Tag: obsidian

Categories
AI

The Quiet Setup: MacSparky’s Robot Assistant and the Unfair Advantage Still Available

A single X post caught my attention this week. It described something quietly happening among a small group of solo professionals. They aren’t working longer hours or grinding harder. Instead, they’ve built a particular kind of setup around AI that carries much of the load.

While most of us still treat powerful models as clever search bars—typing questions and copying answers—these folks have given the AI a rich folder of context, a briefing file that orients it to their world, connections to their tools, and routines that let it produce real work on its own. The result can look like the output of a small team. From the outside it reads as talent or luck. Up close, it’s mostly architecture.0

The post (from @zephyr_hg) emphasized that this advantage remains available because most people haven’t yet made the shift from one-off prompting to building persistent systems. It landed with me because it echoes so closely the practical territory David Sparks (MacSparky) has been mapping for months in his Robot Assistant Field Guide.

MacSparky’s Approach: From Chatbot to Persistent Colleague

David’s work centers on building a true personal assistant using Obsidian (for a local, plain-text knowledge base) and Claude (in its file-aware “Cowork” or project capabilities). The system isn’t a chatbot that forgets everything between conversations. It’s designed to remember your projects, preferences, and people; triage email in your voice; handle morning briefings; track tasks; process documents; and support weekly reviews—freeing you from what David calls the “donkey work.”

The key ingredients will sound familiar to anyone who read that X post:

  • A dedicated context layer (your Obsidian vault or structured folder) holding the details of how you work.
  • Briefing/instruction files that tell the model who you are and what good looks like.
  • Integrations that connect it to email, calendar, files, and other tools.
  • Skills and routines that turn one-time intentions into repeatable, low-friction action.

David has been refreshingly transparent about the journey. He experimented earlier with more fully autonomous agents and even shut one down after learning what felt reliable and aligned. The Robot Assistant Field Guide distills those lessons into videos, workshops, templates, and a starter kit that lets people build without needing to code.

Why This Matters Now

Both perspectives point to the same shift in stance: moving from “How do I prompt better today?” to “What kind of system do I want running alongside me every day?”

For me, at this stage of life, that question carries weight. I’m not chasing maximum output for its own sake. I want arrangements that protect attention and energy for what actually matters—deep reflection, family history work, thoughtful investing, writing that might be useful to others, and simply being present. A well-designed AI setup doesn’t just save minutes; it changes the texture of the day by reducing context-switching and repeated explanations.

It feels like finding a productive seam in the current moment of AI evolution—one of those hidden transitions where leverage quietly compounds if you’re willing to build the architecture.

The Door Remains Open

The encouraging message in both the X post and David’s teaching is that this isn’t locked behind rare talent or expensive infrastructure. The models are accessible. The patterns are becoming clearer. What’s required is the decision to treat AI less like a toy and more like a colleague you’re willing to orient and trust with real work.

I don’t have my own “robot assistant” fully built yet. I’ve been experimenting with custom agents, structured daily scans, and ideas like “The Observatory” for signal synthesis. Reading these sources side-by-side sharpened my sense of the next layer: giving the system a proper home, clear instructions, and meaningful recurring work.

If you’re a solo professional, creator, or lifelong learner feeling the press of too many small tasks, this is worth exploring. Start small. Build a modest context folder. Write a briefing file that captures how you think. Experiment with one routine. Iterate from there.

The setup that outworks the grind isn’t magic. It’s deliberate, learnable, and still wide open.

What setups are you experimenting with these days? I’d love to hear in the comments or on X.

Categories
Link-based note-making Linking Your Thinking Obsidian Personal Knowledge PKM Personal Knowledge Management

Forgotten Gems: Mining Your Second Brain

“One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere.” – Tiago Forte

Ever had a fleeting idea that later becomes a game-changer? Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking (LYT) workshop equips writers, students, and creative professionals with a powerful framework for capturing, developing, and ultimately communicating their ideas.

