Matter is an app that syncs across all my devices. Not only that but it is incredibly easy to use. You can download it here: hq.getmatter.app
Sometimes I use it as nice reader view on my Windows PC. A lot of the time I send articles, emails and tweets to it that spark inspiration.
Here’s how I use it for writing.
Once a piece of content has been captured in Matter, I know it will be there to look at whenever I’m free.
No longer do I need to read engaging Twitter threads in the middle of my work day. They can wait until 11 pm when I like to it down at the dining table with the iPad.
If I’m feeling a bit lazy, Matter can read the article to me. This is a huge time saver for someone who is as slow at reading as myself.
I quickly highlight the parts I find interesting or that I want to revisit.
After highlighting the content, I’m able to make notes on each highlight. These could be quick thoughts around the key points from an article.
From there, I export it to Obsidian.
I’m experimenting with having the highlights auto sync but I feel like that might get more buggy than it’s worth.
For now, I hit the export button and that adds all my notes and the article meta data into Obsidian. Then I archive the Matter article.
I use Obsidian because it’s another one of those apps that’s available across all my devices. Not only that but it’s a native iPad app so is incredibly fast for writing.
Now that the highlights and my notes are in Obsidian, I can really sit down and play with the content.
I create a new Thought heading and add all my new content under there. It’s where I’m writing this article right now.
This is a place for exploring ideas before I publish them. Publishing could mean a simple tweet. Or it could mean an entire article or thread.
Now the question is, what should I do with the content in Obsidian?
It’s tempting to move it over to Notion where my personal wiki lives and tag it. But that feels like an unnecessary step.
Will I go in there and look for this content again?
Obsidian is built for this kind of thing. For tagging ideas and eventually seeing the links between all of them.
My gut feeling right now is that it will stay in Obsidian.
Then, in the future, I can look back at it and create new content around the same topics based on all the other notes that are inked.
Hopefully I’ll turn this workflow into a daily habit. Here are the steps: 📸 Capture content into Matter 🖊 Highlight 📝 Add highlight notes 💾 Export notes to Obsidian ✍🏻 Write and explore ideas in Obsidian 🏷 Add tags based on topics to link notes together 💻 Publish 🔮 Revisit
Reach out to me on Twitter @notiondad
