559: Research Apps

Episodes
62

For sure. I’m planning on writing up a comprehensive overview of my approach (once I really figure out what it is).™️

In the meantime, the key bits of my Obsidian task management approach are to put tasks in their context, or in notes-as-Projects, and to use a couple of tags to indicate whether they’re ongoing, upcoming, or on the backburner. So I’ll have a project note for work with a client, a set of the actions I need to take on top of that note, and I might flag a couple of those with tags.

Then, I put any date-based information about that note in upcoming Daily Notes.

This makes the work project-focused, as opposed to action-focused. I don’t tend to gain much from de-contextualizing the tasks I take on. Moreover, my projects tend to be all-consuming; I don’t switch between several in a given afternoon. Instead I spend a half-day working on one or the other.

Worth noting: it might not be for you. I think this works for me because I rarely find myself doing anything that’s well-defined in advance. I spent years with Todoist, then OmniFocus, and a variety of competitors. (yes, like everybody here.)

Recently, I realized that most of my time spent engaging with those apps was moving deck chairs around a vessel that was questionably seaworthy. That’s because, due to the nature of my work, most of my actions end up being of the following forms:

  • Figure out [x]
  • Sketch my approach to [y]
  • Write paper on [z]

Looking at a list of these separate from their context was always discombobulating. I’ve been more focused (and less anxious to boot) since I stopped trying to sort and filter actions like the above. Just leaving them with their context has been freeing.

But, if you are less helpless incompetent disorganized than I, you might not benefit from this approach.

Aside: The Review plugin might help. It allows you to set notes to a specific date for review, using natural language for the date—and, new in the 1.5.0 release, it allows you to do the same to the current block. So you can easily assign e.g., tasks or projects to dates. (Plus, the developer is the best kind of person. Very smart and also good-looking.)

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Great thanks! I think we do similar work (I’m an academic) and I have less small tasks (eg. write email to X, though I have those too but I’ve found Siri, apple watch and reminders works great for such quick tasks), but more biggish tasks/projects such as this week, work on paper X (and usually at the end of a session on paper X, I’ll write myself a list of things to do in the Word document itself).

My trouble lies with things in the future…if it doesn’t beep at me, it doesn’t happen…so, that Review plugin sounds very promising, I’ll check it out! I had hoped I could write something like [] do this thing on [[5. December 2020]] or in [[two weeks]] and it would pop up in the daily note, but if at all, it’s hidden away in the backlink panel. Perhaps the plugin will help.

EDIT: just tried it, and it’s just about perfect! Thanks!

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I’m planning a dedicated backlinks plugin, allowing you to open dedicated backlinks panes for target notes, for just this reason. That way you could open the dedicated backlinks pane for today and see all notes pointing to today. Same goes for a “current actions” backlinks pane, etc.

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Quick question - the only thing that seem to create a hiccup, is that when I use the review plugin, the daily notes template doesn’t ‘happen’ - that is when I click on the newly created daily note for ‘tomorrow’ with the review items, the daily note template doesn’t appear as well. Would that be fixed if I click on daily note tomorrow? As in, accessing tomorrow’s daily note tomorrow, it will then apply the template?

Wow, this got convoluted quickly…

also, it doesn’t seem to apply the pre-fix for task boxes or -. Could this be a problem with the custom CSS I’m running? (I think it’s called red graphite, or something similar)

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I have thoughts on these comments/questions, but we should have this conversation in a more appropriate place. Mind making/contributing to relevant Issues on GitHub? https://github.com/ryanjamurphy/review-obsidian

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@ryanjamurphy, relatively new to obsidian and have to say I’m loving it so far. Is there a way to save a default setup with same workspace look & theme, and can be recalled each time a new vault is created? I’m doing in manually. Thanks.

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I don’t think there is for different vaults at this point in time. You can save workspaces in each vault, though.

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Justin’s right, no global settings. You could copy and paste the obsidian.css file in your Vault’s root folder to copy theme settings, and there might be a config file in the hidden .obsidian folder you can copy, too. Best to ask on Obsidian’s forum though!

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Thanks Justin & Ryan for your replies.

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72

For those considering or using DevonThink, they’re having a Black Friday sale on software, ebooks, etc.

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73

I’m looking for a better way to manage my documents. Reading through all of the posts here (and others) DevonThink seemed like a good option. I went to check it out on their site and for the life of me, I can’t find information about what this product does. I can find plenty about the difference between Pro and Enterprise but nothing about what the standard version actually does.
I’m reminded of the old adage “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” but in this case its “if you need to ask what it does, you don’t need it!”

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I’ve used DevonThink Office Pro for several years. Essentially it enables one to store, search, OCR, convert, connect, manage, tag, annotate PDFs, share, and export nearly any kind of file you throw at it. You can also import Apple Notes and Apple Mail messages. You can import and/or index files/folders on your hardrive and cloud services. You can use the editor to type notes or other text in various formats including plain, rich, and markdown.

At this point, DT is the focal point for all of my files and notes as I have all relevant folders indexed to DT. I take meeting notes in Drafts and then immediately send them to the appropriate database and group in DT. I’m also using DT’s new enhanced Wikilinks feature to cross reference my research notes and I use DT URL links to connect project notes and resources to my task manager (Things 3)

There are excellent videos on YouTube that may give you a better sense of the app. You could invest a little upfront and subscribe to Screencastonline and watch some of the training videos. This is a great resource for learning about a lot of applications beyond DT.

I hope this helps some.

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Thank you for that response- I appreciate the time.
I found it odd that there isn’t any detail about what you get in the standard edition; only what you don’t.

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This is informative, thank you. I tried it in the past, but couldn’t wrap my head around the functionality (this was early in my education and training in STEM). Now that I have a defined role as a researcher, DT seems to deliver on multiple fronts that I’m struggling with at the moment. I just downloaded the trial and a couple PDFs from their website to try it out for the next couple days.

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I’m glad it was helpful. DT is not intuitive. I recommend you consider Screencastonline. I think you will get a high ROI for DT and other apps. It will certainly help you evaluate DT.

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Thank you, I will definitely check it out :+1:t2:

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For Research, the features I look for are(in order of importance)

  • Markdown support
  • File Attachments with inline preview for images.
  • Encryption
  • Single purchase or free. No Subscription.
  • Linux and Mac clients.
  • Web Clipper
  • OCR
  • Web client for access on computers that I can’t install the client on.

So far, I’ve only found one application that has most of these features, Joplin. It has:

  • Markdown support
  • File Attachments with inline preview for images.
  • Encrytion
  • Single purchase/Free. No Subscription.
  • Linux and Mac clients.
  • Web Clipper

I like how you can choose your synchronization client. I started testing the application last week and I selected Dropbox because it was easy. If I stick with it. I’d use NextCloud where you run your own synchronization server. NextCloud works with a number of different application, so the cost of running, say a DigitalOcean droplet makes more sense the more applications that you run through it.

The lack of OCR might disqualify Joplin for some. I used PDFPen for OCR new PDF’s and Finder to search them.

I started testing it

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Thanks for the Joplin pointer; I’ve made a note to check it out.

I’m looking for a balance between “everything buckets” and standalone document editing. Maybe Joplin is it?

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I tried Joplin but found it not intuitive.
Also, in Finder, the Joplin folder is a mess, filenames have no relation to the file, they are just a random sequence of characters.

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Hi, just want to draw your attention to recent activities in the Tinderbox community. Perhaps it’s worth reengaging - esp. the videos are really helpful in gettin access to this software.

I summarized things in a post that you may find useful at

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