Currently reading: The Age of Faith by Will Durant 📚
I’ve wanted to see the Grand Canyon for as long I could remember. I think it was a Brady Bunch episode from the early 70s that first caught my imagination. They described the canyon as mountains lying down. Last week, we drove up from Phoenix and camped on the South Rim. We took our electric bicycles from Mather Campground to ride Hermit’s End. Even with such high expectations, I was floored by what I saw. We took the entire day to ride eight miles. We stopped and stared for long stretches. What a wonder. 🗺️
The Wastelands
Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.
The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.
In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we’d drop the anchor.
Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.
And yet, life continues. We settled into the new house in Arizona. Little bursts of joy came from unexpected sources: the convenience of curbside trash and recycling, reliable high-speed internet, and kind, welcoming neighbors. I unpacked the sixty boxes of books that make up my library, caressing each volume, inhaling its scent, remembering its message as I slowly rebuilt my sanctuary, my illusive shell.
Reading has always been a solace. I read a lot of history and philosophy these past months: the marvels of early Egypt and the brutality of Ancient Rome in Will Durant’s grand opus, The Story of Civilization; the millions of years of Earth’s geology poetically taught in Basin and Range by John McPhee; and the insignificance of our human existence in a careening, infinite universe in Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman. Taking a dispassionate view can ease the sting of personal loss.
We sold MV Indiscretion this spring, saying goodbye to trawler life and our ties to the Pacific Northwest. I have let go of so many layers of my identity — business professional, islander, sailor, son to my parents, and now father to my son — that it felt right to reach back to utter beginnings, where I might remake myself, like Gandalf after his plunge from the Bridge of Moria.
We bought a small off-road capable RV in April and have taken a few trips to explore the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. In June, we crossed into Mexico to camp on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. These months in the desert were the longest I’ve strayed from the ocean in my entire life. I missed the smell of the sea and the feel of dried salt on my skin. We waded in the warm surf, feeling once again that indescribable joy of shifting sand under our heels and between our toes while flocks of pelicans dove for their dinner a few yards from us.
I sat beside tide pools nestled within the rocky outcrops that lay between long stretches of sand: hermit crabs battling to defend their territories, starfish, sea stars, sea slugs, mussels, sea urchins, and tiny brine shrimp, all pursuing the minutiae of their daily lives. Looking up into the cosmos and down into a tide pool, I noted the parallels: we are all one.
A strong south wind picked up one night, and gusts gently rocked the RV on its suspension. I emerged from a heavy sleep to check the anchor, trying to remember how far we were from the rocks on shore. I drifted back to sleep, still dreaming we were afloat. I know the sea beckons on the far side of this wilderness.
After a long period of intentional isolation, I have begun the process of reconnecting with old friends and making new friends here in Arizona. This has been difficult for me. They ask me how I’m doing. Am I OK? I don’t have an answer. “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Every day, I take a step.
I’m writing this tonight from a small campground in southern Colorado. We’ve been traveling for a few weeks, taking the backroads, stopping often, seeing where the open road takes us. We have no plan, no definite time to return. It feels good to roam.
Driving through western New Mexico, I felt a lightness I didn’t expect. The beauty of the colorful mesas and buttes rising around us filled me with awe. We hiked to La Ventana Natural Arch to find ourselves in an ancient, sacred place — a place of prayer and hope and resilience. It left me wanting to see more, to do more. For the first time in many months, my mind tilted forward, a blessed release from so much focus on the past.
Every day brings a little more joy and a little less sadness. On good days, I see a brightening just over the horizon. A clearing? Yet there are still those days when I sink deep into sorrow and recognize the false dawn. There is no way around this, only forward, across this barren terrain. One step. Then another. When I dare look around, I see so many others walking beside me. Grief is the price we all pay for love. Won’t you take my hand? It won’t be long now. If death has taught me anything, it’s that nothing persists, not even grief.
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A Father’s Grief
This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I’m sharing this partly because I hope that releasing these words will provide some catharsis from the excruciating pain I have carried around these last months. Perhaps the sentiments I’ve conveyed here can be a small comfort to someone who has experienced a similar tragedy. I also know that people are worried about us, about me. Consider this an abbreviated journal of our past one hundred days. Unlike anything else I’ve written, this one contains no epiphany, enlightenment, or happy ending. This one is mired in the messy middle of heartbreak and loss.
On the night of September 27th, our son Connor died in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was killed instantly in the crash. He was riding a motorcycle he had owned for just one day. He was twenty years old.
I mentally replay the call we received from the coroner’s office in the wee hours of September 28th over and over and over again, my mind trying to push this all away, to wake up from the darkest, longest nightmare of my life.
I look back at that person I was on September 26th — that carefree soul with so many blessings — and compare him to the person I am today: darkened, sorrowful, broken. The two of us could be long-separated brothers, but a world apart in life experience. I no longer recognize that other me who swung so happily from the thinnest of threads, not understanding his entire world could crumble in the space of a single heartbeat.
Lisa and I have faced our share of grief together. First her mom, then mine. Her dad, then my dad. With each of these losses, one of us was always the stronger one, there to hold the other, to give comfort, to listen. This was the first time in our marriage that neither of us was strong enough to hold up the other. Thankfully, dear friends joined us on the boat to help us make it through the day, make travel arrangements, encourage us to eat, and simply hold us. I am forever grateful to these friends who also lost a near-family member for their love and help on that hardest day.
When the shock wore off and grim reality set in, we rallied as a family to do what we must. Our daughter Mallory took a leave of absence from work and joined us in Colorado Springs to help with Connor’s arrangements. During breaks from our awful tasks, we hiked the hills that he loved. We hungered for stories from his friends about his last days, his last night. We splashed the healing waters of Manitou Springs on our faces, needing their restorative powers to give us the strength to finalize the affairs of such a young life, a life so wholly intertwined with ours that we struggled to find where he ended and we continue.
We returned to Seattle utterly bereft. Unable to face the grief and sorrow of others, we stole away for the San Juan Islands aboard the trawler in an attempt to regain our equilibrium. Connor spent his entire life around saltwater and boats. We knew that if there was any way for us to find peace after something like this, it would be on the water. We could feel his presence in every anchorage, every trip ashore in the tender, every meal around the saloon table, every sunset and moonrise. Visiting these familiar islands over those two weeks was both a comfort and an agony.
We returned to port steadier but still reeling. We held a small gathering of Connor’s closest friends to mourn his passing. I was surprised and grateful that so many made the long trip from Colorado to Vashon Island to attend this memorial. It took everything I had to talk with others about my son in the past tense. There were tears but also smiles and laughter as we collectively remembered his life and the impact he had on all those around him. It was the first time since his passing that I remembered him with more love than pain.
Link to Connor’s memorial tribute video (six minutes)
In November, Lisa and I drove south to Southern California. We took the coastal route, stopping frequently to gaze at the ocean, to feel the pounding of surf, to take in giant lungfuls of healing sea air. Lisa took this same route in reverse with Connor in 2020, when his university in Colorado Springs closed down because of COVID. She pointed out the places they stopped and the sights they took in together, as if a part of him were still there, waiting for us.