A core concept in LYT is the Ideaverse, a personal repository for all your captured ideas, thoughts, and insights. Whether it’s a scribbled note, a website URL, or an overheard conversation, the Ideaverse encourages you to collect these sparks of inspiration. Tiago Forte uses the term “Second Brain” for the same idea as the Ideaverse. Forte has taught a similar workshop for years and has also published a book on the subject.

The LYT framework, built on the Add-Relate-Communicate (ARC) approach, guides you through the process of nurturing those sparks. Adding involves capturing the initial idea in any format that works for you. Relating encourages you to explore connections, ask questions, and build upon the original idea. Finally, Communicating involves sharing your developed thought through writing, presentations, or simply internalizing it for future use. (Note: I have been using Obsidian as my tool of choice for my personal Ideaverse. I’ve found it second to no other applications when it comes to linking ideas and notes together, helping me to discover new insights in often surprising ways.)

The key lies in maintaining a balance. LYT helps you avoid the trap of over-collecting ideas. By establishing criteria for capture and prioritizing based on potential impact, you can focus your energy on the ideas most likely to bear fruit. How often have you had a brilliant idea or stumbled across an interesting tidbit, only for it to slip away into the ether, forgotten and lost? Our minds are fertile gardens, constantly sprouting seeds of inspiration and insight. But without a system to capture and cultivate those seeds, so many wither on the vine before they can fully blossom.

By cultivating a robust personal knowledge management system, we create a repository to gather up all those little scraps – the half-formed thoughts, the kernels of concepts, the raw materials of creativity. Much like a compost bin nourishes a garden, our Ideaverse provides a rich bed of inspiration where our intellectual and artistic seeds can germinate and grow.

What makes this approach so powerful is the emphasis on saving “the scraps on the cutting-room floor.” We’re all familiar with those fleeting moments of genius – the clever turn of phrase that comes to mind in the shower, the spontaneous creative spark while commuting, the “Aha!” revelation in the weekly meeting that peters out before we can fully explore it. Our Ideaverse becomes the catcher’s mitt for those vagabond thoughts, preventing them from drifting off into the ether of distraction.

And those scraps, when collected and cross-pollinated as we relate to them, have extraordinary emergent potential. A stray joke becomes the seed for a new creative project. An intriguing book quote plants the roots for an original philosophy. An overheard conversation germinates into a novel perspective to share with the world. Our Ideaverse is both archive and icebox, preserving the perishable flashes of brilliance to be leveraged and recombined in novel ways.

The creative process is so often portrayed as one of passionate inspiration and Eureka moments. But any prolific artist or thinker will tell you that their masterworks are built from a million little scraps – the unfinished thoughts, the faint impressions, the whispers of ideas that gradually coalesce into a cohesive whole. By giving those fleeting intellections a dedicated space to live and mingle, our Ideaverse transforms from a mere repository into a fertile idea nursery.

So embrace the scraps, the snippets, the clippings and fragments. Let your Ideaverse or your Second Brain be the garden bed where those discarded trimmings are collected and composted into the rich soil for your creative progeny to take root and thrive. Don’t leave those forgotten gems scattered on the cutting-room floor when they could be the seeds of your next breakthrough.

Note: see also my earlier post from last summer that I wrote after attending my first cohort of the Linking Your Thinking workshop.

Categories
Obsidian PKM Personal Knowledge Management

My Current PKM Stack

My PKM Stack as of September 2023

I’m enrolled in cohort 2 of Mike Schmitz’s Obsidian University. Mike is an excellent educator and he’s developed considerable expertise in Obsidian. His first two sessions are deep dives into setting up a personal knowledge management (PKM) system. The first session was about philosophy, the second about specific tools he uses/recommends.

