Hello friend,

If there’s one thing that boosted my productivity drastically, that’s the system and note taking app that I came up with.

This post and the next one will be about my workflow.

In this post I’m presenting the idea, how I ended up with this system. In the next one I’ll present you the actual system to you. So make sure you don’t miss it.

TL;DR

• Note taking is important. We miss things, we forget what we read, we don’t perform.
• If you’re an indie maker, programmer, freelancer, content creator or do creative work, you might be interested in this system.
• This is my new project: teaching you my workflow, how I read, write and retrieve information.
• I chose Obsidian to organize my notes. It’s a free software you might want to consider.

What’s the problem I’m solving?

I’m an indie maker. In the past I worked for multiple clients on multiple projects. I needed a system to note down things I want to remember.

Besides this, I have multiple hobbies and things in my interest zone. Just to name a few, I’m interested in reading books. I’m not an avid reader, but try to keep my mind sharp as much as possible. I play drums, ride my bicycle, write code (yes, that can be considered a hobby).

I wanted to remember everything and have all my notes under a big umbrella.

How did it all started?

There’s also the concept of commonplace book: an envelope or box where you store physical note cards. I cannot find where my notes are at the moment, but here’s a video of Ryan Holiday where he talks about his system:

This flash card system is also known as Zettelkasten. Niklas Luhmann, a german sociologist used this method extensively. It helped him write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles.

When I heard his story, I thought I could give it a try. I did that for a while, and it worked well with book notes and ideas, but not so much with work related notes.

One advantage of the analog system is that you cannot delete what you have just written, and overthink a concept. You have to think before you write. And there’s not enough room on a small flash card to write nonsense. You should stick to the concise core idea.

I used physical cards for a while, but I decided to transfer these notes to digital.

Why Obsidian?

After trying multiple solutions, I picked Obsidian. There are some considerations:

Obsidian is free. You can use it on your laptop or smartphone for free. I decided to pay for Obsidian Sync Plugin and it’s one of the few subscriptions I’m happy to pay for. This allows you to synchronize the notes across all your devices (I have multiple computers, a smartphone and a tablet).

Obsidian handles markdown files. For those of you not familiar with markdown, these are basically text files. Nothing too complicated. In case you want to backup your notes, simply copy-paste them somewhere else.

Linking notes together. Obsidian allows you to link notes together. This concept mimics how the mind works: same concept can be related to multiple topics.

If someone would ask you “Tell me something about money”, what would you say? You can talk about money as a currency, or about how harmful winning the lottery can be. You can also talk about financial independence or the origin of the word “money”. All are different subjects around the concept of money.

Your mind works like this. Your notes should imitate that.

But Obsidian alone is not enough

Obsidian is an amazing tool. It offers you all the flexibility. But sometimes not having rules and boundaries can produce much more harm than good.

If you don’t know what to do with the flexibility Obsidian gives, it can get really messy really fast.

Just another note-taking app didn’t fix my problems. So I had to rethink my whole workflow and find something simple, yet powerful.

So what’s the project you’re working on, really?

Glad you asked. This is how Obsidian looks like when you create a new project (or vault, to use the Obsidian terminology):

There are many YouTube tutorials on how to use Obsidian. I won’t enter into more details.

My project consists of presenting to you my complete workflow for my day-to-day, from meeting notes, managing projects, time tracking, reading, writing this newsletter, posting on social media and all sorts of other things.

Note-taking is only one part of the whole story. There are some interesting workflows that you can adapt and use in your business, job or social media presence.

Who’s this project for?

You! If you’re looking to become more productive, this project might be interesting to you. You don’t have to take 100% from it, but I hope you can find some golden nuggets here.

Indie makers. Especially if you work on multiple tiny apps, you have to remember so much. From creating your products, to promoting it, to testing it, to pitching to ICPs, everything can be documented and noted down.

Content creators. As content creators, we write and plan a lot. It doesn’t matter if it’s a newsletter, or simple posts, you have to write so much. This project presents how I take notes from the books I read, and how I use the captured ideas to write my own newsletters.

Programmers. I’ve always struggled to properly gather useful coding information. Maybe I read articles, watch YouTube videos, have conversations with AI and I don’t want to lose these resources. This is where the note-taking system comes into place.

What should you do?

Does this sound intriguing? Take a moment and think what areas of your life can be improved with a proper note-taking system.

The Obsidian configuration will be open source: Follow me on Github!

Subscribe to the newsletter to find out about this project earlier. Subscribe here!

More information coming soon: Check out indiemakernotes.com

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Thank you for reading. These are a few places where you can find me:

👉 I’m most active on X/Twitter: https://x.com/razvanmuntian

👉 Checkout my LinkedIn account as well: www.linkedin.com/in/razvanmuntian

👉 Or if you prefer Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/razvanmuntian

👉 My personal website: https://razvanmuntian.com

Thank you so much for reading this post and I hope it’s been inspirational!

See you soon!