We stretched a three-day trip into a week, knowing somehow that it was important for us to linger. We are feeling our way through this. There are no charts, no waypoints to follow, only instinct, love, and shared grief.
I poured my sorrow into a journal each morning and night to help me make sense of what had happened. You can trace the first stages of grief in those early entries: shock and denial, the second guessing and what-ifs, the heartbreak and rage at the universe knowing that Connor would miss the most beautiful aspects of life: falling in love, finding his path, becoming a father himself one day.
On Thanksgiving morning, I forced myself to write what I was most thankful for as Connor’s father. I wrote how grateful I was to have had the chance to be his dad, that I took a sabbatical from work to spend more time with him and his sister as teenagers, that he was able to squeeze so much life and adventure into his twenty short years, that he died doing something he loved.
Luckily, we spent Thanksgiving — our first holiday without Connor — surrounded by the comfort of extended family and the welcome chaos only small children can bring to a home.
In December, we moved into our new winter home here in Arizona. The sunshine and change of scenery from our life on the trawler have been a welcome change. Mallory and her partner drove from California to spend Christmas with us. We tried to be festive and honor Connor’s memory on a holiday he dearly loved.
As I write this, It’s been one hundred days since he died. I cringe at these words — their harsh reality, their certainty. There are moments, sometimes whole hours, when I forget.
The nights are the worst. I wake most mornings with tears in my eyes. My subconscious won’t accept the truth. It’s as if I’m learning, again and again, the facts of this unbearable loss with each new day. My son is gone.
If Lisa rises before me, I approach her quietly, softly, like someone waiting for word in a hospital lounge, anxious for a loved one whose prognosis is not good. “How did you sleep?” I ask her out of kindness, but I already know the answer. I wonder if these splinters that keep stabbing us will ever wear down to mere rough edges.
I looked to the ancient sages who did so much to shape how I live my life: Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius. Their counsel when I was young helped me reconcile our universal longing for permanence in this short life we are given. I tried to apply their teachings to what happened to Connor, to regain my Stoic footing, but Memento Mori feels so hollow and pointless when I consider the death of this young man whose life had only just started.
I’ve never been religious, but I suddenly ache for the certainty and hope the faithful possess. I have listened to Mozart’s Requiem dozens of times these past months. Though I don’t understand the Latin, there’s something universal in the music that communicates comfort and awe on a spiritual, perhaps even molecular level. Since Connor’s death, my uneasiness with mortality has softened. I look forward to the chance, however slim, of seeing my son again, and if not, to know at least that we’ll be together in that vast universal void.
Our plans to cruise the northern reaches of British Columbia and Alaska next summer aboard our trawler feel somehow awful, as if our fairy tale life could possibly continue after such a loss. I feel like making a new start in the desert, to follow the dirt roads and mountain passes where Connor found such happiness in the last year of his life, to cauterize this paralyzing sadness and emerge somehow transformed, reformed, like Phoenix from the ashes.
I remain a proud father to my beautiful daughter Mallory, who inspires me daily with her kindness, intelligence, and generosity. There were days when she was my lifeboat, the one who pulled me to safety from the wreckage. After all those years of holding her hand, she held mine. We need each other more than ever now.
And I have my Lisa, my best friend and soulmate. We may look at the world through different lenses and leverage different strengths, but we never waver on the big things — what’s most important to us and our family. We’re apart for the first time since we lost Connor as she celebrates the birthday of her grand-nephew in Los Angeles. I miss her dearly. We’re two leaning pillars that can only stand upright because of the other’s weight and support. I like to think of myself as mentally and emotionally strong, but I know this: she’s the reason I’ve maintained my sanity through this ordeal. Without her love and support, I don’t know where I’d be.
A family friend who suffered the loss of her 24-year-old son called us shortly after Connor died. Her loss was still very fresh — just three months — but she was strong enough to help us in a way that no one else could. She understood exactly what we were going through.
One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don’t understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain of stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell.
— Laura Mckowen, We Are the Luckiest
She recommended a book that helped her: Finding Meaning by David Kessler. In his career as a grief counselor, Mr. Kessler helped develop the now-famous five stages of death and dying, and tragically suffered the loss of his 21-year-old son before writing this book.
Reading this book did help me. I began to see that what happened to Connor, though horrible, wasn’t that rare. Many, many parents have gone through this same torture of the loss of a child, some much younger, or through circumstances riddled with regret and even more heartbreak. I learned that the agony of grief is equal to the devotion and love you had. It’s no surprise that I am utterly gutted. I loved that boy so much.
About three months after Kessler’s son died, a colleague sent him this note: “I know you’re drowning. You’ll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you’ll hit bottom. Then you’ll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?”
And that’s where I find myself today: at rock bottom or very near it. I too have a choice to make. Will I stay down here to flounder? Or will I swim for the surface? A part of me knows there are many magical moments yet to be shared with family and friends, to begin again to appreciate the everyday joy of life. Will I ever again choose joy? I hope someday I can.
Thank you for reaching the end of this meandering post. If you made it this far, you must either really care about me and my family, or you’ve been part of a similar tragedy yourself and are looking for some comfort. If it’s the former, I am grateful for your concern during this most difficult time. If it’s the latter, I hope you find peace in your own way, and in your own time.
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The Art of Letting Go
If the first half of life is about growing and accumulating, then the second half must see us disbursing, letting go. Life is full of cycles — like the seasons, or perhaps more dear to me, the flooding and ebbing of tides.
In the past few years, I’ve let go of my aging parents, my career and a lifetime of associates and colleagues, a dear friend, and this past year I watched my two kids leave home to start their own lives of growth and accumulation.
At its best, letting go brings an emotional release, a lightness, a feeling of immense relief, like putting down a heavy weight you’ve been carrying around for too long. At its worst, it brings a paralyzing sense of irretrievable loss. I’ve been thinking about these two very different outcomes as we navigate our next phase of letting go.
I’m told your house never looks as good as the day you sell, and after twenty-three years here on Vashon Island, we’re close to reaching that particular zenith. White paint has stained my fingers and forearm, and a big smear tattoos my right cheek. The list of projects has dwindled over the past weeks, and we’re down to just a few beauty marks.
After each section of trim I painted today, I found myself looking out at the water on this sunny Spring day. You’d think after all these years I’d take this view of Puget Sound for granted, but I don’t. For a spell, I watched a container ship make its way southbound to offload in Tacoma, its wake stretching out for miles in the flat water.
On clear days you can see Whidbey Island from our front porch. Such a wide, unencumbered expanse of water provides a theatrical experience for watching weather systems roll through, especially the northern gales in deep winter. Dark gray squalls march across the water, relentless in their intensity, unstoppable in their progress. Bald eagles float just fifty yards off the porch, contorting their wings in tiny increments to remain utterly still as they study the whipped up sea for a meal. The Firs and the big Japanese Maple tree groan and shudder in the gusts. The biting sting of the wind on your cheek makes you appreciate the warmth inside the house as you take all this in.
