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DeveloPassion's Newsletter #144 - Hybrid PKM

Edition 144 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Sebastien Dubois

Nov 7, 2023 — 5 min read

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

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

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

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