The Apps Holding My Digital Life Together This Week

1. Using Notion to Build a Living Dashboard That Does Not Rot

Every few months I have to completely rewrite my Notion setup out of sheer frustration. Sick of buried pages, hidden filters, ambiguous properties. I once missed a client call because the calendar view inside a weekly agenda template didn’t surface properly dated items unless they were in the same database — learned that one the hard way.

The turning point was realizing Notion isn’t a database manager — it’s a visual layer. So now I keep a single master table for all actionable stuff: meetings, tasks, reminders, content ideas. One giant flat table feels wrong at first, but filtering by type and date lets me actually see everything that matters this week without hopping between pages.

Also: do not try to nest dashboards. Make one top-level dashboard called “LIVE” or “NOW”, whatever feels urgent, and pin it. Inside that page:

• A filtered synced view of your task DB (due today or overdue)
• A calendar view of the same DB for this week
• A Quick Notes inline table (no rollups) for things you think you’ll remember, but won’t
• One link to a status page for each project — no nesting

Undocumented edge case: If you duplicate a dashboard page that uses filtered linked views from a database outside that page, the filters still stick to the original DB. This breaks everything if you thought you duplicated the data too. You didn’t. You duplicated the view, not the source.

2. Indexing Files and Web Links in Obsidian Without Getting Lost

Obsidian is only helpful once you stop trying to make it pretty. First time I set it up, I had folders like “Inspiration” and “Might Use Later” that ended up holding 90% of everything and surfacing none of it. Also, fun discovery: dragging PDFs into Obsidian doesn’t really index them in search unless you use a plugin or convert to .md — and even then, it’s weird.

Now I use exactly three folders:

• _inbox for dumps – default drop folder, nothing gets tagged here
• _active for anything I’m connecting between tasks or logs
• _archive for everything tagged or finished

Tags are more valuable than folders here. I use #meeting-notes, #research, #task-ref, etc. To connect everything, I rely heavily on backlinking. CMD-clicking a note titled “follow-up-API-webhook-fix” and immediately seeing where I panicked last week? A+.

Actual file interaction

Saved a 2000-line JSON export for a client integration bug, renamed it bug-clientname-202404-fnerr.json, dropped it into Obsidian, and couldn’t find it later. Turns out files are searchable by title, not content — unless you extract the text. The community plugin “Text Extractor” solved that. No settings menu, just install → restart → it works.

3. Keeping Airtable From Turning Into a Second Junk Drawer

We all did it: started with a “content tracker” base, ended up with 17 tables named “draft staging 3 maybe live”. My Airtable tip: never let more than two tables exist unless one is reference-only.

If you’re using Airtable for project organization, build it like a relational database. Here’s the basic structure I landed on:

• Projects – one row per client or initiative
• Tasks – filterable by project, status, due date
• Assets – logos, links, embeds, etc. Linked to projects

Only three tables. The power is in the filtered views with restricted fields. I set up one EXACT view titled “Weekly Priorities – My Team” that only shows tasks:

(Assigned To = Me) AND (Status != Done) AND (Due Date within the next 7 days)

Each view gets a color-coded label and no one touches the master table unless they’re fixing the schema. I also disabled grid editing for some users after a colleague changed a single select to “Yes-ish” and broke three filters.

Bug that bit me: If you create two identical automations in separate bases, Airtable doesn’t warn you about webhook conflicts. I accidentally triggered two message notifications every time I updated one project status. The webhook was firing twice, which only showed up in the log because I checked the timestamps and saw the diff was 0.2 seconds.

4. Avoiding Google Keep Because It Decays and Duplicates

Keep used to be the place I tossed quick thoughts. But it doesn’t sync reliably between desktop and phone if you’ve had the tab open for more than six hours. Seriously. Try editing a note on mobile while your desktop tab sits idle in the background — the sync conflict leaves you with two versions, neither being right.