They say it takes a special kind of person to live on an island like Vashon. Betty MacDonald wrote her memoir Onions in the Stew while living here in the 1940s. Most of her humorous observations about the eccentricities and shortcomings of island life still ring true.
Anyone contemplating island dwelling must be physically strong and it is an added advantage if you aren’t too bright.
Vashon is nestled in southern Puget Sound halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. The island population of roughly ten thousand hasn’t budged much in thirty years. There are no bridges that connect us to the mainland. Ferries on the north and sound ends of the island are the gateways to visit or leave.
Unlike more tourist-minded destinations, Vashon grooves with its own unique personality. Some say that driving off the ferry boat and winding your way through its rural roads is like going back in time. “Keep Vashon Weird” bumper stickers adorn VW buses and BMWs alike. Eco-friendly farmers, artists, hippies, celebrities, weekenders, old families, newcomers, commuters, eccentrics, musicians, professionals … a hodgepodge brought together by a love of saltwater, an unconventional lifestyle, and geographic seclusion.
I’ve lived here far longer than any other place. I’ve put down deep roots. In 35 years of life before Vashon, I moved some twenty times, from one house or apartment to the next, every year or two, which at the time seemed perfectly normal. Growing up, my parents had this ache in them to roam. We moved every year in my four years of high school. I was a shy kid. By the time I made any friends, we were packing up for the next town.
Lisa, my partner these many years, also led a wandering life as a child. Instead of traipsing through small Washington coastal towns, she lived abroad, calling places like Singapore, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand her home. Her father worked in construction, and when the job ended, they moved on. Again and again.
From the early days of our relationship, we kindled a dream of running off together. A ranch in Montana, a seaside villa in Mexico, a flat in Madrid. Six months into our courtship, we spent three weeks touring Greece and decided, after perhaps a bit too much Ouzo, to get married there and then on the island of Skiathos. Neither of us had met the other’s parents, and our stunned friends were sure the marriage would not last out the year. But when you know, you know.
When our daughter was born, we vowed to give her something we never had: a consistent, unchanging childhood home. We moved to Vashon just shy of her first birthday, and she and her younger brother grew up in the same house, in the same little town, with the same friends from pre-school tots to angsty high school seniors. When the time for college rolled around, both were desperate to get away from a place so small and remote. Yet, later in life, I wonder if the deep-rooted memories of sandy beaches, quiet forests, and a one-block town without traffic lights become a subconscious yardstick for the ideal life?
The house, built in 1917, turned one hundred during our time here. At one point or another, we’ve remodeled just about every inch of her, but we always stayed true to her spirit. She’s an old soul, sitting atop this hill looking out over the water. I realize we’ve just been her caretakers for a time.
I left the island every morning by ferry for twenty years and suffered through my fair share of business travel. Returning home, breathing seemed easier, the sea air and open vista perhaps working together to inflate my lungs more completely than anywhere else. The sound of the gentle surf through the open skylight lulled me quickly to sleep when I fell into my own bed at last. This island home has always been my sanctuary.
Every so often, a grandchild of the former owners stops by to see the house. Fully grown now, they look around, starstruck. “I spent every summer here when I was little,” a lady in her mid-twenties tells me, close to tears. They will have brought their partner along as witness to a living piece of their childhood.
I learned to sail on Vashon, and the connection between boating and island life is inexorably linked. I’ve sailed along her forty-five miles of coastline countless times, and my family knows to spread my ashes in Quartermaster Harbor should the sudden need arise. For years, we kept a mooring buoy in the deep water in front the house. It became a summer tradition to sail the boat around from the marina for crabbing and sailing and floating picnics.
On clear nights, I would sometimes sneak down the long flight of beach stairs to sail alone under the stars. Lying back in the cockpit, steering with my leg over the tiller, trimming the sails in the darkness by the feel of wind on my cheek. Sailing at night feels so magical: the lift and fall of the gentle swell, the hiss of the waves against the hull, the green glow of phosphor trailing astern, and that dizzying feeling of falling and merging into the galaxy of stars splayed above you. I’ve never felt so utterly connected to the cosmos as on small boat under the stars on a summer night.
Selling the house and moving off island has been our plan for years, so why do I feel so pensive as our time here draws near? My glances around the house and the water are slower, more considered, like Ahab gazing at the sea before his final showdown with the white whale. I strain to hear the tolling of an iron bell, for it’s possible the end of this chapter of island life is followed by mere epilogue. A little voice inside me tells me to stop, to reconsider. The house looks so good; why not stay, the voice implores. I am sorely tempted.
But no. What haunts us late in life are the things we didn’t do. In letting go our island home and life, we step into a new life of two distinct halves: from May through October we’ll live and cruise aboard Indiscretion, our expedition trawler, with Shilshole Marina as our new home port. Near enough to see our friends on Vashon and the perfect launching off spot for exploring the Salish Sea during the best weather the Northwest offers. In October, we’ll drive south to our new home in a 55+ community 40 minutes west of Phoenix, AZ called Victory at Verrado. Six months of warm winter weather, desert hikes, Seattle Mariners spring training, and poorly played golf is just enough time to begin pining for the greens and blues of the beautiful Northwest. We’ll lock up the house in early May and make our way back to Indiscretion for another season.
Lately, I’ve been having this recurring dream of riding in a hot air balloon. The gondola is staked to the beach in front of our house with anchors that seem much too small for such a large craft. An offshore wind buffets the big balloon and I know those anchors can’t hold much longer. The two of us pile in the gondola, which, once aboard, looks weirdly like the pilothouse of a trawler. We release the mooring lines and float up and up into the sky. We clear the tree line and watch our house and the island grow small, insignificant. We keep rising, our view expanding in all directions. I point out the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. We float over Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Broughton Archipelago, and the wide expanse of Queen Charlotte Sound. Ahead, just over the curved horizon lies Alaska. The dream always ends when we toss out the sandbags of ballast at our feet. Maybe we simply fly upwards into the stars. Or, perhaps we set down in Greece to renew our marriage vows, but this time, we stay the whole summer, traveling light.
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A Writer’s Journal: Day One or Craft?
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
Day One is my most consistently used app for the past decade. The app provides a calming, distraction-free writing interface and an end-to-end encrypted syncing service that keeps my writing secure but available on all my devices. It handles photos beautifully, accepts audio and video entries, automatically captures metadata about your writing environment like location and weather, and links automatically with Instagram. Journal templates, writing prompts, and the “On This Day” personal history review round out an incredible journaling experience. I enjoyed it so much that I even took the time a few years ago to type in my old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life’s musings.
And yet, I’ve had this nagging idea that I should give up on Day One and start using Craft as my daily journal software.
Why would I leave Day One?
On the surface, I’ve wondered if I needed anything more than a basic writing app for my journal. After all, I wrote for years and years with just pen and paper. Did I need a dedicated app with another paid subscription?
