I want somewhere to be My Workspace™
I’ve been refining my my digital ecosystem over time and feel as though I’m in a good place. I wrote out what I need in a digital workspace and feel as though I’m finally getting myself to this one place: my one digital workspace, as if it were my digital office environment and desk space.
I want peripheral cues of my work, such as artifacts hanging around that trigger my thoughts: sticky notes, scribbled ideas, marked-up books, and all the goodness that a typical analog workspace has.
I want to immediately see Today’s Priority and Tasks, This Week’s Priority and Upcoming Tasks, and anything else to keep me on track.
The perfect tool isn’t out there for me despite having spent significant time refining my digital ecosystem. I have my go to, Things, which excels at what it does best—helping me organize and cross tasks off my list—but it isn’t really the right tool for a macro view of my work and life.
That’s what I’m looking for: a place where I can see the macro perspective and use as a messy-yet-organized working environment.
A place to store my research as I discover and learn new things
A place to put all my thoughts, ideas, wisdom, knowledge, practices, resources, notes, conversations, projects, and more.
A place that let’s me discover connections between ideas.
A place that helps me generate novel ideas.
A place that holds all of the digital notes I take:
- Work notes
- Life notes
- Fleeting notes
- Research findings
- Project documents
- Daily notes / Interstitial Journal
Recently I decided Craft is my workspace—a direct response to this note—so I’ve been diving deep into that.
My latest thinking as I try to ditch all the apps I use and instead rely on essentially Things and Craft, with Evernote as a backup/archive catch-all for discoveries worth saving pic.twitter.com/BDwFJ6kWif
— Mike Tannenbaum he/him (@TheRoyalTbomb) April 27, 2021
The Tasks At Hand
- Capturing thoughts — Drafts
- Processing tasks — Things
- Cataloging knowledge — Obsidian / Craft
- Writing ideas — Craft
- Referencing data and quotes — Craft
- Sparking creativity — Obsidian / Craft
- Collaborating with others — Craft + Whimsical + Google Docs
- Visualizing ideas — Whimsical
It’s taken a while to get here so I made some notes on the evolution of the ecosystem.