I am fairly unhealthy at being an worker. I overtly despise conferences, I say precisely what’s on my thoughts, and I sincerely consider that many managers exist solely to waste the time of in any other case productive folks. I additionally couldn’t be much less concerned about how my work impacts quarterly projections—I need 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 lots 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 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 utility 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 preserve 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 device to get issues completed. Hopefully studying it provides you some concepts for the way you could possibly use it.
Every little thing Offline All at As soon as
To start with, what’s Obsidian? The appliance payments itself as a “second mind,” however you could possibly 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 pc. This implies you need to use the appliance absolutely offline or sync the paperwork utilizing the cloud storage service of your alternative.
This has a couple of benefits. For one, your information are absolutely in your management: If Obsidian stopped current tomorrow, I’d nonetheless have entry to my notes. For an additional, 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 depend 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 might seize all textual content from any web site and switch it right into a notice. I may record plugins for a very long time. However the level is which you could customise Obsidian to work principally any manner you need it to. I’ve completed 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, modifying, and invoicing. Here is how I transfer by these steps in Obsidian.
Brainstorm
Each article begins with an concept. I get these from all types of locations. Typically I am simply utilizing my pc, discover one thing that annoys me, endlessly analysis an answer to that difficulty, after which resolve to jot down about it. Typically I discover a cool-looking app whereas studying the information or searching 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, increase on the concept, 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 will 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 contemplate pitching it to a different publication or put it in my “concept jail” to doubtlessly revisit later.
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