I’ve been using Obsidian pretty heavily since I first started playing with it in May 2022. I’ve got lots of notes collected and have a workflow that’s been working for me in terms of capturing information I want to think about later. Here’s my basic workflow:

  1. I’m doing all of my browsing in Safari on Mac, iPhone or iPad. I have used Instapaper as my read-later service for years and articles I find while browsing that I might want to save I’ll capture in Instapaper. I like Instapaper’s “clean up” approach – taking all of the extra stuff out of web pages and distilling them down to the essence of the text on the page.
  2. A second source of capture is Feedly which I’m using as my RSS reader and in which I also capture articles to Instapaper.
  3. Sometime later I’ll open Instapaper and read through what I’ve captured. If I find an article I want to add to my Obsidian vault, I will email it to Drafts using its recently added mail drop feature. Once it’s in Drafts, I used an action to save the article to my Obsidian Inbox folder which is stored in iCloud.
  4. Later, I’ll open Obsidian and review my Inbox folder and open each item in turn, add metadata properties to the top (using an Obsidian template that I’ve created), and – once I’m finished editing it – I’ll move the note to my Zettlekasten folder in Obsidian which is where I store all of my notes.

That’s it.

I also use Drafts from time to time to just capture text that I either write or dictate – and process that later in the same fashion.

What I’m still trying to figure out how to do better is taking advantage of the notes I’ve captured – revisiting them, summarizing them, using them as the basis for a new note or a blog post, etc. In other words, creating some useful output from all of the input I’ve been adding. This is very much a work in progress!

By the way, sometime that’s important to learn before or while you’re learning Obsidian is the Markdown text format. It’s a simple, easy to learn way to “markup” text and it’s important to become fluent in using it with Obsidian.

Note: in addition to Mike Schmitz’s Obsidian University, I’ve also purchased David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide which is also a useful educational resource for learning the ropes of Obsidian.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Claude

Projects vs Efforts

a person typing on a laptop
Photo by Daniel Thomas on Pexels.com

As part of his introduction of the new Ideaverse sample vault for Obsidian, Nick Milo has focused on the difference between projects versus efforts – and has settled on using the Efforts name for one of the folders in his new ACE folder structure. Efforts are different from projects and Nick believes that name is better suited to be part of a PKM system. In his fourth video introducing Ideaverse Nick Milo noted: “Why do some projects get done, and other projects get stuck? It might be because projects don’t work well with ideas.”

Of late I’ve enjoyed bouncing ideas around with Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic. I asked Claude to help me understand the differences between projects and efforts by writing a musing on that. I found Claude’s response quite useful:

Projects and efforts both require time, energy, and focus to accomplish something, but they have some key differences. 

Projects are more defined, with a specific scope, timeline, and set of objectives. They have a clear beginning and a desired end result. Efforts are more open-ended, without rigid parameters. An effort may continue indefinitely as part of an ongoing process.

Projects follow a linear progression, with planning, execution, and completion phases. Efforts evolve organically, with starts and stops, detours, and gradual refinements. Projects aim to produce a deliverable, while efforts may have less tangible outcomes.

Projects can be handled individually or by teams. Efforts often involve loose collections of people contributing in diverse ways over time. Projects have project managers overseeing them. Efforts lack that formal hierarchical structure.

When projects finish, they are done. Efforts may pause or change direction, but they often persist in some form. We celebrate project launches and project completions. Efforts reflect continuous investment without fanfare.

Both projects and efforts require diligence and group coordination. But projects allow for more top-down control to keep work narrowly defined. Efforts rely more on bottom-up participation, following passion and drawing in a wide base of support.

In essence, projects impose structure on objectives, while efforts supply energy to ambitions. Both are vital and mutually reinforcing. A singular project can advance an expansive effort, just as an ongoing effort can spawn many delimited projects over time. By balancing closed-ended projects and open-ended efforts, we can direct our limited resources toward achievements with lasting impact.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models ChatGPT Link-based note-making Linking Your Thinking Note-making Obsidian

Link-based Note-making

Update: see my more comprehensive review of the Linking Your Thinking workshop.

