My hard drive’s file organization looks like a cherry bomb hit it.
My current “process” if you want to call it that involves cleaning stuff out of Downloads and putting it in Documents, and then getting to them … eventually.
It’s a long way of saying that if I didn’t have the search feature, I’d be in a lot of trouble.
Most of my writing online isn’t much more searchable
I’ve blogged over at Mighty Bargain Hunter since 2005. Even after unpublishing all of the now-spammy blog carnivals that were in vogue back then (anyone remember those?). I’m still left with nearly 1,300 posts there.
For most of those posts, that’s the only place they live. So if I’m looking for something I’ve written, I’m using the search feature in WordPress to find it. It usually works if I remember enough, but otherwise, again, I’m in trouble.
I’ve been using Obsidian to fix this problem
Slowly but surely, my creative writing work is going into a single place with a powerful search and linking capability.
That’s Obsidian, a Markdown-based text editor that is my go-to place for personal knowledge management, also known as my Second Brain.
My workflow doesn’t start in WordPress, or in Medium. It starts in Obsidian.
(Actually, it may start in 750Words.com, but that goes directly into Obsidian when I’m done. Obsidian doesn’t have confetti when I reach my 750 words. I like confetti.)
After I’m done with the article in Obsidian, I copy-paste it into the WordPress editor on one of my blogs. After it’s published there, I copy-paste it from there into Medium (or occasionally Substack).
I still search Medium for posts, but I now can also search my Obsidian vault for those posts, too.
Now for related links
Some other Medium writers have had good success with related links at the end of their posts, so I’m looking to add them to mine.
With WordPress there are probably dozens of plugins that will do this for me in some fashion, but Medium doesn’t have this capability. And in any case, the links would be different. I’d typically want to link from my blog posts to other blog posts, and from my Medium stories to other Medium stories.
Since my process involves pasting from Obsidian into WordPress, and then from WordPress into Medium, I’ve started creating two sets of related posts in Obsidian: one for the blogs, and one for Medium. I’ll put both sets of links into the Obsidian post, copy the article through, and then delete the set of links I don’t need from the appropriate copies afterwards.
I’d like to save time and reuse these links
Creating these two sets of links doesn’t take a huge amount of time, maybe 3-5 minutes.
And it probably isn’t that much of a big deal to find the links again in the article if I want to reuse them, like I’m going to do in this one.
A simple way to do this is to modularize things. The links go into their own note in Obsidian. I tag it so that I can search by it to find it again quickly (and name it in a reasonable way as well — no more Untitled 7 filenames!)
Now I don’t need to remember which post the list was in, or some keyword to find the article. I can search a smaller number of files to find them.
As a bonus, the list can also serve as an index of articles that I can link to other notes in my vault.
Working consistently in my vault helps me to be more efficient with it.
My Second Brain is a content creation assistant.
We partner with the content creation, but I call the shots.
I direct my assistant how best to help me. Just like any relationship, if I don’t put in the time regularly, it’s going to be harder to hold a conversation when I do end up going back.
Lots of ways to add value to your content
There’s a lot more power to be had with Obsidian!
I’ve developed a Starter Kit that gives templates, processes, and dashboards to help you build your second brain out in a way that reduces friction and makes it fun!
Check out the Obsidian Starter Kit for Content Creators here!