Why do I use so many note taking apps || Vlogmas Day 5

okay so what i'm going to do today is actually i'm going to live stream this video because i just want to talk about productivity apps so i think today's vlog for vlogmas is actually going to be a replay of the live stream a little bit cut up of course you're not going to watch the whole thing probably i would imagine so i mean you can if you want to um but like i said it's gonna be cut up sliced into a nice small video-ish like 12-15 minutes long we'll see how long i actually stream for but yeah so sit tight and we're gonna slide around productivity is the theme of today's video we're gonna be talking about i i am gonna be talking about productivity apps what i use how i use it and maybe deciding if i if and how i can actually pare down these productivity apps so let's pop in to it alright so first off what apps do i use i have a chrome browser here with air table and notion open i also use craft and i also use obsidian these are all kind of competing at least craft air craft notion and obsidian are all kind of competing for my um attention and like they're all different they're all different buckets that i can put different information in so i kind of wanted to product to first talk about like which ones i'm using why i'm using them how i'm using them that kind of stuff first so first let's talk about obsidian since that's the first one that's actually open here okay so first let's talk about what obsidian is and then we'll hop into my app so it's a second brain they they taught say it's a second brain for you forever it's a knowledge base that you can just build out very wikipedia style like you can link to other you can link to other files and such like that um they have a really strong plug-in community which is neat where you can access different plugins and such that you can actually like really customize obsidian to do exactly what you want um and it's free and what's what's super neat about obsidian is each file is actually stored as a markdown file um so i'm gonna go where mine is in icloud drive there's an obsidian folder since i use it on mac and on my phone so they're in both places actually and in here these are all the different vaults that obsidian has and so what volts are an obsidian is they're kind of just like like the database of your folders so this one here that i have open is called cct plus um that's where i manage all of coffee code tech and more so like my youtube channel and such like that and it's basically all just markdown files in folders and that's all that's in here so like if i click into people here's another markdown file and we can just keep going markdown file after markdown file after markdown file basically that's exactly what's in here now where obsidian's like power comes in is the fact that it does this backlink thing which i was talking about with it being like a wiki style app like it makes wikis so here is the home for my wheels and then whenever there's these double brackets here that means we're linking to another linking to another page so if i command click it i am taken instantly to that page this is a community plugin that i have installed that makes it into a kanban board so if we open it as markdown we can see that it uses the yaml formatter here and then there's just a bunch of markdown related info here since it's just marked down it is an electron app like people can write javascript plugins and such for it to work then we can hit open his kanban board and it's back as a kanban board which is pretty nifty um if we go into this other my wheels we can see here the double link to the home and click back and it's just going to take you back now the nifty little view that i had opened before is a graph view it allows you to just see where all the different links are happening so i have some out here that aren't really linked to anything these are probably like dates like my daily notes that i have taken um but like vlogmas here is linked to lots of different things and you can follow this path over and over and over to just a lot of different ways and you can see how you how your notes com notes like actually uh connect to each other if you set those back links in and then of course you can say what you want what you can actually put in what you want here if i wanted to show tags like i have some work in progress tags and such like that i can do that we could also put in groups here um so if i wanted to put all of my wheels anything that's related to my wheels inside this actual my wheels folder will be red we can make another group the same thing for people that way we can see where people are connected and when i say people it can either be work people just uh p what however i'm categorizing people you can also do this with tags so here are all the different tags i have so all my swift i can put is like this nice orange color [Music] and of course they might get taken over by other colors like priorities and such like that um so it's just a pretty nifty way to start visualizing where stuff is connecting so it looks like i have this swift here that is a work in progress so this is just a way to start organizing and visualizing your notes like i hadn't really thought of visualizing my notes that way um some people say this view is kind of useless that graph view is kind of useless it's kind of nifty if once you start actually filtering out info so like i don't i probably don't need all of like the single date feel the single date options here so i could probably figure out how to actually filter those out usually people would probably categorize them inside their own folder for like a daily note folder and then you can say great take that away that kind of deal um and something that i just found out recently that they have inside this view is