Rethinking My Note-Taking App Decisions

Intro

Over the past 48 hours I’ve once again been on a journey to rethink how I take notes. Why? I’ve actually been struggling to answer that question for myself, and I’ve boiled it down into a few potential reasons:

• I’ve never felt fully at home in Obsidian ever since moving to it, even though I’ve been using it for over 2 years now.
• I miss the seamlessness in my life of old Evernote, and constantly wish that there was an alternate that filled the same role in the same way.
• I have liked Bear from the time I first saw it, and wish that I could convince myself that it fills all of my use cases.

What Do I Miss From Evernote?

I started using Evernote back in the early 2010s (I think 2014; I’ve not checked the exact date while writing this post), both as a way to store personal notes and documents, and for some work-related project notes.

11 Years with Todoist

Today is an interesting anniversary for me, one that I never thought to keep track of until about a year ago. You see, on a fateful (but otherwise mostly forgotten) day 11 years ago, I began subscribing to Todoist Pro.

I don’t entirely recall at this point how I stumbled upon Todoist, though I do generally remember why. At the time, I was working for InSource Technologies as an embedded software developer, and I was finding that the amount of tasks & projects that I was keeping track of at work, along with those at home and at church (where I was heavily involved as a volunteer), were making me feel like I was constantly forgetting things.

A Digital Home

Yesterday, in my post on Blogging Expectations, I mentioned the concept of a website as a virtual home, and wanted to expand on it.

I like having a singular place on the internet that I can point people to and say “This is Justin’s virtual home. You want to know what Justin is thinking, or what’s going on? Start here!” And I hope that’s been reflected in my blogging and my site design…

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Blogging Expectations

A few days ago I ran across the post Blogging Expectations by Kev Quirk, and a quick read told me that it was something I wanted to add my commentary to.

…Okay, I just glanced at the date on Kev’s post. “A few days ago” was over a week ago. Apparently my backlog of post ideas is taking longer to review than I anticipated.

Anyhow, today I re-read Kev’s post, and (of course) followed the links to the posts his thoughts were based on, and a few thoughts stuck out to me.

Operating Rules for Email Collaboration

Today, while following a blogger/IndieWeb rabbit rail (when I click on a link from someone I follow, and then promptly begin following other links to other sites that interest me), I ran across an excellent post by Naz Hamid on Operating Rules for Email Collaboration, and promptly decided I needed to link to it with light commentary on my site.

I’ve slowly been improving my email usage over time, since my tendency left unchecked is to be verbose. However, I’ve learned that verboseness should not be the norm when communicating via email, as it can cause your thoughts to be lost in the weeds. And now that I am using email much more than earlier in my career, learning to use it well is important.

An Amusing Incident at the Office

I’ve shared this story with a few coworkers and family members, and decided to write up a short post to share with y’all as well. I’ve left out the names of those involved, purely out of a respect for their privacy, and used only titles as descriptions for the story.

As a part of my current job, it is fairly common for me to have meetings with various vendors, and this past Thursday was no exception. As I was walking between buildings to get to a meeting with a vendor that had stopped by our offices while in town, I met one of my coworkers, the IT manager, and we stopped to chat briefly.

2024 Year in Review