I’m currently immersed in Nick Milo’s 11th cohort of his Linking Your Thinking workshop, and I must say, it’s been an enjoyable experience so far. This workshop has proven to be an excellent opportunity for me to refine my skills using Obsidian as my primary tool for capturing notes and thoughts. Moreover, it has provided me with ample time to engage in deep thinking and establish connections between various concepts through note linking.

This week in the workshop is dedicated to “AI Week,” where we delve into the realm of artificial intelligence to enhance our thinking processes. One fascinating aspect has been our exploration of generative AI chatbots such as Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Yesterday, we had the privilege of an expert session with Jeremy Nguyen, who has honed his expertise in leveraging multi-step prompts with ChatGPT to engage in interactive conversations with selected “mentors.” The intricacies of his process were truly captivating!

I was up early this morning and playing a bit with ChatGPT. I had come across someone else who had put together a prompt like the following to generate some pithy one-liners that he could use on Twitter to stimulate interest:

Create 35 one-line statements that sound motivational and inspirational but are really just platitudes that have very little intellectual value. They must be original and not quotes.

I modified a version of that prompt as follows:

Create 15 one-line statements about the power of link-based note making that are very motivational and inspirational. They must be original and not quotes.

Here’s what ChatGPT generated in response – these one-liners are all pretty good!:

  1. Unlock the limitless potential of link-based note making and watch your ideas soar to new heights of creativity.
  2. Embrace the interconnected web of knowledge through link-based note making and witness the power of ideas intertwining.
  3. Harness the transformative power of link-based note making to create a symphony of ideas that harmonize and inspire.
  4. Let link-based note making be the key that unlocks the door to boundless inspiration and innovation.
  5. Dive into the world of link-based note making and witness how the threads of knowledge weave a tapestry of enlightenment.
  6. Embrace the empowering nature of link-based note making and discover the magic that happens when ideas collide.
  7. Unlock the door to accelerated learning and creative breakthroughs with the dynamic tool of link-based note making.
  8. Let link-based note making be the catalyst that ignites your imagination and fuels your pursuit of greatness.
  9. Embrace the transformative power of link-based note making and watch as your ideas bloom and flourish.
  10. Dive into the ocean of possibilities with link-based note making and witness the ripple effect of inspired thinking.
  11. Unlock the untapped reservoirs of inspiration with link-based note making, where connections illuminate the path to brilliance.
  12. Embrace the synergistic dance of ideas with link-based note making, where each link becomes a stepping stone to greatness.
  13. Harness the creative energy of link-based note making and unleash a tidal wave of inspiration that propels you forward.
  14. Let link-based note making be the compass that guides your intellectual journey, leading you to new frontiers of discovery.
  15. Dive into the realm of boundless inspiration with link-based note making and witness the alchemy that happens when ideas collide and synthesize.

I then remembered having fun weeks ago using ChatGPT to generate poetry – so I tried the following:

Write a poem about the joy of link-based note making.

I got the following lovely response:

In the realm where thoughts do flow,
A joyous dance, a rhythmic glow,
Link-based notes, they intertwine,
A tapestry of knowledge divine.

Each word a vessel, meaning true,
Threads connecting what’s old and new,
Ideas woven, seamlessly bound,
A symphony of thoughts profound.

Hyperlinks, the bridges strong,
Guide us where our hearts belong,
From concept’s core to distant shores,
Exploration, forevermore.

With every click, a path unfolds,
A gateway to stories yet untold,
A web of wonders, vast and wide,
Linking worlds, side by side.

No longer bound by linear thought,
Unleashed, the mind’s expansion sought,
A fluid canvas, limitless and free,
Mapping ideas, effortlessly.

Inspiration sparks, creativity soars,
As we navigate these digital shores,
Link by link, we venture through,
An endless maze of knowledge accrue.

So let us revel, embrace this bliss,
In link-based notes, we find our kiss,
For in the web we’re all entwined,
A testament to the human mind.

My explorations continue!