Yet, my true interest is more profound than saving money or mere simplification. It’s widely known that to write well; you have to read. There’s no better on-the-job training for an aspiring author than to read the works of other writers. It’s less commonly understood how many writers keep a private journal and, more importantly, how they leverage their private missives as inspiration for their published works. Henry David Thoreau, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag were avid journalers who attributed at least part of their success to keeping a diary. David Sedaris and Joyce Carol Oates both consider their private journals to be critical parts of their writing process. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled nearly two hundred journal volumes over his lifetime, which he frequently consulted as source material for his essays and speeches. He spent months cataloging his journals to make access easier.
A reason I’ve maintained a journal for so many years stems from a deeply-held desire to become a published author. My earliest journal entries make this point again and again. When I root out the source of my few published pieces, each can be traced back to its origin in my journal.
As much as I love Day One, Craft has stolen my heart as an innovative note-taking and writing app that I’ve used for a little over a year as my knowledge management system. Modeled after Professor Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system, I use Craft to house about a thousand interconnected notes and insights from books I’ve read. The power of connecting reading notes through a system of links and backlinks is truly astonishing once you open your mind to the possibilities. I’ve shared how I use Craft to leverage what I read, and it’s this versatile linking capability that has drawn me to use it for my private journal.
What if, like Emerson, I took steps to make my journals easier to access when I’m writing for others? What if I brought together my journal writing and reading notes into the same cross-linked system? Would the organic connections I’ve discovered from my reading grow deeper through close association with thirty years of journals? Could swirling together my journal writing and book notes in a system like Craft make me a better, more productive writer?
Might the convenience of having all my writing in one place, fueled by the connecting power of links and backlinks, outweigh the benefits of a dedicated journaling app?
To answer these questions, I launched an experiment: I kept my daily journal in Craft for an entire month to see whether or not these private musings would infuse greater insights into my Zettelkasten system and, ultimately, better writing.
As part of the experiment, I imported 3,200 journal entries into Craft to test its search and linking capabilities (see the end of this post if you’re interested in learning how to export Day One to Craft). I initially expected to use Craft’s Daily Notes function but soon decided against that. The implementation of daily notes in Craft felt half-baked and disconnected from the central note-taking system. Instead, I created a “Journal” folder in the main Craft notes area, alongside my reading and permanent notes.
A Month of Journaling in Craft
Here’s what I learned after thirty consecutive days of journal writing in Craft:
Performance
I was concerned that Craft might lose its pep with several thousand journal entries spanning more than a million words added to its data banks, yet performance remained snappy. Search results were near-instantaneous, and syncing updates between the Mac and iPad were as fast as ever.
Security
Craft’s syncing system does not provide end-to-end encryption like Day One. I wasn’t very concerned about security or encryption for my reading notes. But my private journal? That’s a different story. In the end, I decided to accept the security risk for the promise of new insights and writing productivity garnered by a connected journal.
Writing Experience
I found the writing experience in Craft to be mostly pleasing. I hid the navigation sidebar with a keyboard command (CMD-) to provide a clean, distraction-free writing environment. Numbered lists, bullet lists, pictures, and even Apple Pencil drawings were easy to add. I enjoyed moving entire paragraphs around in my entry with just my index finger. But, there were some annoyances. Craft doesn’t permit a change to its default font or font size. I usually write in my journal before bed. In Day One, I scale up the font to make it easier on my tired eyes. In Craft, I found myself straining a bit when I wrote at the end of the day, wishing I could make that font a little easier to see. And while I generally don’t spend too much time editing my journal writing, I found Craft’s Undo capability tedious. While Day One will quickly erase an entire sentence with just a couple of CTL-Z commands, Craft insists on undoing each character, one by one, even to the point of redoing and undoing typos. It’s a small thing, but enough to pull me out of the writing trance when it happened, and something that more mature writing apps handle better. But, these are minor complaints. The overall writing experience in Craft was positive.
Search
With my journal now part of Craft, I could finally sift through decades of personal writing for insights to link to my knowledge system. Yet, I soon discovered that searching Craft with all those journal entries had limitations. Before this, a CMD-O search in Craft usually produced interesting and relevant results. Now with thousands of rambling journal entries thrown in, a search wasn’t as reliable or valuable. For instance, a CMD-O search in Craft for the word fatherhood produced a list of 30 randomly ordered documents. The same search in Day One found 65 entries, ordered properly by date. I learned Craft enforces a hard limit of 30 documents using this on-the-fly search method, though it’s unclear how it decides which to present. Craft’s dedicated search pane found all 65 fatherhood journal entries, but reviewing the search results was cumbersome. The journal entries were again presented in a random order, and the scroll bar persistently leaped back to the top of the list when I clicked on an entry, losing my place. This made a review of a long list of search results very challenging.
Further, Craft’s search functionality is ham-stringed by its reliance on text blocks. For example, If you search for a journal entry with the words fatherhood and marriage, Craft will only find documents where the words appear in the same paragraph. If the search words appear in different paragraphs of the same document, Craft won’t find it. Day One had no such limitation.
Dates
Dates are the universal building blocks of every journal. Since Craft is primarily a note-taking app, it doesn’t provide much context on the date something is added to the system. This can make finding entries for a particular day, week, or month more challenging. I partially solved this by appending the date to the journal entry’s title, so I can at least view the date as I scroll through a list of entries. But, there’s no easy way to zoom to a particular time period in Craft like you can with Day One.
Linking Struggles
Connecting thoughts through the power of two-way links was one of the main reasons I wanted to try Craft as a journaling tool. Surprisingly, I struggled to apply links when I journaled, and when I did, they served as a work-around to apply a tag vs. a legitimate link. This troubled me since creating these links comes so easily when I’m writing and curating reading notes. It seems my mental mode when I write in my journal doesn’t lend itself to self-editing or analytical reasoning. I must journal from a whole different side of my brain, favoring feelings, vague intuitions and dreams over links and connections and knowledge building. The writing fizzled any time I stopped to scan for potential links as I journaled. This happened again and again.
The Return to Day One
After a month of journal writing in Craft, I realized the truth. My journal isn’t meant to be poked or prodded, linked, or back-linked. For me, the act of writing every day in a journal is therapy; writing how I feel in the moment keeps me healthy and balanced. My attempt to elevate the process in Craft only diminished the meditative value of the journal writing, while producing little in the way of new connected insights. Not only that, but my system of carefully curated wisdom in Craft felt swamped by a tidal wave of mostly unremarkable and repeated personal observations, which obscured much more than it uncovered.
Before importing my journals, everything in Craft had been vetted and polished to contribute to my understanding of the world and what it means to be human. The source of these insights was gleaned from other writers’ books, but each note was carefully distilled and refined in a personal way that is meaningful to me. While my journals are comprised of all my own words and heart-felt reflections, they’re raw and meandering and filled with empty calories, which simply aren’t suitable for the wisdom I collect inside Craft.
So, my journaling experiment ended with a return to Day One, keeping Craft apart and sanctified as my knowledge system.
Back in Day One, I felt a new appreciation for the soft, cozy feeling the app offers the constant journaler: the writing prompt that stirs your imagination as you open the app; the time travel of reading your past “On This Day” entries that transports you back ten, twenty, even thirty years ago; the comfort and security of end to end encryption of my most private thoughts; the easy swiping through the past week’s entries to connect you to the story arc of your life; and maybe most important: that precious altered state you enter as you write for just yourself without any expectations or demands … but honesty.
