Moved to /uses

Hardware

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• Macbook Pro M4 (work)
• Macbook Air M1 (private)
• iPhone 17
• Sony MDR-7506
• Sennheiser gaming headset
• Shure microphone
• Airpods Pro 2
• Cartel Contra 40% keyboard with Kailh box navy switches running QMK with my custom layout and Mito Mt3 Pules keycaps
• Let’s Split 40% keyboard
• Dell Monitor as a USB hub
• Anker wired vertical mouse
• IKEA standing desk
• Orient Kamasu Mako III
• Vitra desk organizer
• Lamy Safari fountain pen

Home

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• Cartel Contra 40% keyboard
• Logitech G500s mouse
• Håg Capisco chair
• IKEA tiny desk

Software

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• Obsidian
• Code & Zed & Helix
• Ghostty
• Claude Code
• Fantastical
• Things
• Bear
• Homebrew
• Aerospace
• John’s Background Switcher
• Hex
• Maccy
• Raycast
• Amphetamine
• CleanShot X
• gg

At its core most of my Obsidian time is spent in the Daily Note which is also where most of my actual work happens. I tried to get to a similar setup in my previous note taking tool Foam (see my PR) but there were too many limitations for it to work well.

The Github Gist of the entire setup is here: https://gist.github.com/alper/2bbf8f3cb60466b55026deb47f8e15e6

The main way I use this is I create a new Daily Note for a day and this template seeds that note with all the scaffolding and information I need to be successful that day. It automates and structures what would otherwise be a relatively miserable sequence of manual steps and copy-paste-ing.

The plugins that I use for this are:

• Calendar
• Tasks
• Templater

Let’s go through the template file from the top:

# {{date:dddd, MMMM Do, YYYY}}

This sets the title of the note to the date that we are creating the note for. Nothing very special here but note that with Calendar we can create a daily note for any date (it doesn’t have to be today) and that date is passed in as a parameter to the template.

Tasks

#

Then comes the tasks section:

### Due Today

```tasks
[^1] AND NOT done
```

### Scheduled Today

```tasks
[^2] AND NOT done
```

### Done Today

```tasks
done on <% tp.file.title %>
```

This is a triple that lists all my tasks that are due on that day (or were before), all my tasks that are scheduled for that day (or were before) and if I finish anything, it will list those tasks under the third section as my work log.

The hack here is that the ISO date is passed in to the templates as ` file.title and can then be used to query Tasks. It took me a bit to get this to escape right and figure out how to write the complex boolean condition.

I moved away from Things when I discovered the Obsidian Tasks plugin. Tasks allows me to close over all the tasks that are in my notes and is incredibly flexible and powerful. Being able to do arbitrary queries on tasks in any markdown file in my workspace is nothing short of amazing. I’m still waiting for Notion and other tools to offer something similar.

I always felt the split between taking notes and capturing tasks was incredibly broken and created lots of unnecessary friction. For instance this nonsense with bear:// protocol links in Things that is delusionally claiming that “Bear & Things 3 Work Really Well Together”. These two things should be in the same environment.

Calendar

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Then the second part is a section that creates a scaffold with all the appointments I have for that day formatted as markdown stubs.

It works using this relatively obscure and somewhat finicky tool ical-buddy. In the template I call a Templater user function days_events:

<% tp.user.days_events({CURRENT_DATE: tp.file.title}) %>

which inserts the result of the following command in-place:

icalBuddy -ec "FE0B6DAB-E598-4DE1-9F2B-7DE06A236647,4242177B-7D2B-4A20-AE23-A99DD51D5B80" -eep '*' eventsFrom:$CURRENT_DATE to:$CURRENT_DATE | sd '•' '##' | sd '\(alper@example.com\)' '' | sd '\n' '\n\n* \n\n'

This call to icalBuddy excludes a bunch of calendars I’m not interested in, queries the calendar for events within the specified day and then does a bunch of replace actions that turn it into markdown.

I don’t use Calendar.app (preferring Cron at the moment) but I have my Google Calendar setup in macOS System Settings and leave Calendar open for it to always have up to date data.

