Standing Up

I have been using Joplin to track my daily tasks for almost 7 years now. I started back in 2019 and am still doing it today in 2025. My first day tracking my personal tasks this way was Thursday 2019-01-17. The idea evolved from doing daily standup meetings at work as part of Agile development. I found that I was being a lot more productive at work than I was being in my own time and I found that kind of annoying. I had a lot of projects that were just sitting around in various stages of completion and I very much felt like on the weekends or in my free time I was not actually making any progress on any of them.

For those reasons I started creating a daily standup style note for myself every day. It consists of the date and day and some recurring prompts. I write down “What I did yesterday”, “What I want to do today”, and I try to note and address any blockers that I see. I currently have the notes grouped by year in Joplin.

Today I am also using Taiga and have various Kanban boards to organize my life and projects into actionable tasks that I can pick up and work on.

I am also transitioning to Obsidian an advanced notes app that has a lot of the functionality I am looking for (like most tools I find though I wish it did things in an easier way). I often find the user interfaces and polish of most applications lacking nowadays with most things being overly complex and not really made with usability in mind.

Some Problems with Joplin

• It does not scale.
• It’s a bad substitute for project management.
• I want vectorization and usable data.
• I want it to be LLM context.
• I want a canvas of linkable nodes, images and groups to store my ideas.

It does not scale

I constantly want to DO something with the data and because it’s stored in Joplin in markdown format it’s POSSIBLE to do something with it, but it’s not easy enough that I have done it.

A lot of times I have questions about how often I have done something or how many hours I have spent doing something. I can answer those questions by introspecting the data I have but because of the format it needs to be pre-processed first to really get an accurate answer.

I have played around with creating vector databases from it so I can do semantic searching but it was not providing the utility or the interface I would like.

It is great for tracking a small number of todo items, but it’s feels really bad for planning and it’s awful at giving an overview of many things. It just does not scale well because of its tree-like structure of notebooks and notes.

It’s a bad substitute for project management

I came to the realization recently that I had been using Joplin to track projects which has actually made them less accessible for me and harder to get an overview of. I tend to lose my place or forget where I was on a task if it has sat for too long making it hard to pick up where I left off on a project without wasting time getting back up to speed. It’s also hard to get any kind of an overview of multiple projects.

Enter Kanban. Normally at work I was working from Kanban boards and doing backlog grooming. My todo lists there were usually just the current Jira issues I had been working from. I did a deep-dive into some project management tools that are available and eventually landed on Taiga A free and open-source project management tool, with a self-hosting option which is right up my alley.

I created various projects for myself to help organize the projects I am working on and my side-quests. This way I get a Kanban board for each project which I can add tasks to. I can create Epics as well to help track longer running or bigger projects. This has actually mapped really well to my goals of being able to get a better overview of tasks and being able to pick up where I left off. It also makes it easy to grab a task when I have some time and start working on something. Having User stories where I can attach files, make comments and add descriptions has been great since I already am used to doing that while working anyway, it’s helpful in my personal life for all the same reasons.

I want vectorization

I really want semantic search from my notes but more than that I also want to be able to parse them, pre-process them and actually create some kind of structured data from them sometimes. I also really wanted to be able to create a canvas style area of images, nodes, notes, like a mind-map but more. Enter Obsidian which actually provides all of that and more.

It even has a cool feature called Bases that allows you to create database like views from your notes. I plan to explore this feature a lot more to make some usable views from my data.

I want it to be LLM context

I have been using LM Studio and Continue along with some experiments with LangChain and some custom tools I have been building. While using various LLMs I would like my notes to be available as context, I feel like it would improve the experience and the results.

I have already experimented with creating embeddings from my notes so they are available as a vector database and hence as context via. semantic searching but it does not really provide the kind of utility I was looking for and often seems to suggest unrelated content that is not useful.

I want a canvas of linkable nodes

Obsidian does have that too. This tool comes really close to my own ideas about a note application, however I still plan to do some of my own experiments around user interfaces as I have some ideas on how to make a more unified interface to the editing, so that things are not so broken up and divided. I feel like the canvas and a video game HUD style interface to things would lend itself better to the type of user interface and interaction I am hoping for.

Gamification & AI Data Visualization

I am very interested in the general concept of gamification and I am interested in applying some ideas I have into both note taking and schedule planning applications, and in general I want to see more gamification in work applications to just make work feel more fun and rewarding.

I think there is also a level of UI elements that can be done to further enhance the feeling of doing something besides working by adding particle effects, sounds and other elements much like arcade and mobile games or even slot machines before that.

I really want to create an interface into data organization and notes that creates more of a seamless experience, allowing for the ability to zoom into various views and data sets. Even allowing for the user to “lock” into a specific view or dashboard and then back out to a canvas type view. I am also very interested in creating tools using this interface to allow execution in a node based (think ComfyUI) environment.

As a part of that brainstorming I have been thinking about an AI model that would be able to analyze a dataset and predict what the best ways to visualize that data would be, and be able to produce actual working beautiful graphs from it.