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Going to Attempt All-in with Dynalist
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Posted by Drewster
Dec 29, 2020 at 07:26 AM
As the originator of this thread, I thought it would be appropriate for me to share a post I wrote (using Dynalist - and therein lies a story) about using Dynalist as my daily notes repository. I hope it’s of interest to the readers here.
https://canion.me/dynalist-as-a-tool-for-daily-notes
Posted by Drewster
Dec 29, 2020 at 08:27 AM
Christoph wrote:
Drewster wrote:
>>So if everything at its essence is an outline, why not use an outliner?
>
>Yes, but I believe your premise that everything is in essence an outline
>is wrong. Take a hen and and egg. What comes first if you want to put
>them in a hierarchical outline?
I tried to answer but I returned a Stack Overflow error.
:-)
Posted by Christoph
Dec 29, 2020 at 09:48 AM
Drewster wrote:
As the originator of this thread, I thought it would be appropriate for
>me to share a post I wrote (using Dynalist - and therein lies a story)
Thanks for the write-up. I would agree that many things can be structured as outlines. Just not everything. Btw, Obsidian also has a Daily Note feature and a calendar plugin that supplements it quite nicely.
I also agree that “zooming” (hoisting) is a really useful feature. There are already requests to get this into Obsidian as well (for bullet points and headings in Markdown pages). Obsidian also has a view that is called “local graph” which is a similar feature.
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 29, 2020 at 11:40 AM
avernet wrote:
>My perception is that, in 2020, Obsidian created more buzz in the
>productivity space than Dynalist or WorkFlowy ever did. Maybe even more
>so than Roam Research and Notion, or on par with those.
The buzz around Roam, Obsidian and Notion has been an interesting phenomenon.
My sense is (just from looking at the fresh faces on Youtube being excited about these) is that a new generation has just grown up who have discovered the specialist need for digital outlining, knowledge building, note-taking etc., while their peers are content with keeping notes in MS Word files, Google Docs or in Evernote (apart from the sophisticated folk on this forum who are a very niche crowd, and who’s average age is probably that of the parents or grandparents of this new crowd).
This buzz suggests that maybe the market for these outlining tools is widening (though it’s probably still a niche compared to the mainstream digital tools everyone else uses at work or in school).
I guess what this new generation might not realise that there has been a previous wave of outliners etc. in the past few decades, some of which were pretty good and had some innovative ideas. There used to be a live spreadsheet circulated here that listed most of them, but in recent years many of these have disappeared, so the ecosystem has become poorer.
There should be some kind of a digital museum where all these tools could be preserved for posterity…
Posted by Christoph
Dec 29, 2020 at 12:06 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>My sense is (just from looking at the fresh faces on Youtube being
>excited about these) is that a new generation has just grown up who have
>discovered the specialist need for digital outlining, knowledge
>building, note-taking etc.
They also have more pressure to organize their knowledge than we had since the information flood and has only grown over the years, and the half-life time of knowledge has decreased. Plus, many now need to work from home office and probably use this to better organize their knowledge management.
And I think this is not only a hype, these new tools bring something really genuinely useful and new. For instance, use of Markdown to avoid vendor lock-in, back-links and more flexible graphs than outliners can offer. At the same time they are less complicated than personal wikis which usually had peculiar, ugly syntax and were not a joy to use.