You subscribe to a useful service, something that makes your life a little easier. Unfortunately, it's a start up, and one day they're bought by another company. Then they notify you to move my data before they delete it. Sure, they say it more politely than that.
Evernote
It's happened to me one too many times. So, one of the first things to attract me to Evernote was its quest to become a "hundred-year" company. How great would that be?
I started at Evernote, testing their free account. At some point, I started paying for the service, and for the longest time, Evernote was the best of the best. Sure, it was lacking in some features I wanted, but I found workarounds. And it's great features more than made up for what it lacked.
But slowly, the software became clunky. It failed to evolve. And along came Notion and Craft. I dabbled, and I had fun. But I'd been loyal to Evernote for so long, and I have thousands of notes there. Transferring all those notes would be digitally tantamount to scaling Everest.
Obsidian
I follow several productivity YouTubers. I think it was there that I first heard about Obsidian. And I liked everything I heard about it.
And now, Evernote is playing catch up. To make things worse, every time I open the desktop app I'm greeted with an ad for a special offer 'that you won't receive again.' I've received that offer too many times to count. I can't abandon it fast enough.
Things I like about Obsidian:
files are local or saved to the cloud
community plugins, for example, themes, word counts, calendars, checklists, etc.
linking between related topics is easy
and discovering relationships between topics is easy, using the graph view
All for free.
The one free feature it doesn't have is the ability to share a note as a web page. That's a paid feature at $8/mo, paid annually. Compared to Evernote's $14.17-17.99/mo, eight bucks is a steal.
But I don’t need it: an Obsidian note is basically a text file, so it’s a quick copy/paste to email, and I'm done with it.
And if I really need to share it as a web page, I can copy/paste that text into a Hey.com email share that online. And I already pay for Hey, only $8.25/mo.
I wish Evernote all the best, and I hope they make it beyond a hundred years.
But I've found a new home. Obsidian.
R. Maurice Ledesma
Next Issue:
Using the Fractal Planner's Reflection Pages and Other Tips
Available from Studio Gootank
The Storyboarding Notebook for Children's Picture Books serves a dedicated purpose: capturing and working on picture book ideas. It's easily identifiable—it's large, brightly colored hardcover notebook. So, no more hunting for that lost picture book idea stored somewhere in one of my many completed or in-progress notebooks, journals, or planners.
TIP: Given the paper available via Amazon's KDP, I've found that pencils and 0.3 HI-TEC-C pens avoid bleed-through. It's currently available only at Amazon.