you can actually see your notes grow if you hit the button the start time lapse animation you can start seeing them all grow together which is just a fun it is literally just a fun view to watch your note and your graphs just all grow [Music] again this is obsidian it's just a nifty it's all markdown based it all lives on my own drive there's nothing wrong here because it's stored in that icloud folder everything is part like i have access access to it on all my devices so you don't have to pay for anything either on it they do have also this one nifty plug-in that you do have to pay for it's called publish and it will publish to like a website for you so now if i go to this website we can see everything that i've actually decided to publish here and we can start to see um just everything come together and we can see it all like on the website so you could actually go to m wilson underscore codes.cctplus.dev and see all these notes that i've taken live um i really like obsidian for this part alone it makes it a nice easy website to actually maintain um and you know you can you can customize it and stuff like that i'm just not obsidian i don't think it's gonna be my end-all be-all but it is a very nifty app that because everything is marked down you don't have to necessarily use obsidian to actually get info into it again obsidian is probably the lowest on my on my apps to actually like keep inside to actually keep in my in my workflow because craft and obsidian kind of play the same role so let's talk about craft for a little bit craft craft craft craft they actually just won a apple app store app a design award for the app store recently for mac app so they claim they're taking their notes to the next level it's built for digital devices it is a native mac app it's a native mac an ios app it's written in swift it you can really feel there it is their mac app of the year you can really feel like the craftsmanship in it and you can also really feel like how how snappy it is inside mac os i'm on ipad os and on iphone ios so this is really like i highly recommend if you're looking for a note-taking app this is probably a good place to go um it's just it's craft is a super nice and super clean app so everything is document based so like if we go into my vlogmas schedule here we can see that there's just a list of tasks so each vlog isn't each vlog is an actual task here and then on top of that though you also can make each line become its own page so like this vlog that this vlog that i'm recording right now you hit into it there are the different there's like the actual notes for this p for this video but like if we were to go into the revenue cat one again very detailed i know but like here is more details about it so you can start having things like live on a page and then you can go into a page if you need to there's folders you can see a bunch of different page styles and all this kind of stuff so you can change the whole default font if you want to exactly like basically you can customize a lot of what you see here um change what your block spacing is page with stuff like that um also change the style of text if you want to and then what's nifty is how we can actually group options so like here is what they would call a grouping because it's a page inside a page basically so there's different we can turn it actually into a card instead and apply the style of the card you can customize like the cards color so if we wanted it to be like that it's how it actually looks and you can even apply like a background a background image to it as well to me craft is a lot more like notion especially in the fact that you can bring up the different commands so if you needed like a separator you need the font to change that kind of stuff it does support markdown so hashtag is the heading double hashtag is a subheading and then you can link to other pages as well like backlinks kind of like obsidian or you'd hit at and then you can go find the page that you want and it'll link here so you can go and find it and you can go and you can um click on it and go to that page specifically or if maybe that's just the title and you want to add more notes you can do that as well so now it's a there's more page inside the page here which you know it can work for some people like there's reasons why these exist people like this idea that is what's happening there so this is craft i really like it for general note taking they do have a daily note feature so you can add a note for each day and it clearly just lives in this day view um i like to use it we can see up here i like to use it for uh kind of like my schedule for the day type notes what i want to focus on stuff like that um and then like my all documents is actually more so for loose leaf notes that i'm actually crafting or loose leaf projects that i'm currently working on now before i was really into craft and really in into obsidian the one that started it all was notion notion is just a very well-rounded tool that basically does everything that you could imagine so let's get it open let's talk about it we are also going to bring up their page this the notion really wants to be like a workspace for everyone the company obviously wants you to use it for everything um but they're starting to put more emphasis on a on the collaboration part than they are the um note taking part the single person note taking part so like yeah this is like i mean it does a lot here um and you can share you can share these and be collaborative all that good stuff here it's built for collaboration craft is also has collaboration mode where you can talk with other people in it and collaborate with other people um but let's go peruse around how i'm currently using notion so as you can see here i have lots of different workspaces each workspace