friendbion.blogg.se - Richard lent medium plain text workflow

What tools can I use for writing and managing plain text files?.

Why plain text files and what are the current limitations?.

This post is divided into four sections with four questions: In this post, I want to share my take on the “plain text life” and how using plain text files and combination of tools, best practices, and organizational principles can unlock a powerful and efficient framework for writing, thinking, note-taking, project management, goal tracking, or whatever you are working on. This setup helps me focus on what matters: writing and keeping my projects, ideas and thinking organized and interconnected. It’s evolving, has emergent properties and is trackable too.

The end result is a loosely-coupled web of notes. Practically-speaking this translates into notes stored in a few directories, tagged, and connected together using a links. The files and notes themselves have been intentionally designed to be “organized” as network of information. I call this method and approach a plain text life, by which I mean a note-taking, organizational, and writing system based on plain text files. I use plain text files not only for my writings, study notes and note-taking but also for my goals, organizational, project notes. The files themselves are simple, can be edited on any system, and are future-proof. Rather than a fully featured notes or writing tool, I now have a bunch of plain text files and a lot of them. For me, that solution was “downgrading” to plain text files as my primary means for note-taking, writing, knowledge management and life organization. But sometimes the best solution is one of the simplest and oldest. We live in a world of nearly endless options for productivity and writing software.

There are a lot of tools that can help you in this pursuit. They should augment your ability to reason, to develop connections across knowledge, and produce a targeted output. The goal of your productivity, writing or note-taking systems should be to enable you to think clearly, stay organized, learn, and create. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult.”ĭon Norman, professor and author of The Design of Everyday ThingsĮxternal aids, especially writing, are the key to sustained learning and a creative life. “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated.