Welcome to Weekly Wonderings, a newsletter exploring the journey towards Digital **Self-Actualization**: > *realizing our meaningful potential through the synthesis of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies* Here's a quick galactic overview of this edition: - [[#My current ikigai 🌸]] - [[#Goldfish starts Pre-Beta 🥳]] - [[#The next level of customization in Obsidian 🤯]] This Obsidian plugin lets you create anything ## My current ikigai 🌸 Last year I quit my software development job in February due to a lack of fulfillment. But as I found myself with other opportunities to code, like for Linking Your Thinking or while building the Goldfish app, I realized that coding is still the closest thing to work that feels like play—an activity I can find myself hyper fixating on for the whole day. Despite trying to make my brand my main priority in 2024, I naturally gravitated towards building products and coding. Ultimately, a more profound aspiration guided me: to build a life of fulfilling days driven by intrinsic motivation. I had thought being a creator was the way to do so, but it seemed like it wasn't. So, after doing a trial period in January, I'm excited to share that I've joined the Morgen team full-time as a developer! 🥳 In 2023, I paid for a 5-year believer plan for Akiflow, but after trying out Morgen's Obsidian integration and appreciating its power-user-friendly features, I've grown to love the app and vision. One of the reasons I love Obsidian is the personalization I can do to enhance my cognition and compensate for some of my [[ADHD Types|ADHD Symptoms]] through the power of an [[Extended mind]]. Morgen has been helpful for [[Executive Function]], which helps me better manage my time and priorities while planning for the day or in the middle of it. With everything I'm doing right now, from work (Morgen, Linking Your Thinking), as well as my own personal projects (Goldfish, Ultimate Starter Vault, content creation, going through After Socrates), I don't have the time to do everything. But by accepting my finitude and consistently working on what's most important day by day, I can engage in [[My Resources/My MOCs/Slow Productivity|Slow Productivity]] towards all these areas of my life from a place of growth and fulfillment rather than burnout. Working on this app feels like the closest thing to Ikigai, the Japanese word that describes what makes life worth living. Although the following definition isn't the true origins of the word, I like to think of it based on these four dimensions: - **What I love.** The state of flow I can enter during programming. Creating productivity tools that people use and find valuable. - **What I'm good at.** Although I'm not the most experienced programmer, other skills I've learned from being a creator, like product management, content creation, and customer support, make me more fit to help Morgen than the average programmer. - **What the world needs.** Their mission of helping people be intentional and in control of their time deeply resonates with my brand mission of [[Digital Self-Actualization]], to empower people with the tools to live their ideal lives. - **What you can be paid for.** Having a stable income helps me fully focus my brand initiatives less on financial stability and more on impact and passion. But beyond that, I'm also being paid in mentorship and growth thanks to the friendliness and insights while working with the team. I haven't made many videos on Morgen, so my vision and meaning behind the app might not be as clear to those of you who discovered me through my Obsidian content, but I want to make time to share more of it once I do. Morgen has amplified my love for productivity and living my best life the same way Obsidian has nurtured my love for learning, and just like how I've been creating Obsidian videos to help people do the same, the thing I feel most compelled to do for YouTube is to do the same but for Morgen. ## Goldfish starts Pre-Beta 🥳 Thanks to everyone who showed interest in trying out Goldfish during last week's email — we had a meeting today and should be slowly rolling out invites throughout the next few days, so keep an eye out on your emails for that 🤩 For now, we've decided to take in 60 people for now: half iOS and half Android. We found out that to test on an Android, we must send the testing invite to an email with a Google account, so I've sent emails to some people again. ## The next level of customization in Obsidian 🤯 As I've been learning and experimenting with the [[Datacore]] plugin, I've been impressed by its power and practical application. It lets you write React code, which provides you with the same coding possibilities as you would