Things change
Do you know that I love seeing piles of notebooks that someone has been using to document their lives? Even better if they’re all the same brand and they line up neatly on a shelf and you can look through the whole stack and see the spines with the dates on them. I look at them and I think ‘they’ve really got it figured out’. The same with bullet journals and digital tools. It makes me feel like a ragged mess by comparison because I keep changing what I’m using every few months.
And yes, I realise that part of the reason for that is procrastination. I’m aware of myself enough to realise that. But it’s also because I’m contantly pursuing what my version of that shelf of perfectly matching notebooks is. Every time I make a change, I’m thinking ‘this is it, this is the thing that I’m going to stick with forever and one day I’ll be able to look back at this glorious archive’.
But if there’s one thing the last few years have taught me is that change is constant. Family, jobs, finances, responsibilities. It’s always changing and maybe it’s insane to think I can find this one perfect system for work that I never have to change. Maybe change is just something I’m going to have to figure out how to cope with.
For a while I’ve been trying to do everything in Obsidian and for the most part, I’ve figured out ways to do that. Or at least have it be my source of truth. But stuff is changing again in my life and it’s not working for me at the moment.
When this kind of thing has happened in the past it turns into a whole soul searching thing where I have to admit that what I was doing before isn’t going to be my ‘forever system’ and that I was wrong to commit to it. But I don’t have to do that. It’s up to me how I frame that stuff. And the truth is that for a while it was working perfectly, and if everything hadn’t changed, it would probably have continued working. But things have changed and I need to change with them.
Obsidian as an everything tool was fine, but now it isn’t. I need different tools and systems to get the things done that I need to get done. And that’s fine. Maybe in a few months the current setup will feel like overkill and that doesn’t mean it was always wrong, only that it’s wrong for that hypothetical point in the future.
Who knows, maybe in a few months time I’ll be back to being all in with Obsidian, or maybe even back to using analog tools. I don’t know what things are going to be like then, just like I didn’t know what life was going to be like now, back in January.