I've used or built more personal knowledge/task/project management tools than I care to list over the years, and adopted various methods along the way. I've ended up in a place where I know what I need day to day: A place to dump my ideas, plans, reflections, and tasks, along with methods of processing and accessing all this data. It's hard to compete with plain text files, a notebook, and structured daily/weekly rituals that process these notes into actionable tasks, meeting agendas, and project docs. It's not that time consuming, it's super effective, and most importantly, it's infinitely and freely customizable because instead of software, you just have checklists and processes to manually follow. You can execute GTD without touching a computer: https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Wee...

I can get by just fine with that system, but a handful of months back I started wanting software again. Reminders, task wrangling, workflows around taking meeting notes, taking and processing transcripts of talking through ideas, automated daily and weekly checkins with summaries, project work logs, managing lists of things to talk about with people, the list goes on....

Same reasons I have always reached for software, and the same reasons I wrote my own system a few times over. But this time I had some new thoughts:

- I want this to have a chance at being my last system. For that, I must be able to read/edit the data without special software. I settled on committing to building software that interfaces with folders of Markdown files exclusively. I could use Obsidian to cover any gaps and get work done immediately–I don't need my software to do it all right away.

- I want to own as much of my recorded activity/thoughts as possible, so I can drop it into new AI models, giving them a ton of context about me and what I'm up to, and avoid getting vendor locked to OpenAI.

- I want ubiquitous access to the system, which means it's gotta be easily used from a phone.

7k LOC later and I've got a Telegram bot with a plugin architecture and a pile of plugins that implement everything I've described and more. The plugin arch means there's a defined interface and every new piece of functionality never ends up with more than 1k LOC in a file. My objective was to structure the project specifically so I could avoid the pitfalls of AI generated code as projects get large. Everything isolated with well defined integration points.

I chose Telegram because they have a great API, supporting custom keyboards for quick actions, audio input for taking voice memos that my system transcribes, and reaching out to me with reminders/requests on whatever device I'm on.

The result is thousands of messages that have translated into a nicely organized Obsidian vault. Couldn't be happier and think there's a chance I'll live with this thing for the foreseeable future–and I can always swap out the interface away from Telegram, build a proper frontend, or drop it altogether and be left with my Markdown files.

If anyone is interested I'd be happy to share what I've got. Just my private project that I'm reaping a lot of benefit from.

Here's a quick dump of some of my plugin commands to get a flavor of what I'm talking about: https://gist.github.com/zackham/3c2d061e6dd0127958c913329aa0...