This experiment may not have resulted in any new Emersonian journal insights, but it did ultimately lead me to a better way to leverage my journal writing in Craft. As part of my weekly review, I now take some quiet time with the analytical side of my brain to reread the previous week’s journal entries for insights and ideas that add something meaningful to my knowledge system in Craft. It’s the perfect way to maintain the therapy of my journal process while leveraging the best of my thinking in Craft. And since my lifetime of journal writing resides digitally in Day One, I’m just a couple clicks away from discovering those lost insights lurking inside this vault of my life’s experiences and musings.
Afterward: How to Export Day One to Craft
Here are the steps I took to export over 3,200 Day One journal entries and 700 embedded photos to Craft. I used the Bear and Hazel apps to help me in the process.
- In Day One, I used the “Export … JSON” function to export all journal entries.
- In Bear, I deleted any notes in the library, emptied the trash, and restarted the app.
- I imported the Day One JSON file into Bear.
- In Bear, I used the “Export as Markdown” function with “export attachments” checked. Craft limits each import of markdown notes to 2,000. To get the linked images to come across, you need to make sure your Bear export falls below this limit. In Bear, I selected about 1,500 entries and saved the export into an empty folder on the desktop. I called it Bear 1.
- I repeated the process for the next 1,500 entries and again for the remaining entries. Folders Bear 1, Bear 2, and Bear 3 were now populated with markdown text files and folders of images and PDFs.
- If my original Day One entry didn’t have a title, it used the first paragraph of the entry as its title in Craft, which was too long. I wanted to shorten that to a consistently formatted date. If it did have a title, I wanted to append a consistently formatted date to that title. I created a few simple rules in the excellent Hazel app to remedy this.
- In Craft, I imported the contents of the Bear 1 folder using the “Markdown files” option. This added the first batch of journal entries to a newly created folder called Bear 1 inside another newly created folder called Imported Notes. This is important: I waited until the process concluded, and Craft was done syncing. In my case, this took about 15 minutes with my slow internet connection. If you move the entries out of the import folder before the sync is completed, many of the images in your entries won’t sync.
- I repeated step #7 for Bear 2 and Bear 3 folders (this only applies if you have more than 2,000 entries in Day One). Again, I waited for each to fully sync before proceeding. I tested the sync on an iPad to see all the entries (and images) to confirm everything was working.
- I moved the entries out of the Bear 1-2-3 folders into a Journal folder at the highest level in Craft. To do this, I had to select all the entries and keep scrolling down to the bottom of the window repeatedly to make sure I got them all.
- For new entries written in Craft, I used the “/Date Today” keyboard command to append the current date to the end of the title to match the format used in the above Hazel rules.
The post A Writer’s Journal: Day One or Craft? appeared first on Robert Breen.
Read Better with Craft and Readwise
Have you ever run across a book you know you’ve read but can’t recall much about it? Or, come across a passage in a book while you were reading that seemed important — something you knew you could use at some point in the future — but didn’t know where or how to save it so you could find it again?
Too often, I’ll pick up a book I’ve read just a few years back and feel a familiar sense of despair. I may have spent hours of study at the time, but it’s already become a blur. And how many hours of my life have I spent searching for something I read but can’t find?
For someone who invests a thousand hours a year reading, this kind of poor knowledge return always bothered me. I needed a simple system to make better use of the time I spent reading, but didn’t distract or pull me away from the flow of reading itself.
I’m pleased to share that two innovative apps — Craft and Readwise — have finally become that system for me. Both require a paid subscription, and one works only with Apple devices, so they aren’t for everyone. Yet, using these two apps has improved my reading retention, and perhaps more importantly, unlocked a way for me to consistently integrate what I read into a broader system of curated thought and wisdom.
What follows are the methods I employ in the reading system across three key activities:
(1) Capturing notes and quotes from my reading;
(2) Curating what I’ve captured inside my note-taking system; and
(3) Compounding the knowledge and insights I’ve gleaned with daily reviews and Zettelkasten-style linking.
There are a few caveats I’ll share before diving in. First, these workflows only apply to books I actively read with an alert mind and a notebook and pen nearby. The books I read for pleasure at night before bed don’t see much action in this system. Second, we’re in the early innings of a golden era of note-taking and reading technologies. The tools and techniques I’m using in early 2022 will continue to evolve as new capabilities and services emerge. And finally, I have no financial incentives or affiliations with Readwise, Craft or any other service or product mentioned in this post.
Phase I — Capturing
Capturing insights from my reading is the first phase of my system. I’ve learned that to remember and learn from what I read, I need to take notes. This part of the system is decidedly old school. If I’m reading an actual book, I almost always have a pen in my hand to mark passages or scribble notes in the margins. If I’m reading on Kindle, I highlight passages with my finger, but jot notes down on paper, usually in a Field Notes notebook. I’ve gotten in the habit of summarizing the main points of what I’ve just read to help forge a mental lock on the material. Often, in the process of putting something in my own words, I stumble upon some new insight I hadn’t comprehended at first blush. I also occasionally reflect on what I’m reading in my journal.
I use Readwise to import highlights and annotations from Kindle ebooks and online articles using the Pocket read-it-later app. Readwise is a subscription service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals. Readwise integrates with almost 20 reading sources. Kindle and Pocket highlights sync to Readwise automatically, so I don’t have to think about it while I read.
Capturing quotes from printed books is a Readwise superpower. The OCR engine inside the Readwise app is fantastic. Snap a picture of the page with your iPhone, pick the beginning and end of the highlight with your finger, tap the book (it remembers what you’re reading), and type in an optional page number. If you want to include a note with the highlight, tap the record button and add it with your voice. I batch my capture of highlights in chunks, and each takes about 20 seconds to process. When finished, all those highlights and notes are now magically part of Readwise.
Besides books, I read a lot of online articles and blog posts, but I resist the urge to read these on the fly. Instead, I save them into Pocket and take time on the weekend to read through them all at once. I enjoy the reading experience on Pocket’s iPad app, and it’s a simple thing to add articles, even those behind paywalls. The free version of Pocket allows up to three highlights which is sufficient for most pieces. Highlights I make in Pocket flow automatically into Readwise.
Once a week, I archive the best Pocket articles into DevonThink for future reference. DevonThink is a tremendously powerful document storage app that I use to keep various personal and professional files, including the entire ship maintenance system for our trawler, MV Indiscretion. DevonThink can save Pocket articles as bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, Markdown, or plain text, and I can easily link to them from other apps (like Craft). I love having an established workflow for online articles. Nothing important I read falls through the cracks.
Phase II — Curating
The process shifts from Readwise to the Craft app in the curation phase. Craft is a markdown note-taking app with powerful linking capabilities that I adopted about a year ago for all my reading notes. You can read more about why I love Craft here.
