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I'm pretty bad at being an employee. I openly despise meetings, I say exactly what's on my mind, and I sincerely believe that many managers exist only to waste the time of otherwise productive people. I also could not be less interested in how my work impacts quarterly projections—I want to write things that people find helpful and entertaining.
So, yeah, I'm a freelancer.
I write for five publications, including the one you're reading now (obviously my favorite). The upside: I'm never in meetings. The downside: There's a lot to keep track of. I have to manage relationships with five editors. It's a challenge, and I've tried a full array of systems over the years, from spreadsheets to index cards, apps like Trello, and way too many to-do list apps.
None of them quite did the trick, until I discovered Obsidian a couple of years ago. This application has slowly gone from being a weird app I didn't understand to one I can't imagine functioning without. It's where I do all of my writing, yes, but also how I keep track of my ongoing articles as they move from brainstorming to pitching to publication.
This isn't a review of Obsidian (I already wrote one). This is an outline of how I use this tool to get things done. Hopefully reading it gives you some ideas for how you could use it.
Everything Offline All at Once
First of all, what is Obsidian? The application bills itself as a "second brain," but you could it put in the same category as note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote. Unlike those applications, though, Obsidian stores everything—notes, attachments, and even plugins—as simple text documents in a folder on your computer. This means you can use the application fully offline or sync the documents using the cloud storage service of your choice.
This has a few advantages. For one, your files are fully in your control: If Obsidian stopped existing tomorrow, I would still have access to my notes. For another, everything works offline. My favorite thing about Obsidian, though, is the extensive plugin ecosystem. There are over a thousand Obsidian plugins, and I depend on several of them. There's Kanban, which allows you to create a board of cards you can move between tiles. There's Extract URL, which can grab all text from any website and turn it into a note. I could list plugins for a long time. But the point is that you can customize Obsidian to work basically any way you want it to. I've done this to create a perfect setup for my workflow—one that allows me to do my planning and my actual writing in the same application.
My writing process has a progression: brainstorming ideas, pitching those ideas to editors, researching, writing, editing, and invoicing. Here's how I move through these steps in Obsidian.
Brainstorm
Every article starts with an idea. I get these from all kinds of places. Sometimes I'm just using my computer, notice something that annoys me, endlessly research a solution to that issue, and then decide to write about it. Sometimes I notice a cool-looking app while reading the news or browsing Reddit. And sometimes I just spend a few hours brainstorming ideas. Whatever the case, I compile my ideas in a dedicated Kanban board on Obsidian. Every card on the board links to a dedicated document where I include any relevant links, expand on the idea, and note a bit about possible angles for the article.
When it comes time to take these ideas into the world, I decide which ones I'm going to pitch to which editors and drag them to a column for that publication. If the pitch is approved, I drag the card over to my "article queue" board, if not, I consider pitching it to another publication or put it in my "idea jail" to potentially revisit later.
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I like this system because it allows me to slowly collect ideas throughout the month. That way, when it comes time to pitch, I'm not starting from scratch.
Track Projects
The core of my workflow is the "article queue" Kanban board, which basically contains every article I'm working on in the current month. I have a column for every step of the editorial process—writing, waiting on edits, editing, edited but not invoiced, invoiced but not paid, and paid. I drag articles from left to right.
I live by this board. Every work day I log in, look at how far along I am with every article, and decide what to work on. The board also means I never forget to follow up with editors who might have forgotten to email me feedback, or to follow up on unpaid invoices. I sincerely don't know how I functioned before I had this.
Even better, this isn't just a project management system: It's also the app where I do my writing. I can click any of these cards and start writing, right away. I can't overstate how helpful it is to not have to use one application for project management and another for the writing itself.
Write
Obsidian is a great place for writing. Formatting is handled by Markdown, a simple way to apply formatting—for example, to bold text you surround it with two asterisks, **like this**. I've done all of my writing in Markdown for a long time, so this is perfect for me.
Some Markdown editors use two panels—one where you write, with the formatting “code” visible, and another where you preview how the text will look. Obsidian doesn't do this, opting to render the Markdown in real time as you type. This is a perfect compromise—it gives me the benefit of writing in Markdown without the downside of my text editor looking ugly as sin. This is a feature I first saw in an app called Typora, and I'm glad it works here too.
I write a lot of tech tutorials, and I generally start by collecting screenshots for every step. I put all of the screenshots, in order, in a document in Obsidian, along with all of the relevant links. If I'm doing a reported piece, I gather my research and interviews in separate documents, then compile the best quotes and tidbits into the document where I'll do my writing. Obsidian offers an internal linking feature—it can basically function as a private wiki—and I use this to connect all of my interviews and other research to my article for tracking purposes. It's possible to view multiple documents in the same window, a feature I use all the time.
The Canvas feature, which is relatively new, offers a way to arrange and edit multiple documents in the same place—I personally don't use this, but I can see the appeal of dragging documents wherever you like and editing them all in one interface.
Share
Obsidian doesn't really have any collaboration features, and even if it did my editors don't use it. That's why I use a plugin called Copy as HTML to copy a rich text version of my article. I paste this into a Google Doc, which renders it as formatted text, complete with images. I share this with my editors, all of whom use comments and track changes to give me feedback.
That, in a nutshell, is how I manage to pitch, write, and track 15 to 20 articles between five different editors every month. It's a lot of work, granted, but I enjoy it. And this workflow makes it all feel manageable.
I can't imagine that this exact process would work for most of you, and that's not the point. Obsidian is useful because you can adapt it to almost any workflow, no matter how specific your needs are. I spent a lot of time customizing everything so it works just so; you can do the same thing. Other apps try to get you to adapt to a particular way of working. Obsidian, if you put the time in, will adapt to you.
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