DeveloPassion's Newsletter #214 - Timeline Mode and the Summer Sale
A newsletter discussing AI, Knowledge Work, Knowledge Management Systems, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and everything in between!
Edition 214 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Work, AI, Knowledge Management, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!
Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host. You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter, or bought one of my products. Thank you for being here with me ✨
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Welcome
Welcome to all the new readers ❤️
The past three weeks have been a mix of shipping and (finally) slowing down. We spent a few days in a chalet in Viroinval, in the Belgian Ardennes. We spent a peaceful week over there, enjoyed the woods, the bike rides, the hills (especially when going down 😂), the food and of course the Jacuzzi!
On the reading side, I've finished The Night Window (book) by Dean Koontz, closing out the Jane Hawk series. I actually realized it was a series about halfway through the book. Now I'll have to read the previous ones haha. I've now started reading "The Institute" by Stephen King, who remains my favorite author, next to a very select few others. Fiction remains my favorite way to disconnect, and it helped a ton this past week!
I almost forgot about you all. Nah just kidding ;-)
🏃 Running & Training
June ended with a milestone I'm really proud of: 100 more kilometers. Consistency beats intensity; one run at a time, and the kilometers pile up.
I did some hill running during my vacation, with roughly 150 meters of elevation gain over about 1.5 kilometers. Short, steep, and EXHAUSTING 😅. Now that I'm back home, the local hills feel so friendly in comparison. Super motivating ;-)
Highlights
- ☀️ The 2026 Summer Sale is live: 30% off EVERYTHING in my store until July 30
- 📊 Kanban Action Planner 1.1.0 shipped with a brand new timeline mode, and the plugin is now listed on the official Obsidian community plugins site
- 📝 Two new articles: how I turned my Obsidian notes into Kanban boards, and how I turned 20,000 notes into live dashboards with Obsidian Bases
- 🎙️ Knowii Voice AI 0.7.0 released, with rock-solid Linux support
- 🔌 Plugin ecosystem improvements: Journal Bases, Ghost Publish, Book Exporter, and more
- 🧹 Vault housekeeping: every single task note is now linked to a project
Before You Go Any Further
Help me reach more people; share the link with someone in your circle who'd benefit from joining us. And don't forget to mention the Knowii Community ❤️
And if you bought some of my products or courses? Please leave a rating/review. It really helps ❤️
☀️ The 2026 Summer Sale
My Summer Sale is live 🎉
From now until July 30, everything in my store is 30% off with the discount code SummerSale2026. Every product. The whole catalog. No exceptions.
That includes the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Knowledge Worker Kit, the Obsidian Starter Course, Knowledge Management for Beginners, the AI Ghostwriter Guide, Knowii Voice AI, the Personal Knowledge Management Library (PKM Library), the masterclass recordings, and more!
Why now? Because summer is when calendars breathe. It's the PERFECT moment to finally build the knowledge system you've been postponing all year. Don't wait for September; the wheels will start spinning faster and faster again, and you'll be too busy to build anything.
All the details are in the announcement:
Sebastien Dubois
🔗 https://www.dsebastien.net/the-2026-summer-sale-is-on-30-off-everything-until-july-30/
Or go straight to the store and use the code SummerSale2026 at checkout:
Sébastien Dubois
The Lab 🧪
📊 Kanban Action Planner
I recently started working on the Kanban Action Planner plugin for Obsidian. And I already gave it a lot of love (tokens!) these past weeks. This plugin adds Kanban board, calendar, and now timeline views to Obsidian Bases, all driven by your own note properties. Your notes stay the source of truth. Statuses become columns, you drag cards around, and every change (status, order, dates, relationships) gets written back to your notes' frontmatter. Nothing lives in a hidden database.
The timeline mode is a Gantt-style view that places each card by its start date plus an estimate in days. A board already set up for the calendar gets a working timeline with zero configuration. You get milestone diamonds, a today line, per-row deadline lines, and you can drag a bar to move it or resize its edges to change the estimate, with the exact date shown live while you drag.
The other big improvement I added is grouped navigation. The Unplanned panel groups cards by note type, then by status, so a large backlog stays easy to scan and schedule in both calendar and timeline modes.
There's also a calendar mode what you can add tasks (or other types of notes!) to the calendar, a triage mode to identify the most important/impactful actions, ...
The plugin is already listed on the official Obsidian Community site 🎉
And there's more... I'm currently working on a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) view. The idea: organize your work as a hierarchy. Associate goals to projects, projects to tasks, and so on (and this is just an example; it works for any note type). Then estimate each piece, and track progress at every level; the estimates and progress roll up, so you can see how far along a project (or an entire goal) really is at a glance. Top-down planning instead of card-by-card. Here's a sneak peek:
Importantly, the plugin works with ALL note types, not just tasks. You define your note types directly in the plugin settings (by tag, folder, or regex). Or you skip the configuration entirely: if you use the Obsidian Starter Kit, your note types are detected and reused automatically. Zero setup, and your goals, projects, and tasks show up on the board right away. And of course, this will be part of the next Obsidian Starter Kit release, and it'll come pre-configured ❤️
This is also what makes it easy to build a content creation pipeline with it: articles, newsletters, videos... each as its own note type, moving through columns like Idea, Draft, Review, and Published. That's exactly how I manage my own content; the piece you're reading right now went through that board ;-)
Dwayne Appleby
🔗 https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/obsidian-starter-kit/
If you want the full story of why I built this and how I use it to plan my work:
Sebastien Dubois
🔗 https://www.dsebastien.net/how-i-turned-my-obsidian-notes-into-kanban-boards/
Documentation and releases:
dsebastien🎙️ Knowii Voice AI 0.7.0
I've released Knowii Voice AI 0.7.0. This release makes voice typing much better on Linux (although not perfect yet :p): reliable global shortcuts on GNOME, KDE, and Hyprland, correct keyboard layouts on Wayland, ... There are also quality-of-life improvements for every platform: a microphone test in the settings, faster navigation in the pickers, and clearer feedback when a recording fails to start.