Result

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Putting everything together, when I double-click on a day, I get a document that looks a bit like this:

The fact that it’s fully automated and that with a single action I can get a relatively complete informational dashboard for what I should be doing that day has been an immense load off. It allows me to hit the ground running and immediately start sifting tasks, go through my meetings and create a plan for the day.

When I know a day is coming up that’s going to be particularly intense, I create the daily note for it ahead of time and start lining up information and talking points for each appointment in the scaffold. Reducing the effort it takes to start that prep and storing it in a standardised format makes it much more likely that I’ll do it and use it. With that preparation ready-to-go in Obsidian it takes out all the stress and I can run my day in a pure flow state.

The days are long but the years are short.

One more year over and these are starting to look like a blur, so here’s what changed.

Work

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I gave notice between Christmas and New Year 2020 and spent the first three months of the year in a weird in-between state mostly done with the old job, waiting for the new one to start, in between daycare closures and being sick.

Then the new job started and I fell into a blur of work that has continued for most of the rest of the year. It’s been a nice change but also very intense. Details are on LinkedIn.

Travel

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I haven’t been anywhere in 2021 except to an island in Croatia last September with work which definitely was a highlight.

Will I travel again and why? I have no idea.

Learning

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I finished Turkish. I now prefer it over German again especially for writing.

I gave up on Chinese and couldn’t motivate myself or figure out how to book the HSK2. I did learn a couple hundred characters which seem to mean the same thing as in Japanese.

I started learning Japanese which is a lot more enjoyable and for basic conversation seems a lot easier. There also has been some strengthening on the claim for a relationship between Turkish and Japanese so let’s see how it goes.

I should have started this way earlier and not listened to anybody who ever said something is difficult. What they mean is that something was difficult for them. Depending on their intelligence, many things may in fact be difficult for them. It shouldn’t matter to me or anybody else.

Kids

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The daycare was closed at the start of the year until March or Easter, not sure anymore. Most of the rest of the year things were up and running.

We had a nasty burn wound on one kid that cut the summer break short and gave us several weeks of grief but in the end all turned out well.

Then at the end of the year we gave notice. We are leaving one very esteemed Kindergarten for another which I didn’t think would be possible with two kids in the middle of the year, but it is. We even had several more places willing to take our kids.

The kids are doing really well. After a brief bout of gymnastics which they enjoyed a lot, COVID made us switch to outdoor ice skating for now.

Sports

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I finally killed my old fixie or to be more correct it nearly killed me. With it gone, I could finally shop for a real road bike.

Thanks to a ship blocking the Suez Canal and all the other supply chain difficulties in the world, there was a tremendous bike shortage most of the summer (who knows, maybe it’s still going on?) and I got any random bike I could get my hands on in the €1000 price range.

I also got most of the tools and kit that you would need for cycling. It’s the clichéed guy midlife hobby. The local Rapha store is more convenient and also cheaper than many of the cycling apparel you can buy dropshipped over Instagram.

I seem to have ridden 1231km on it and looking forward to doing many times that in the coming year. The details are on Strava.

I picked up bouldering again which when in a rhythm (every 4-5 days) I’m finding pretty enjoyable.

Health

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I got boosted randomly on November 17th which was a lot earlier than I expected and before almost everybody I know. I am now AZ/Comirnaty/Comirnaty.

We survived another year. That’s it. That’s the year note.

Turns out this was a huge mistake.

1. Don’t learn a new productivity application while starting a new job. This was a lot more annoying than I expected it to be. In part also because…
2. OmniFocus is extremely unpolished. I don’t know what they are doing with the monthly subscription pricing that they cash but developing the applications is not it. The tool is extremely bare and missing huge swaths of basic functionality out of some kind of misguided principle. Their quick add window looks and works terribly and is a bad parody of the one that Things has. The interface design looks like something I could also have whipped up (and I consider myself largely design blind).
3. OmniFocus is also very old and has gone through a bunch of version updates which makes all of the user guides and documentation hard to sift through. I’ve more than once been reading about stuff that didn’t exist anymore in the current app.

I will be switching back to Things as soon as I can find out how to purchase it in the correct way. And because both of these tools are fairly popular there’s an exporter/importer so I don’t have to type everything over manually.