When I finish a book or article, I create a new literature note in Craft that will ultimately include my notes, favorite highlights, and a personal review of what I’ve read. I keep a folder of reading templates in Craft to bring consistency and completeness to the process. I have templates for fiction, non-fiction, essays, and articles. For example, my fiction template has a section for the plot, characters, key themes, questions I had during my reading, favorite quotes, and my overall review of the book.
With the literature note now created in Craft, I copy in the highlights and annotations from Readwise with its custom markdown export function. Some note-taking apps like Roam or Obsidian can be integrated directly with Readwise, but this really isn’t necessary. I like having control over when I bring in my reading highlights, which isn’t any more complicated than a simple copy and paste.
Next, I copy in my handwritten notes from the margins of the book or Field Notes. I’ll flip through my journal in Day One and copy in relevant passages I wrote during my reading.
At this point in the process, the literature note is quite a jumble of highlights, journal entry excerpts, and note fragments. I sort through it all and try to bring forth order. Luckily, it’s simple to rearrange blocks of text in Craft, so I move things into proper sections and rewrite or expand on my notes. I summarize the main ideas of the book and any takeaways.
Finally, I try to think more broadly about how what I’ve read connects to other books or concepts in my reading system. This is where links come in.
Linking is a Craft mainstay. Type the @ symbol in a note, and you can create links to other notes within Craft. I add links at the block level from inside the book note to related permanent notes (or other book notes). Block-level links are truly a Craft superpower. Many Zettelkasten proponents insist on creating stand-along “atomic notes” to get the true benefit of a linked note system. I think Craft’s block-linking capabilities do a better job of preserving the continuity and context of the literature note, while producing excellent backlink references inside the destination note. Whether you use atomic notes or block-level links from inside your notes, this connection between notes serves as the backbone of a knowledge system that generates an ever-growing convergence of insights.
Phase III — Compounding
This brings me to my system’s final and most valuable phase: the compounding of knowledge and wisdom from my reading. I compare this phase to the compounding of interest on your retirement savings. The more you save, the faster it seems to grow, until eventually, the interest outpaces the principal. Midway through this past year, I reached that crossover point in Craft when the connections between books, world views, concepts, themes, and ideas began forming at an accelerating rate.
There are three primary methods I use to promote this knowledge compounding effect: (1) creating or updating permanent notes of ideas or concepts that run through my reading; (2) daily Readwise reviews; and (3) open-ended exploration of the system, which I affectionately call my Craft Time.
Permanent Notes
In my system, permanent notes are concepts, scientific principles, philosophical beliefs, genres, human conditions, cultural practices, etc. — thoughts or ideas that span across the books I read. An eclectic list of examples: Field Theory, Tides, Origins of Religion, Sobriety, Hindsight Bias, and Memoirs. I currently have 130 permanent notes in my system, yet I still frequently encounter new themes or concepts in my reading that don’t exist in Craft. If I think it’s worthwhile, I’ll add the link anyway, which creates a new note in Craft’s Inbox. Later, I’ll open the note and bring it to life as a proper permanent note. This almost always starts with a CMD-O search through my system for any related notes that might deserve a link.
Searching a well-populated Craft database of your reading notes and inner thoughts invites serendipity and wonder. The search results are near instantaneous and displayed in a sensible order — documents with the search term in the title first, blocks next — with a preview of each result.
In the early days of using Craft, these searches were ho-hum. But now, after curating hundreds and hundreds of interconnected notes, searches frequently yield something unexpected, insightful. With a few keystrokes, I discover connections to similar ideas in other books I’ve read in the past; call it my personal Wikipedia, written in partnership with the authors I most admire, just for me. How else would I connect Cheryl Strayed’s appreciation of solitude while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail with Susan Orlean’s happy time in a crowded public library or Maria Popova’s sanctuary within the pages of her private diary?
I usually discover other books or notes that relate directly or indirectly, and I add the appropriate links to these newborn permanent notes. I almost always sigh to myself at this point. How many books have I read over the past three decades that touched on this theme that are now gone forever from my mind because I didn’t have Craft?
Finally, I’ll add the permanent note to my master index, known in PKM circles as as Map of Content. But rarely is this the end of the note’s evolution and growth. Once a note enters Craft — and I suspect also my subconscious — I find myself adding more and more references and links to related content in fits and starts over time.
Daily Readwise Reviews
One of the benefits of being a Readwise subscriber is the daily review of a random selection of your reading highlights. These arrive by email or inside the app itself and follow a pattern of spaced repetition to help you improve retention. You can set how many highlights you want to review each day and create themed reviews that pull from selected books or tags. I was an early adopter of the Kindle e-reader, so I’m able to revisit a veritable treasure trove of highlights I captured years and years ago.
These morning reviews provide an opportunity to think deeply about a handful of highlights from a population of more than a thousand I’ve captured. For each one, I ask myself a series of questions. Why does this highlight resonate with me? Does it support something else in my reading system? Could I write something of my own that stems from this quote?
These review sessions almost always lead me into Craft to edit a particular permanent note, add a new link from that day’s highlight, or record a new writing idea or topic (which I also keep in Craft). It’s a rare day that I don’t add or revise my reading notes after a Readwise review.
Craft Time
I’ll call out my third way of compounding knowledge as simply Craft Time. More and more, I feel drawn to explore and broaden my reading notes, almost like seeking the dopamine hit from social media apps like Facebook or Twitter. Yet, here, the content is uniquely tailored to me, and in a sense, constantly growing and changing as I add and connect notes and ideas. Instead of refreshing an endless Facebook feed, I am exploring pathways of thought that are at once familiar but also entirely novel to me.
In practice, this involves reviewing and adding links between meaningful passages of books and articles to appropriate themes; developing notes for new themes or ideas; and most recently, breaking apart and propagating notes that have grown too large. Sometimes, my Craft Time is simply open-ended discovery. Scanning the backlinks from my notes on Friendship, Regret, Mortality, Meaning of Life, or Time can transport me mentally — sometimes quite spiritually — to a place I would be hard-pressed to find another way.
I recently read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I read this twenty years ago, and it was one of those books that had fallen into that blurry category of non-remembering. This second reading mesmerized me with its beautiful observations of the natural world set alongside a backdrop of religion and philosophy. Before long, I was comparing Dillard’s breathtaking assessment of the vastness of the universe with similar musings from Blaise Pascal and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s like this reading system of mine has unlocked something in my brain that now permits me — no, implores me — to step outside the single book and see patterns and themes across books, across genres of literature, across vast swaths of science and philosophy.
In Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, he describes the most advanced and challenging reading level — Syntopical Reading — as reading many books on the same subject and studying the differences and similarities in themes, ideas, arguments, and styles. I can’t say I often live up to Mr. Adler’s standards, but I think this system in Craft approaches his syntopical ideal with its blossoming cross-reference links and aha! insights that emerge from my time with it.
Is It Worth It?
Cost will be an issue for anyone considering a reading system like this. Between Readwise and Craft, I’m shelling out $150 per year in subscription fees. That might seem like a hefty outlay for reading, given there are free or less expensive options. For example, Readwise offers Bookcision, a tool that allows you to download properly formatted Kindle highlights for free. Obsidian, a popular PKM app, offers a capable free tier and supports at least one free community plug-in to download Kindle highlights.
