Do you have a lot on your plate? Pause and organise!

Shahin Katebi
5 min readAug 14, 2022

If you have a tendency to multitask, managing your thoughts may be a constant challenge for you, like me.

When you’ve got a lot on your mind and yet are worried that you’ll miss something, it’s challenging to concentrate on one item at a time.

We have read a lot about different tactics to organise your thoughts, take notes, and manage projects. I won’t be introducing any new ones. In this article, I’m going to discuss the tools I currently use to keep track of my activities, ideas, and notes.

Do you recall the Dumbledore’s Pensieve? That’s what I am always looking for to organise my mind and the things I want to do.

Not a fan of Harry Potter? No problem! It is not a requirement for reading this content. But trust me, whether you are a wizard or a muggle, this simple pot is all we need. Haha. I’m kidding. 😅

For taking notes and organising my thoughts, I tried with a number of tools. Some of them did, in fact, function somewhat, but there were always issues that led me to give up on them.

These are the tools in my current tool stack: Obsidian.md + some nice plugins such as Excalidraw , Todoist and more.

I’ll quickly discuss each of them in this post. I’ll share how I’m utilising them to organise my mind in the following article.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a free, lightweight, fast, and highly customizable Markdown knowledge base. It may appear nerdy at first glance, but trust me, you’ll love it.

Here are the highlights of Obsidian for me:

  • Permanent: Your local folder, which may be a cloud storage, is where Obsidian files are stored. This is going to stay there forever. My note-taking app hosts all my important thoughts and I don’t want to lose them if somehow the company or the app disappears. Obsidian is a markdown editor, so even if it disappears, I can just use another one.
  • Secure: As was previously stated, Obsidian markdown files are local to you and can be encrypted. So I can retain access to those encrypted files on my iCloud Drive without jeopardising their security and privacy.
  • Flexible: It has a fantastic community and…
Shahin Katebi

SWE @Meta, Working on @Instagram, Founder of @YekaStudio and @BeamitDelivery.