between ideas) and analytically when writing in deep focus mode. Both have a ton of value and are complementary.

Links of the week

Obsidian 1.5 will deprecate the legacy editor. It'll remove a maintenance burden for the team, but will also break some plugins along the way as some of those rely on the legacy editor to function. Hopefully, the most important ones don't or will quickly be updated.

They have also announced upcoming improvements to the editor, such as the visual editing of Markdown tables, which is now part of the "short-term" roadmap

Goodbye legacy editor

In the upcoming Obsidian v1.5, the legacy editor will be removed from the app.

Obsidian

Obsidian Roadmap

We’re chipping away at improvements to Obsidian. Learn about what’s coming next.

Obsidian

I'm not a fan of memorizing information, but sometimes there's no other choice:

Why Note-Taking Won’t Help You Learn, and What You Can Do About It

For those who love learning, note-taking can surprisingly be really fun.

Medium •LearnChangeDo

A cool post explaining how to create beautiful dashboards with Obsidian Canvas:

How to Build Beautiful Dashboards With Obsidian Canvas

Kanban-like presentation with Canvas simplicity. Use embedded Obsidian queries to build your own personal dashboard.

productnook •Trevor Tarakjian

By the way, TfTHacker has launched Canvas Candy, a (paid) product that adds 40+ decorations that you can use to decorate your Obsidian Canvas cards. For instance: borders, background gradients, background transparency, headers, footers, labels, shapes, etc. It looks really cool. Hopefully, some of those features will later make their way in the core of Obsidian:

Canvas Candy - TfT Hacker

Canvas Candy - TfT Hacker

TfT Hacker

Did you know that it's possible to embed search queries within your Obsidian notes?

Search - Obsidian Help

Search - Obsidian Help

Obsidian Help

Should you use the PARA method in Obsidian? (hint: my answer is YES):

Ready to get to the next level?

If so, then check out the Knowledge Worker Kit, the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Obsidian Starter Course, the PKM Library, a PKM coaching session with me, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois (you can follow me on Twitter 🐦).

I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

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