Behind the scenes, I also fixed the update server: installers are now resolved from the release manifest, so auto-updates are more reliable across platforms.
Sebastien Dubois
🔗 https://www.dsebastien.net/knowii-voice-ai-0-7-0-rock-solid-linux-support/
📊 From 20,000 Notes to Live Dashboards
I've also published (and since updated) a detailed look at how I turned my 20,000+ notes into live dashboards with Obsidian Bases. If you want to see what a mature, data-driven vault looks like in practice, this one is for you. And it's also a great reference about Obsidian Bases.
Sebastien Dubois
🔗 https://www.dsebastien.net/how-i-turned-20-000-notes-into-live-dashboards-with-obsidian-bases/
🔌 Plugin Releases and Improvements
The rest of my plugin ecosystem moved forward too. A LOT, actually:
Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian got its first official release (0.0.1) 🎉. The headline feature is hybrid semantic search: lexical search combined with dense vectors, so agents can find the right resources by meaning, not just keywords. You can run embeddings through a local embedding server (e.g., Ollama) or a hosted API, with automatic retries. There's also a Reindex button, opt-in skill-folder watching, and a full security and reliability pass. This one is a key building block for agentic vaults, and I'm just getting started. I didn't yet have enough time to test it in depth, but I'm going to spend more time on it in the coming weeks. This one has great potential to drastically reduce token usage/waste. Journal Bases plugin for Obsidian (1.12.x) learned to keep your frontmatter out of the way: properties now collapse automatically when opening notes from the Periodic Review (with a global setting to control it), and stay folded when you mark a period as done. It also remembers the collapsed state of Periodic Review columns and detects notes with custom date formats. Time Machine plugin for Obsidian (1.0.7): the view now stays fixed while you interact with the history slider. Book Exporter plugin for Obsidian went from 0.1.0 to 0.2.4 in three weeks. It now supports WeasyPrint as a PDF engine (HTML/CSS-based rendering), probes every PDF engine up front so you know what works before exporting, turns cryptic pandoc errors into messages that tell you what's actually wrong, and auto-opens (or links to) the exported file. Plus a batch of export fixes: anchored embeds now inline only the referenced section, absolute-path images get copied correctly, and the book title stays out of the table of contents. Ghost Publish plugin for Obsidian (0.6.0): added a fuzzy search box to filter the active panel, making it much faster to find posts. Update time plugin for Obsidian (1.2.1): fixed a nasty feedback loop where the plugin's own updates re-triggered updates. Your updated timestamps now behave.
Everything is listed on the tools website: https://tools.dsebastien.net
📹 YouTube Partner, Finally
After months of publishing videos, I've FINALLY been accepted into the YouTube Partner Program 🎉
It won't make me rich overnight (far from it), but it's a milestone that took a long time to reach, and a nice signal that the channel keeps growing. If you haven't subscribed yet, now is a great time: https://youtube.com/@dsebastien
Random Bits
The Concepts Website crossed the 4,000 concepts mark 🎉 (4,015 as I write this). Mental models, frameworks, ideas... all curated, all free:
Sébastien Dubois
Go discover & learn valuable concepts! There's a world of ideas to explore.
💡 Business Updates
A few things on the DeveloPassion side:
- The Summer Sale is the big one: 30% off everything until July 30 (code SummerSale2026)
- New tools listed on https://tools.dsebastien.net, including the Kanban Action Planner and the Agentic Resource Discovery Server
🧠 Tip of the Week
If it isn't visible, it won't get done.
A plan that lives in your head (or in a flat list of 200 items) isn't a plan; it's a worry. Put your work where you can SEE it: a board, a calendar, a timeline. The medium doesn't matter as much as the visibility. The moment work becomes visible, the bottlenecks, the overcommitment, and the next action all become obvious.
🧠 Quote of the Week
Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid only of standing still
Fitting for the summer, I think. Slow weeks are still forward motion.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading. Reply to this email if something resonated, something annoyed you, or you just want to say hi. I read everything.
That's it for today! ✨
---
Ready to dive in?
- ☀️ The Summer Sale: 30% off everything until July 30 with the code SummerSale2026: https://store.dsebastien.net
- 🚀 Get OSK v4: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/obsidian-starter-kit/
- 🧠 Join Knowii: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/knowii-community/
- 📰 More content at https://dsebastien.net
Talk to you again soon ❤️
— Sébastien
About Sébastien
I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.
I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.
If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.
Ready to get to the next level?
Since you're interested in Obsidian:
- 🚀 Obsidian Starter Kit — Skip weeks of setup with 40+ templates
- 🎬 Obsidian Starter Course — Master Obsidian in 2+ hours
- 📚 KM for Beginners — 10+ hours of structured video lessons
- 🎯 Join Knowii — Community + ALL courses & tools
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