Making My Notes Useful Again
Like most software engineers I’ve known, I have a habit of trying to optimize my daily routine. My notes were already in Obsidian, alongside my journal and whatever I was writing. But when life became harder and more stressful, I fell out of the habit of keeping everything up to date. I’ve written about that burnout before. Returning to the notes meant continuing to expose myself to friction. Notes that were the backbone of my life snowballed into another thing I couldn’t keep up with. I had to put effort into maintaining the information before I could get much help from it. I wanted to reduce that overhead, particularly the work of gathering context and remembering which unfinished things needed my attention. Having all of it written down somewhere was only useful if I could bring it back into the day I was actually trying to get through.
In high school, I suffered a traumatic brain injury in a rollover car accident, and my memory hasn’t been dependable since. My wife has been dealing with that since we met in 2008; it still upsets her sometimes when I forget something she’s told me. Keeping extensive notes has a practical purpose for me, which is why Tiago Forte’s Second Brain approach appealed to me. I need to be able to look things up when my memory doesn’t cooperate, and a note-taking system quickly became a crucial aspect of my daily life. Hitting a wall where I cannot maintain these notes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, continuing to escalate the overall impact of the burnout I was experiencing.
I’ve found that local models and n8n can handle some of the preparation I was previously doing myself. I use the models to help interpret what I’ve written and suggest what needs attention, while n8n handles recurring jobs and the connections between applications. This lets me keep the notes in Obsidian, where I can still read and edit the Markdown files myself. I’ve also been using Copilot and Claudian to work with an assistant inside the vault. Giving it access to the relevant notes means I can work through an idea using the information I’ve already collected, without having to explain all of that context again. I still decide what to keep from its suggestions, but I don’t have to do all of the reading and organizing before I can start.
I’ve been able to automate daily note creation and pull buried to-do items and relevant project context into the day’s note. I can start with that information in front of me instead of having to gather it from several places. My morning journal had a similar problem with the effort it took to keep up. It’s basically a personal standup, but getting three boys ready for school tends to take priority over sitting at a keyboard and reflecting on the morning. I’ve made that easier with an Apple Shortcut that lets me speak my answers while getting a child dressed or cleaning up breakfast. Local models can help me draw out priorities from those answers, while I keep my original words in the journal so I can come back to them later.
I can remember working through a problem and still have no idea where I put the notes. I’ve been using Miyo to search by subject when I can’t remember a title or the words I used, and an assistant can read the results to help me work out where I left off. I can check its answer against the notes it found. I’m also using AI to help sort new captures, which lets me save something before I’ve decided where it belongs. Saving a recipe article still leaves me with copying and formatting to do before I have something I can cook from. AI can help prepare cooking notes for me to review and use in Mealie. I can review the result with the copying and formatting already done.
I haven’t measured a net time saving, and getting this set up has taken work as well. I can easily replace one backlog with another if I let suggestions accumulate. I’m trying to make the notes useful while I’m getting back into the habit of keeping them, because waiting until I have the energy to maintain everything consistently would leave me where I started. Having some of the preparation done automatically makes it easier to return after I’ve fallen behind. I need to be able to use the information I already have, especially during the periods when I’m least capable of organizing it.