While I could cobble together a free solution, it’s worth it for me to pay for a seamless experience. For me, the benefits accrue in three ways:
- More focus, less distraction. Both Readwise and Craft offer an attractive, uncluttered design and user interface that promotes thinking over futzing with software settings. Focus is hard enough to come by these days, and I appreciate the calming interface these apps use in elevating my book highlights and notes. How do you put a price tag on sustained concentration?
- Nothing slips through the cracks. No matter what or how I read, Readwise captures my highlights without thinking about it. While Bookcision or an Obsidian plug-in might work fine for Kindle highlights, what about printed books? Or web articles? I could process these manually with an iPhone scanner, copy and paste them into the proper text file, and then return to my reading. But for me, that’s the whole point of having a reading system. I can focus on the text without the worrying distraction of how I’m going to act on what I’m reading.
- Higher return on investment. In the course of a year, I’ll read around 60 books and many hundreds of articles and essays. At typical adult reading speeds, this means I spend at least 1,000 hours each year reading. In addition, I spend about $1,000 a year on books and news subscriptions. Between time and money, my investment in reading is considerable. For me, spending a little on tools to ensure I get a great return on that investment is a no-brainer. At 15 cents per reading hour, I assure you that I am getting a good return on Readwise and Craft.
A Wish List
While I am pleased with this system, there are few things that I hope will improve in the future:
- Kobo Support in Readwise. I read about half my books on Kindle, but am very interested in switching to the Kobo e-reader to lessen my reliance on Amazon as a company, and enjoy a better reading experience when borrowing books through Libby. Readwise doesn’t yet provide a way to import reading highlights and notes from Kobo, so I’m staying put with Kindle until that functionality exists.
- Tighter Readwise and Craft Integration. I’m using a custom markdown export tool from Readwise to bring my highlights to Craft, but it requires the use of a web browser and text editor to make the transfer. having a built-in integration with Craft or a way to copy the highlights out of the Readwise app itself would be an improvement.
- A Better Solution for Reading Articles. Pocket works for my article reading, but there are some downsides. The free version limits you to just three highlights, and you’re not able to add any notes to what you’ve highlighted. Readwise has announced their own read-it-later app called Reader which I’m told will provide a better overall reading experience. I’ll be very curious to try this out when it’s eventually released.
Smarter Reading
I can’t help but feel both excited and wistful about the state of reading today. As a lifelong bookworm, I am thrilled that technologies have emerged to take reading retention and knowledge assimilation to new levels. I am now more inclined to tackle difficult books because I have a method to mine and refine their gems of wisdom.
But, part of me laments the fact that these technologies didn’t exist when I was younger. I cannot even begin to imagine the level of knowledge a system like this would yield after thirty years of continuous use. While I read mainly for self-improvement and entertainment, can you imagine the power of a reading system like this for a doctoral candidate writing a thesis? Or a writer collecting research for a book?
They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. There’s never been a better time to become smarter in how you read.
Questions about this reading system with Craft and Readwise? Leave me a note in the comment section below.
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Keep the Change
As I walked through the throng of travelers at LAX recently on my way to a flight that would be canceled the minute I got to the gate, I reflected on how change is the only real constant in life. In less than a week, I found myself hurrying through crowded airports in Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles (fun fact: these three airports accounted for 60% of all holiday flight cancelations). From Denver, I drove 1,200 miles to Los Angeles in a Jeep with Connor and his ten-month-old puppy, listening to baseball podcasts (yes, that’s a thing) through Colorado and New Mexico. The music changed to hip hop in Arizona, and I felt nostalgic for the podcasts. I paid nearly $7 per gallon for gas in California and felt nostalgic for Arizona. We survived freeway driving in the rain as we neared Los Angeles with Connor relying on his 19-year-old reflexes — or the Force — to weave in and out of 80-mph traffic.
Mallory hosted us at her beautiful apartment near Santa Monica. She’s only lived there a few months but showed us around her bustling neighborhood like a native. I can’t believe this young lady who grew up on an island of 10,000 is now so at ease in a city of four million. We picked up Lisa at LAX later that night in a downpour. And defying the promise of the song and our much-needed dose of Vitamin D, It really does rain in Southern California. Serious drenching rain, like the kind I used to see in the rain forest near Forks.
With the four of us together, we did the usual holiday stuff, but in a new way: last-minute Christmas shopping at an open-air mall in the pouring rain, Christmas Eve ramen, a marathon Monopoly game made longer by Lisa’s insistence on gifting money to her children and thereby violating the very premise of the game (!), a requisite walk through Marina del Rey to gawk at boats, and Christmas Day with extended family in Costa Mesa. Here I got to meet the next generation of little ones — Jackson, Avery and Effie — and as I helped them play with their Christmas toys, I couldn’t shake the feeling that time had somehow looped back on itself, and I was a new dad, and Mallory and Connor were little again, and that life stood still.
For many years, our holidays repeated a predictable pattern at our island home. The same setting, the same meals, the same corner with the same kind of Christmas tree, the same wintry night on the same porch, looking out at the night sky and sea. Yet, life is forever changing, renewing, and reshaping. As Alan Watts said, “the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Long-standing traditions can be a comfort, but on this family holiday, with its unexpected detours and moments of sheer bliss, I learned a new kind of music. And it’s time to dance.
The post Keep the Change appeared first on Robert Breen.
The Craft App —A Year of Magical Linking
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
I use Craft as a Zettelkasten-style note-taking system fed by a healthy reading habit. I take notes on things that interest me so that I might use this knowledge to make better decisions and inform my own writing. Before Craft, these notes were scattered across note cards, journals, and the margins of books — locked away and seldom consulted. I had this uneasy feeling that I was wasting my time taking notes at all. But no longer. Over the year, the notes I created inside Craft have taken on a life of their own, approaching that mythic “second brain” potential. It took a while to reach critical mass, but I find that the time I spend — writing notes, linking notes, and exploring connections — now yields some of my most thoughtful and creative work.
So, yeah: I love Craft. The designers have created and continue to evolve an iPad-first thinking tool that enables me to focus on my ideas and connected thoughts without unnecessary complexity or clutter. It matches my sense of design sensibilities and interface delight; it works the way I think. With the announcement of Craft 2.0 and Craft X, I am more excited than ever about the future of this fantastic app.
In part, my enthusiasm for Craft stems from a short dalliance with Obsidian, another popular PKM app. I spent a few weeks in this alternate note-taking universe when ReadWise released its official plug-in for Obsidian. ReadWise is a service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals, scratching a particular itch for serious readers. Obsidian has won over many fans with its powerful linking tools on top of plain text files, and this new superpower of syncing ReadWise highlights automatically was too tempting not to try out. I soon learned that Obsidian wouldn’t work for me, and despite the automation with ReadWise, I hurried back to my beloved Craft. But in the process, I learned what matters most to me in using these knowledge and thinking tools that I thought would be useful to share with others who might be thinking about diving into the PKM world.
