The Art of Archiving - How I Created a Repository of My Life
This is the story of how I created a repository of my life.
It’s been a while since I first discovered the Zettelkasten method and Obsidian. The Zettelkasten method is a way of organizing and linking notes, and Obsidian’s features—like backlinks, graph view, and easy linking of notes—make it an excellent tool for this method.
Like many others, I used Evernote, Bear, and Notion before discovering this methodology. After migration to this methodology I have completely changed how I organize my knowledge base. Over time, I realized I had totally transformed my habits for saving notes, tasks, bookmarks, books, project notes, images everything you can imagine. I had a single repository for my digital life, where I could find anything I needed.
Eventually, I began searching for something similar that I could use directly within VS Code. Why not use a tool where I already spend most of my time? After some searching, I discovered Foam, and I completely fell in love with it. Now, I feel more productive and organized than ever before.
One of the significant advantages of using Foam is that you can leverage the many useful extensions available for VS Code. Here are my favorite extensions to use with a Foam workspace:
Now, imagine having all your notes, tasks, bookmarks, and everything else in one place—in one repository, in one workspace, all stored on your local Git. Picture having a timeline history for each file, where you can see when it was created, modified, deleted, or when a new line was added.
Note: ☝🏻 Git, not GitHub. I prefer to have everything on my local machine for security reasons.
Another cool feature you can use in your workspace is chatting with your knowledge base using Copilot. What if you could ask it questions like:
- Show me my completed milestones from August 2024.
- Show me all tasks with the tag #suada.
- What did I do on August 1, 2024?
Isn’t that cool? Now, imagine making these connections for years and looking at your graph view to see how everything is interconnected.
Lastly, you might ask about mobile sync. Well, I don’t care much about it because my workstation is my laptop. However, you can use iCloud to sync your workspace with your mobile device. There’s also a free tool called PreText that allows you to open markdown files directly on your mobile device.
