Your apps will die. Your files shouldn’t.
Every few years, the productivity world reinvents the wheel. A new app arrives with slick animations, beautiful themes, and a subscription model. You migrate everything over. You learn the shortcuts. You build your system. Then the company pivots, gets acquired, or just quietly stops updating. And you’re left exporting whatever you can salvage into… plain text.
So why not start there?
This is a short series about the most boring, most durable, most 80-20 technology choice you can make: storing your work in plain text.
The Series
The Bet That Always Pays Off — A
.txtfile from 1985 still opens instantly. A.docfrom 2005 might not. Why plain text is the safest long-term bet you can make.Tools Come and Go, Text Stays — Obsidian, Logseq, Quarto, Vim, VS Code — they all read the same files. The difference between choosing a tool and choosing a format.
Markdown: Plain Text With Just Enough Structure — When raw
.txtisn’t quite enough, Markdown gives you headings, links, and code blocks without leaving the keyboard. Write once, render everywhere.The 80/20 of Productivity Tools — A text editor, a folder structure, and the discipline to write things down. That’s the whole system.