is used for a different part of my life um work was used for my previous job no longer used now even though my current job does use notion on a day-to-day basis basis to run its business it's not listed in this drop down here uh cct plus that was that was used for my um used to run youtube twitch all that fun stuff um it's no longer but if i need to share anything out like this template issue tracker anything anything that i need to share out as like a single page i'll either use it put it into notion or i'll put it into craft because they both have the option to actually share a page out so with notion you can hit share and you can share to the web and you have that link and inside craft if i wanted to share this i can hit the share icon hit share secret link and now i can copy this link and open it inside a web page to be viewed so that was cct plus the next one is auto tracker this one is quite a different workspace um because it's actually tracking this one specific project that i'm working on my wheels if you follow me on twitch you actually have seen me work on my wheels quite a bit here um to where like and this is where everything is based out of um what i'm planning for subscription tiers what my data looks like what my database info is um what i actually want to see in mvp where my ideas for sharing cars um all that kind of stuff like that's exactly what i have in here and this is a it's a great tool for this because everything's so flexible so like we have embeds for for embeds that come from websites casts auto uh headings you can put things side by side if you need to so like this free light pro it all goes side by side and all this fun stuff like i can just take random notes as i need to now where those if notion is so great like why do i feel the need to go look for other things the first thing though is that it is web-based so if i don't have access to the internet i literally cannot do anything with this data there are ios and mac os apps available for notion but they're all like really just react uh react to rappers like they're all web wrappers basically and it it just doesn't have the nice polish like craft does and the only thing that is keeping me from switching over fully to craft is the fact that i can do stuff like this with my database um inside what notion calls databases you can have properties data types all this fun stuff so you can actually click and like select your different options here um so it just makes it really easy to categorize data if you need to and such like that so i highly this is just one of the reasons why i can't um [Music] why i can't exactly switch from notion yet because like this is purely this is great but like i said it is web-based it doesn't really have offline support inside the ios and ipad os apps internet connection which is really sad for such a great app because it is super flexible so like here like i built out a res whenever i was applying to jobs like i had a whole resume completely built out in notion i mean it's super nifty to like be really i mean notion is great like look check this out like here are here are all the skills that i have they're all organized by programming language developer tools all that fun stuff we can then share copy it's shared to the web and we then go check it out actually inside proceed anyway inside here like it it looks it just looks very clean you can start to organize everything i can link jobs to i can link specific jobs to like specific skills here if i wanted to same with my ios apps and it just it makes it really easy to get up and going edition's great i i just really like notion um i've done a whole video actually over notion about how i use notion to like track projects like that and such like that because i've done used it quite a bit for ihog here um like here's just a very static page that people can come to and then i also have it for like an issue tracker um so i actually like really went in depth on how to do this i'll link it in the description box below but yeah so like notion is like right now the thing that can do everything that i really want to those are the apps that i really truly enjoy using for productivity now i don't know i really do want to cut back i feel like i'm using too many different apps but i think craft notion and obsidian are all kind of stepping on each other's toes notion's also gonna stay in the mix for now no matter what it's really just craft and obsidian that are stepping on each other's toes so craft is gonna be like my end all be all of productivity apps that's not like it's gonna overtake obsidian um it makes me really slightly sad for it to overtake obsidian but i really don't need i feel like craft and city obsidian both have the exact same features and even like notion could take over crash but i really like the offline support for craft so like i really feel that craft is going to be like the app that is the end-all be-all at the end of the day once they figure out how to get notion notion databases in but um i just craft is a very well made app and right now it's doing exactly what obsidian does or is obsidian does exactly what craft does i really think that's that letting obsidian go deleting it off all the devices and such is gonna be the way to like simplify my life just a little bit more um and with that being said that is the end of this video if you really liked this video make sure you give it a like thumbs up subscribe all that fun stuff and then watch the next video that's presented to you because the algorithm says that you will probably like it the best and i will catch you in the next one

Channel: maeganwilson_

Views: 25

Keywords: best note taking app, note taking apps, productivity apps, notion, obsidian, craft

Id: fI1Vx2Nntko

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021