MdViews for focus and insight

MdViews scratched my own itch. It was the needed missing overview link between the note taking flows I moved from other tools and the tack I was experimenting with using neovim and telekasten .

Primarily, I implemented it to get a Resonance Calendar (/ht Ali Abdal), which I’ve been using for several years across various tools to allow me to action and remember the things I consume. It is an absolute pillar in my GTD stack and helps me organize, retain and action information.

MdViews has been strangely more powerful than that though. Because I crafted it so you could have arbitrary views outside your telekasten vault, it’s provided some minor superpowers in terms of focus on just the things I need to be emphasizing and in particular on getting things I want to get done that have been about forging new habits (which I find half the battle when you’re trying to do new things.). Admittedly, early days in the year, but so far, it’s been surprisingly promising and even better than alternatives in org-roam, Obsidian, or Notion (and I don’t think it’s just my own Ikea effect).

What’s the difference? It’s allowed me to take existing flows or tools I already have and, rather than try to shoehorn them into some suboptimal representation in Obisidian or Notion or org-mode way of doing things, I can simply overview the other flows I’m already using in their native contexts and ways I alrady had of working with them.

Perhaps a subtle and minor difference, but it’s been very real in terms of lowering of friction and context switching cost makes it much easier to focus on getting the work done for some reason. It just means I spend more time working on the things I’m meaning to focus on and less being distracted or trying to map an already existing flow into the way a tool thinks it should be done for me.

There’s probably an entire other post in there somewhere on composable, rather than opinionated, tools since I noticed the same sort of effect when I used org-roam, but whatever the underlying reasons, it’s made MdViews way more useful than I’d been thinking. Where originally I’d considered it little more than a navigation and summarization aid, it’s been easy to repurpose it into a general swiss army knife for accessing, summarizing and acting on information.

Case in point: writing.

While habits like Morning Pages have made me write daily (and, I like to think… better), being consistent with blog posts and poking at The Great Canadian Novel has been, well… less so. As a habit I want to form, it’s been stubbornly resistant in past years to being established with everything else on my plate. Yes, it’s gotten better, but it’s not something that I don’t need to think about doing.

Often, drafting blog posts in something like Obsidian or org-roam would involve getting me out of the nice solid markdown context I already had for my Hugo setup. And the “special flow” for blog posts would have it falling by the wayside, despite trying weird bridges from org-mode to Hugo (horrible) or attempting to do a kanban of blog posts in Obsidian (or Notion). The friction of copy-posting or converting into proper posts would fail terribly.

Not so with MdViews (at least, so far). With a Blog drafts MdView, when I see the habit come up in harsh , or when the mood or an extension of my idea strikes me, I MdView all drafts, choose from my picklist of WIP (and shameful abandons) the one I want to focus on and I’m right into the writing flow. It’s been shockingly effective.

Same goes for finances via my Ledger and Reckon flow or equities picks and trades for the month. I look at the (sorted) picklist of candidates for either buy and sell I have based on their metrics, and make the selections.

It even helps speed simple workflows like my weekly reviews. I pick the Weeklies view, even while I’m reviewing my week and review previous weeks, or zero in on things to roll forward to next week. It makes things faster and more frictionless.

A Focus Aggregator

And that’s really how I’ve come round to thinking about MdViews in a few short weeks: *a tool for focus and friction removal. Something that integrates and distills all my stuff down to give me just the view if the stuff I need to focus on at the moment for the task at hand. I’m not saying it’s revolutonary, but it’s evolutionary enough in my context that it has helped me, and well… may help you as well if you’re interested in using it in a similar way.

And sure, a fluffy idea like “more focus” may sounds fluffy, and even trite, but in these days of AI slop and backseat, interruption-driven software, I kind of feel anything I can claw back for myself if worth a bit of extra effort. Low impedance means greater throughput.

In fact, the effectiveness of this approach, almost dashboarding particular flows from a keyboard driven CNC, has me thinking a lot more about what else hadn’t worked in past years due to an over-reliance on tools to solve problems that may be more about needing to figure out how to make an existing flow more effortless. So far, it’s paying off. YMMV.

MdViews has been getting a bit of traction from its launch post on Reddit, and more love than I would have thought on dotfyle . I’ve got a post in mind on sharing my GTD flow and how I’ve used views and simpler tools to be more effective, but that needs a bit more rounding out (and tbh, I want to finish another tool like MdViews before posting.). But I know for fans of my old emacs gtd posts, this will probably be of interest.

Fin

I hope you found this post interesting enough if you’re an nvim user to try both telekasten and MdViews a try.

Much like I said in the my last post , MdViews is still in early stages, and at this point, more a tool encoding my GTD and notetaking flows in as lightweight a way as possible, so looking forward to feedback. So far, it’s working far better than I hoped and looking forward to seeing if I can roll a few other minimal plugins to get me a faster, lightweight stack. If you have feature ideas that won’t bloat, please don’t hesitate to post an issue in the GH.

If MdViews is useful to you and you are using it, or you have some constructive feedback (it’s my first nvim and Lua plugin), please let me know via mail or elephant below. Feel free to mention or ping me on @awws on mastodon or email me at hola@wakatara.com .