All Plain Text Everything
An idea that I should try to move as much of my work into an all plain text everything mode. See also Stpeh Ango's post File over app
Plain text is Evergreen. If you want your data to work on a computer in 2060, then you need to keep it in a format that works in 1960. The Unix Philosophy applies
Plain text is more LLM-friendly the more you want to work with LLMs, the more you are going to want your stuff in plain text.
Embraces the Unix Philosophy - Text can be the output of one program and the input of another. Keeping things in plain text gives you optionality and utility.
Obsidian is a killer app - it gives you just enough power on the plain text. You can version control it, sync it across multiple devices. You can even add graphs (Excalidraw), queries (data view), task management (tasks) graphs (tracker?) and AI support (smart compose)
Plain text works on, integrates with everything - every device, most programs, most systems. Similar to the unix philosophy here.
If it can't be plain text, then it should be able to easily input and output plain text Google Drive can export to Markdown. Excel can export to CSV. these are fine. Avoid vendor lock down to a proprietary information management system
Problems non-plain text has caused me
- Vendor lock-in with old notes in Evernote
- Vendor lock-in with old content on my Ghost website.
- Notion's clunky "data table" setup.
Potential Action items:
- Replace Things with an action book, a collection of tasks, projects, systems, and goals.
- Replace the writing notion with an Obsidian notebook (easy win here, you like writing a lot in plain text anyways.
Potential benefits
- Easy cheap backup
- Can use LLMs to help with goals and tasks once I have them all in one notebook.