Six Reasons I Love Craft
1. Design
Craft is beautiful, drawing praise from just about everyone who tries it. The text spacing, the font choice, the intuitive user interface, the colors, and even the app icon options point to a gifted visionary with an intense focus on a near-perfect balance of form and function. Craft reminds me of the best of Apple’s hardware and software designs. But this beauty goes beyond appearance. Dragging a block or a note somewhere in the app (or outside of it) does exactly what you expect it should. Markdown text commands fly from my fingers and transform before my eyes into perfectly formatted text — no arcane symbols or HTML code to disrupt my thinking, no toggle between edit and preview mode to confuse me. My notes appear consistently polished, not janky with placeholder brackets, caret symbols, or exclamation marks. Sync is flawless. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts and slash commands keep my hands on the keyboard and my thoughts flowing without having to think; now, how again do you link to a block in another note? With other apps and Obsidian, in particular, the design and user interface feel like glaring distractions that interrupt flow. With Craft, everything on screen is there for a good purpose, nothing more. The interface fades into the background as I work, precisely what I want in a thinking tool like this.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
— Steve Jobs 1
2. iPad-first
Since I use an iPad Pro for almost all my work, I need a platform without mobile compromises. Craft was designed for iPad first, and it truly feels that way with no limits in functionality or power. It actually took longer for the Mac app to gain all the iPad features, which is backward from most developed software (Craft’s Mac app just won Apple’s 2021 software of the year award, so I guess it caught up!).
In contrast, Obsidian’s mobile offerings launched late and are still hobbled by functionality gaps and far too many compromises for power use. During my time with Obsidian, I frequently pulled out my old MacBook Pro to do things, which felt jarring in my iPad-centric world.
3. Sharing and collaboration
Craft includes excellent sharing options to other formats: a nicely formatted email, PDF, Microsoft Word, Markdown, and Textbundle, which allows a complete export of your database to other apps like Bear or Obsidian. In addition, notes can be shared between apps like Ulysses, Day One, DevonThink, and Things. Craft allows seamless drag and drop between apps. On the iPad, I often have Ulysses and Craft open in split-screen mode to review my notes and drag over blocks of text to incorporate as I write. Inserting an image into a note from Photos or the web works equally well. It interacts with these other apps in a consistent, predictable way, allowing me to focus on the content. I can share notes with colleagues through a secret link or even publish whole sections of my notes to the web, rendered with all the style and interactivity of the app itself.
4. Innovation
In the past six months, Craft released an astounding 25 updates to the app. New features include a calendar function, integrated daily notes, tables, inline equations, local file storage, expanded app customization preferences, image and PDF annotation, Shortcuts functionality, Markdown export improvements, and significant app performance boosts. Perhaps the most exciting innovation is still to come with Craft X, an open-source plug-in platform that developers can use to create custom functionality within Craft. A ReadWise plug-in is already in testing, and the roadmap suggests we might see features like WordPress publishing, automated templates, and other workflow automation soon. The pace of innovation at Craft is astonishing.
5. Platform confidence
Company stability and sustainability are factors to consider before investing time and money in a product or service. Craft and Obsidian are roughly the same age, so comparing their business strategy for growth is instructive. Craft avoided the freemium model and enforced a subscription fee from the beginning, followed by a sizable round of venture capital to expand the team and fund product development. Between this recurring subscription revenue and the capital raise, cash flow should not be a top concern at Craft. In contrast, Obsidian relies on its two founders for software development and capital. The vast majority of users pay nothing for Obsidian, which puts pressure on the long-term sustainability of the business. Obsidian recently doubled the rates for their optional syncing and publishing services to improve cash flow. Everything else being equal, I would bet on the company with a sustainable business model, capital, and that financial metric that eludes so many startups: positive cash flow.
6. Future proof
One of the raps against Craft is its proprietary database, where it stores your notes. This database structure enables all of the amazing functionality and power of the app, but should Craft go out of business, all your information could technically vanish. In contrast, Obsidian stores your notes locally in plain text, which should always be accessible in the future. I’ve lost access to my share of old word-processing documents due to unsupported file formats, so I had a chance to test Craft’s export capabilities when I moved my notes to Obsidian and back again. The results surprised me.
Craft to Obsidian. The steps to export your Craft data really couldn’t be more straightforward. Select all your notes and use the export to Markdown function. This creates a nested folder of all your notes in Markdown text format alongside images, PDFs, or other files stored in Craft. Next, open the folder as a vault in Obsidian. That’s it. Your folder structure from Craft carries over to Obsidian. The links between documents, even links to specific blocks within a document, come through perfectly. The export of 2,000 notes took under a minute.
Obsidian to Craft. The process of getting my notes back out of Obsidian was surprisingly tricky. While notes in Obsidian are simple Markdown text files, maintaining the critical links between note files, images, and other embedded files is complicated without a proper export function (which Obsidian lacks). Thanks to a tip from Curtis McHale, I used Bear, a competing notes app, to import my notes from Obsidian. Since Bear doesn’t recognize folders, I had to consolidate all my notes from a dozen folders in Obsidian to one catch-all folder to avoid losing links. Bear was able to import all my notes, complete with links between notes, images, and PDFs, and then export them in a format that worked fine for Craft. Once in Craft, I had to refile all my notes back into my folder scheme, which took some time. For software that touts itself as the ultimate in future-proofing, I honestly didn’t expect it would be such a hassle to move my information back to Craft. Bear gets high marks here for serving as the go-between, but it seems like a pretty big gap for Obsidian not to have a proper export function.
Despite the time it took to retrieve my files from Obsidian, I discovered how easy it was to export my information from Craft, which isn’t something you usually figure out until it becomes a critical necessity. I now have very little hesitation with trusting my notes to the Craft with its top-notch export capabilities.
Is Craft for You?
I am sold on Craft as my knowledge tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect or necessarily suitable for everyone. Obsidian is popular for good reason. It’s free for most users and available on more platforms, like Windows and Android. Secure encryption of your notes is possible with its optional sync service. It provides more powerful back-link capabilities and unlinked mentions, and a graph view of your linked notes that doesn’t exist in Craft. While the Obsidian interface doesn’t appeal to me, direct manipulation of Markdown and HTML code is the preferred way to write and think for many, particularly programmers. And, because it’s so easy to export my Craft data, I’m keeping Obsidian around for times when I want to dig deeper into unlinked mentions or mine insights from the notes graph.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear cautions about confusing motion with action when getting things done. Motion represents all those things we do before getting down to work. Thinking about it, planning, organizing your desk, making lists, selecting tools, etc. Action is doing the work itself. Since the work is often difficult and draining, it’s tempting to slip into the trap of motion, and switching software tools, like my two-week foray with Obsidian, is the very epitome of motion.
So, my advice is to pick a tool that feels right to you and stick with it. After all, the real value of these tools stems from the thoughts and connections you bring to it, which takes time and critical mass to yield any lasting benefits. After my year with Craft, it feels like we’re both just getting started.
Questions about Craft? Leave a note in the comment section below.
- Quoted by Ken Kocienda in his book Creative Selection. Page 187.
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