Mildly terrifying lesson: I once prepped for a team call with bullet points in Keep, only to discover mid-meeting that my browser still showed the older version without the updated action items. There’s no version history. Just your gut.

Switched to Apple Notes and iCloud syncing is somehow less flaky than Google’s system here. For Android, I now use Notion mobile quick capture or Obsidian with Syncthing for vault sync. It’s not elegant, but it doesn’t lie to me.

Small gotcha: If you paste rich text with links or images into Keep from Gmail, you may get embedded formatting that breaks normal copy-paste later on export. Saw “nbsp” characters rendering on export into markdown tools — turned into weird spacing issues in publication.

5. Sorting Daily Logs With Timestamps Inside Coda Rows

Coda’s cross-table relations are nice until you try to treat it like a proper data warehouse. I used it to gather daily logs — each row as a journal-style entry. Wanted to surface only entries from the last 24 hours using the built-in Now() formula. Here’s what hurts: The Now() function in Coda does not auto-refresh in real time. It caches for performance. Which means your “live” filters drift by hours, sometimes more.

My workaround:

• Add a column called Log Timestamp and set its default to Now()
• Disable editing on that column so it doesn’t change post-hoc
• Create views like Today Logs where the filter is Log Timestamp is within Past 1 day

This forces time to be stored as entry-specific, not computed. Now the view doesn’t get stale as Coda coasts on a stale Now().

Classic platform flaw: If you have two cross-linked tables and create a new row while viewing from the related record view, Coda can auto-link incorrectly using the last clicked context, even if it doesn’t match the intended project. Had a bunch of logs accidentally getting tagged to the wrong client just because I clicked that record earlier in the day.

Confirm linkage using formula columns — not just visual relation rows — before trusting filtered summaries.

6. Building a Mobile Inbox From Siri Voice Memos and Zapier

The workflow: voice idea into phone → send text extract to Zapier → push to Notion or Airtable. This thing saved me during a week of travel when typing was impossible.

I used the Siri voice memo feature and then shared it to Shortcuts, which sends it to a folder in iCloud Drive. A Zapier zap watches that folder via an RSS feed-to-Webhooks hack (since direct iCloud integration is still a mirage).

Key discovery: Apple voice memos shared via Shortcuts can be auto-transcribed by the Whisper API (OpenAI). I route the audio to a webhook attached to a PythonAnywhere script with Whisper running on it. Whisper turns it into text, sends it back via another webhook, which then feeds into Notion with a timestamp header.

One weird bug: sometimes iOS saves voice memos without file extensions if sent mid-recording. This breaks everything. I added a step in the Shortcut to rename the file with “.m4a” manually before shipping it off.

Logs kicked back a 415 Unsupported Media Type error until I figured this out:

{"error":"Unsupported format, should be .mp3 or .m4a"}

That breadcrumb alone saved two hours and a head scratch.

7. Managing Browser Tab Hell Using Vertical Tabs and Workspaces

I used to install a new tab manager extension every month. None stuck, until I just gave up and switched to Microsoft Edge. It has native vertical tabs, decent workspace segregation, and it doesn’t die when reopening after crashing with fifty tabs.

Workspaces are surprisingly stable. I keep three: “Work”, “Checklist”, and “Debug Week”. Each has 10–20 tabs that autosave. You can actually right-click any workspace and duplicate it to spin off a new session for testing.

Underrated feature: You can drag a tab from one workspace to another while both windows are open. This is not obvious. Discovered it by accident while rage-dragging a broken Webhook.site tab from a workflow debug stack into quiet mode. It just moved tabs and kept the session.

If you’re still on Chrome: Tab Manager Plus works fine, but the tree doesn’t preserve search history per tab. Edge does.

Internal bug: if Edge crashes while updating itself, it sometimes loses workspace state, depending on the OS-level session recovery setting. One time I relaunched after a system update and got only my homepage — all saved session pointers were erased. Edge called it a “history sync failure”. Not recoverable unless you had synced your workspace to a cloud profile, which I hadn’t that week.