In my recent trip to TMEA, I presented on the topic of my book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers.
There are a lot of different types of data to manage on a computing device. There are notes, tasks, events, words, websites, audio, video, sheet music, and more.
One of the things we discussed in the session is how the move to web-based productivity apps like Google Docs has made it challenging to organize website URLs alongside the documents that are stored locally on a computer.
It can be confusing to keep track of where all of this data is, especially when your different files may be spread across multiple apps and websites, even though they relate to the same subject.
I have been using a PKM app called Obsidian to create "dashboards" where I link this various data together.
Linking URLs to Google Docs is easy enough using copy/paste. But linking to other files that live on my hard drive is tricky.
I have been using the Mac app Hookmark, which solves this very friction. A keyboard shortcut (mine is Control+Command+Spacebar) takes whatever data is in the foreground, generates a link to it, and copies it to the clipboard, where it can be pasted somewhere else.
For example, I can be inside a note or a document I open frequently, invoke Hookmark, and then paste the a URL directly to that file right inside of my Obsidian Dashboard. The Dashboard can therefore include links to websites, notes, documents, and nearly any other kind of data imaginable.
I have a dashboard that matches each large project I have going in OmniFocus (where I manage my tasks). Creating links with Hookmark also allows me to link to specific tasks inside of the dashboard. It goes the other way too. I can link an Obsidian note to the notes field of an OmniFocus task to create better context for my data.
You can learn more about Obsidian in the podcast episode below.