making your typical web application. Pair that with their 50x faster queries compared to Dataview, and you've got yourself a way to create any custom view or workflow you want in Obsidian 🤯 Here are three sneak peeks into some of the cool things I've been implementing into my vault: ### The ULTIMATE Ultimate Obsidian Habit Tracker Recently there's been a new "ultimate habit tracker template" circulating that gives you a powerful view for tracking and viewing habits. ![[Weekly Wondering 2025-W07-20250222113438522.webp]] You can easily click on a habit on the daily card to toggle its completion, and you can keep track of your progress towards weekly and quarterly goals. I've been taking it one step further by adding the following features: - Ability to track checkbox habits (the current version only allows number metrics) - Automatically showing new habits in the tracker view when you create a habit note (previously, you would need to add it in the code) - Showing warning callouts when some of your habits are not properly configured, to save time on trying to troubleshoot code you might not understand 🥲 This will be part of the Ultimate Starter Vault, and eventually I'll make a video showcasing the new version 😎 ### Seamless daily journal logs I've also been working on enhancing the daily journalling experience: You can prefix any bullet list with a log tag like `#log/obstacle` ![[Weekly Wondering 2025-W07-20250222112850805.webp]] If you combine it with the [[List Callouts Plugin]], you can style these bullet lists to easily make these logs stand out from the rest of your daily/weekly journalling 👀 ![[Weekly Wondering 2025-W07-20250222113154081.webp]] Then, I have a query for `My Obstacles` that shows you the logs grouped by each day, also showing all nested children. I also have a query in my weekly note that specifically lets me know. ![[Weekly Wondering 2025-W07-20250222112757140.webp]] Previously I used inline metadata for this, but that led to potential performance issues and does not work well with Datacore, the plugin used to create these highly performant but customizable views.. ### Enhanced periodic note recaps In each periodic note, I have a section that shows me the periodic notes for each note. A problem with this setup though is, if I was filling out my monthly review and wanted to quickly see the summaries of each month, I would have needed to open each weekly note and look in there. But with Datacore, I've set up a custom query to let you switch between all the notes within: ![[Weekly Wondering 2025-W07-20250222111240967.webp]] In your note for February, 2025-M02, you can either see all weekly notes in that timeframe, or all daily notes 👀 With the plugin's Pagination features, I'm really excited to see how this feels when I do a larger timeframe review like for March or the first quarter of the year. ### Coming soon on the Ultimate Starter Vault Unfortunately, the time I spend on my personal brand has been occupied by preparing my tax return and coding for Goldfish/Morgen, but I'm only a few tasks away before releasing a new version of the Ultimate Starter Vault 🥳 People who have purchased it will get it first and will have it automatically integrated with the rest of my productivity system. ## My new shining stars 🌟 _A place to share the new stars and constellations inside my digital galaxy_ ### Notes I've been learning how to use the [[Dygma Defy]], a powerful split keyboard orthocolumnar keyboard that I've been loving so far. I used to use the Lily58 keyboard, but as I did more development work, I needed more keys for modifiers and symbols. This keyboard allows for 16 thumb keys, which can be customized further by having different layers that change all key mappings when a button is pressed. It's felt really nice returning to a split keyboard; although I'm probably not making a video on it, I think it's good to look out for ways to make staring at a screen for 10+ hours a day healthier 😅 ## My Free Resources Thank you for being a part of this journey :) If you want to level up your productivity or personal knowledge management, you can check out the following free resources: 🧠 [Organize your life and knowledge by building your second brain](https://free.johnmavrick.com/code-method) 📃 [Get my FREE 4-part Obsidian beginner course with 20+ templates](https://free.johnmavrick.com/obsidian-templates) 🕸️ [Set up a powerful zettelkasten in Obsidian for learning](https://free.johnmavrick.com/zettelkasten) 👩‍🏫 [3 Days to Lecture Note Taking Mastery](https://course.aidanhelfant.com/3daystolecturenotetakingmastery?ref=JohnMavrickYT): 🤖 [Get my FREE Ultimate Guide to using AI for PKM with 15+ prompts](https://free.johnmavrick.com/ai-pkm)