I have been mostly using markdown or other text-based tools for my main notes for a while now (10+ years). I.e. no databases, at least not in any tool I’ve fully committed to. I use Notion occasionally, but I have long had significant concerns with their development priorities and lack of public feature request voting and discussion, etc. and I find their DBs both harder to setup and work with, and poorer in UI/UX (e.g. layout of DB fields vs. body; Fibery’s two-column layout is so much better). So I never went all-in on Notion and hence did not realize the complete, interconnected system I planned.
My build-out in Fibery is really the first time I’ll be fully diving in to realizing my long-held hopes for a more well-documented and integrated system. I have tracked a lot of this stuff more ad-hoc for a decade or more, but putting it all in DBs and interconnecting them, adding Charts, etc. is going to save me so much time or simply make insights available that were too time/energy-prohibitive to have in the past.
I am in the early days of implementing all this Fibery, but here’s a quick outline of what it does or will contain. Most of these are separate databases and much of this is interconnected in various ways (i.e. Relations); I do not specifically note all of them by any means:
- Daily logging, i.e. “daily notes” implemented
- Time allocation and tracking
- Work log
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual reviews
- Daily habits implemented
- Physical activities log
- Meditation log
- Therapy log
- Mental health tracking insights, parts map, etc.
- Hike database tracking and commenting on hikes over time
- Finances
- Contacts partially implemented
- Friends track status, important dates, gifts for, etc.
- Dating
- Businesses/vendors tracking vendors for products, orders, etc., connects to Finances
- Food and drink products tracking inventory, creating shopping lists, etc., connects to businesses/vendors
- Tea reviews, notes, info
- Supplements
- Food and Drink Recipes
- Home meal log
- Home cocktail log
- Restaurant and bar notes + reviews
- Events for events I host
- Content Creation
- Content ingestion + notes articles, YT vids, etc. for personal and professional enrichment, research, etc.
- Media recreational, notes, reviews, etc.
- Travel
- Locations DB
- Travel planning and review as Projects
I use e.g. Comments to track “interactions” and various updates, as well as #mentioning various entities in my daily log to establish a date connection. Anything that has more a more in-depth time tracking or note-taking component, e.g. a hike or a date, has its own database rather than just being mentioned in my Daily Log. I also use several Automations and Buttons, with plans to add many more in the future. Things like auto-creating my Daily Log and Habits entities (and auto-linking them), adding template data to Daily Notes and other Entities, etc.
I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting at the moment. The project is large and ongoing. But so far the limitations on implementation are primarily my time (and occasionally my cleverness or lack thereof ). I think Fibery already supports most of what I want to do. I’d say the biggest missing piece is integration with some kind of “Read it Later” tool. I’d love Readwise integration too, for example.
Of the apps out there on the market now, the only ones that have seriously given me pause on doing this in Fibery are Coda (sort of), Tana, Mem.ai (mainly for their amazing ingestion/quick notes approach, e.g. text/email into Mem, and the promise of some of their actual AI plans), and potentially Capacities.io. Anytype was on that list previously, but I lost faith in their direction a while back (after being a very early alpha tester). My current deal breaker with Tana is the enforced outliner structure. I’ve written more about that here:
https://twitter.com/OGreenius/status/1593866886403723264
I must admit, despite my long-time enthusiasm for Fibery and fairly deep participation here, there is still a part of me that has some minor anxiety and discomfort with going all-in on Fibery like this, particularly for a personal use case (my biggest concern is probably that things like Readwise integration will never happen). There are a couple major things that do a reasonable job allaying my fears:
- Amazing and responsive Fibery team
- Experienced but open-minded CEO
- Open and honest approach, e.g. monthly “startup diary”, public revenue, etc. reporting (“open startup”)
- Funding secured for a reasonable number of years, and controlled burn date, demonstrated sustainable hiring
- Public roadmap, feature voting + discussion, etc.
- As good as can be expected Export, i.e. all data that can be represented in common formats CSV + Markdown (missing Relations, automations, and so many other things, but acceptable and understandable limitations)