My digital toolkit

While most of my advisors managed to be much more productive than I ever will be just using a manual typewriter and a hand written journal, I have always enjoyed trying out new tools to see what they can do. Below are some notes about my current digital toolkit. (Also see my article Working with Text for some more general thoughts.)

Writing and Research

• Note-taking : Logseq
  • Inspired by Roam Research, which in turn was inspired by a long line of outliners going back to MORE which I used on a MacPlus in college, as well as Workflowy and Dynalist. Unlike Roam Research, however, Logseq can save all the data as plain text files on your desktop. This means you can use it with other apps that can read the same files, such as Obsidian.
  • Here’s an article I wrote when I first started using this new generation of note taking apps that tries to explain what makes them so powerful.
  • And here is a user's detailed discussion of how they use Logseq to take notes and organize their tasks.
  • NOTE: Logseq is due (hopefully later this year) for a major overhaul as they switch to a database-driven model. This should make the app much faster, more stable, and give it some new features as well.
• Writing: Obsidian
  • While Logseq is good for capturing and linking ideas, when I need to start writing something longer I prefer to use Obsidian.
  • Out of the box Obsidian is not really set up for this, and it requires some patience to get things set up for long form writing, but the large number of community-built extensions means that you have a lot of control over your work environment.
  • My Obsidian Setup (This page lists the extensions I currently use and what each of them does.)
  • Some people prefer Scrivener. In the past I’ve used Ulysses and Zettlr as well.
• Reference management: Zotero
  • Zotero is an open source bibliographic manager with apps on nearly every platform as well as a full featured web app. They also have an API that allows other apps to query your library in Zotero. And it is possible to set up private and public groups for sharing your library. With the latest update (version 6.0) Zotero has become easier to use and now features a full-fledged PDF reader as well.
  • I particularly like Zotero because it fits well into plain text workflows - allowing me to move between Zotero, Logseq, Ulysses, Zettlr, etc. without having to worry too much about my bibliographic data breaking between apps.
  • Before I used Zotero I used Paperpile, which is a much slicker app and probably a lot easier to use. (To get Zotero set up the way I wanted required installing numerous extensions maid by third party developers, and the interface for Zotero still feels stuck in the 90s.) While Paperpile is working on better support for plain text workflows, but it could be some time before it is ready.
• “Read Later” service: Readwise Reader
  • Save anything to read later on your phone or a dedicated web app. Can even upload epub and PDF files and it will re-wrap the text to look perfect on a small screen. Can make highlights and notes. And if you want to listen to the article, it uses impressive AI driven text-to-speech that sounds almost like a real voice actor is reading the article.
  • Some people use Pocket, or Instapaper, but Instapaper has been neglected by its new owners. Omnivore is a good free option.
• Digital Archive: DEVONthink
  • This is where I keep all my document scans, and non-academic PDFs. I also dump a lot of other stuff in there, like old notes and stuff that I might need to search now again but don’t use too much.
  • I used to use Evernote, but I wasn’t happy with the current app, so I switched.

Productivity

• Note: I use Logseq (see above) for my personal task management.
• Collaborative Task Manager: Todoist
  • I manage most of my daily tasks right inside Logseq (see above), but for working with others I used Todoist. There are many online collaborative task managers, but few that offer so many features for free, or which work if only one of the users has paid for a pro membership. Of these, Todoist is currently the best. It also works very well for grabbing websites as tasks via the Chrome extension or the iOS app, making it useful for bookmarking things that need to be checked off.
  • Available on every platform.
• Time Blocking: Structured
  • Make a quick visual timeline of your day and block out time for work.
  • Apple devices only.
• Timers: Toggl Trak
  • Designed for freelancers who need to bill people for their time, the basic features are free for personal use. Useful for keeping track of how much time you spend on various tasks.
  • Available on every platform.

Other Tools

• Presentations: Deckset
  • Make presentations out of a single (markdown formatted) plaintext file. Very easy to use.
  • MacOS only.
  • I also like to use Notion for my lecture notes, which you can turn into presentation slides using this website.
• Blogging: Blot
  • Stupidly simple blogging. Just put any file in a dropbox folder and it becomes a blog post! No interface really, you can use whatever text editor you like to edit the files. (It accepts plain text files or Word documents, etc. and you can add images as well.)
• Manual Transcription: oTranscribe
  • Free app for transcribing audio or video.
  • Works in your browser, but your data stays local, not in “the cloud.” Available in many languages.
• AI Transcription: MacWhisper
  • Uses a powerful AI engine to automatically transcribe text.
• This website: Obsidian plus the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin
  • The instructions call for hosting on Vercel, but you can also use Netifly, which works better for me for some reason
• My teaching websites: Notion
  • Notion makes editing the website as easy as editing a document in your word processor. I also use it to make dedicated pages for each of the classes I teach - accessible only to the students in that class.
• My Triptych newsletter: Ghost
  • While Substack is a more popular platform, I do not wish to support them, for reasons... I also find Ghost easy to integrate into my text based workflow. See, for instance, My Obsidian Setup lists a plugin for publishing to Ghost.