on plain text, and sacrifices
One of my hobbies is tinkering with note-taking, organisation and productivity apps and systems. I love organising things. I love making notes. I love setting up a to-do list so that it flows in a way that makes my brain hum happily. It’s taken me longer than it probably should have to admit that such a hobby exists and that I have it, because this activity does not sound like something that should be a hobby. But after I read Screw Finding Your Passion on Mark Manson’s blog:
The common complaint among a lot of these people is that they need to “find their passion.”
I call bullshit. You already found your passion, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously.
I thought about what I did with my time, and a possibly abnormal amount of it is spent on reading blogs about note-taking and productivity, lurking on r/macapps, downloading and testing out every personal organisation related app on the planet—whether it’s for to-dos, notes, your media, trip planning, scheduling, journalling, miscellaneous lists, I have tried them all. I suspect setting up a notes and tasks structure in a brand new app when you already have one that works fine might sound like unbearable tedium to someone else, but I love doing it. I do it for fun a lot.
All this buildup about my weird hobby to say: I always come back to just a folder of plain text files.
I don’t say this lightly, since, as I have established above, I am constantly playing with interesting apps. Over the years, some have stuck better than others. I’ve had extended flings with Day One, Diarly, Notion, Craft, Bear, Logseq, Apple Notes, Trello, Workflowy and Dynalist. I’ve briefly dipped my toes into Evernote and OneNote. And none of these are bad apps. I really like some of them. My brain enjoys lists, so Workflowy is actually really good for me, and Diarly is an excellent journal app. Bear is incredibly elegant and zippy. Apple Notes also surprised me: I wrote it off for ages, but tried it again with Sequoia/iOS 18 and found that its deep system-level integration and ease of use made it a really viable note-taking solution. Being able to highlight some text in Safari, for example, and send that to Notes, and have the highlight saved in your browser, is incredibly handy.
However, no matter how pretty or nice to use any app is, I always run up against the same roadblock sooner or later: that I can’t abide my data being inaccessible outside the app itself.
I don’t like being locked into one app. It makes me feel trapped. Even if it has really good export options, the fact remains that when you use the app you’re using their proprietary database, and you have to remember to export your notes periodically. You never know what will happen to the app, and this is an even more problematic situation if it’s is a subscription-based one where you can’t even keep a copy that you’ve bought. And so when it comes to anything written down in words, whether it’s my journal, book notes, travel plans, wishlists of things to watch, I always find myself returning to plain text files because anything else gives me a layer of stress I don’t need. Obsidian is my main note-taking app, but I can open my notes in anything that can read a plain text file, and sometimes I want to write in iA Writer or BBEdit, so I do. At work, I use Jeff Huang’s single text file method. It works shockingly well and is very, very scaleable.
You do have to make sacrifices with plain text. Images are at best a second-class citizen, you have to figure out your own solution to store videos, audio and other media, sync gets kind of annoying on mobile, there’s no web interface for your notes, and you lose a lot of features such as Notion-like databases unless you’re okay with some hacky workaround. But even though I often feel drawn to try out new shiny apps that look beautiful and have all these features (I am so curious about the new Craft V3), sooner or later the discomfort I feel about not having my stuff in text files sends me back to Obsidian.
And that, I think, is really where I want to conclude: that even though I’ve said a lot about why I like plain text files, this isn’t an exhortation for everyone to switch to plain text files (this is the exhortation). It’s a reflection of where I’ve ended up after trying out many, many different tools and approaches, each with pros and cons, figuring out what is non-negotiable for me, and making my peace with what I have to give up. For me, what I don’t get with plain text files is an acceptable compromise in exchange for having everything in plain text. You might feel differently. But I think it’s worth taking time to consider your workflows with your most important and personal data, and thinking about what matters to you.