Will Helliwell's Linkedin Analytics

Being able to publish changes to my new website directly from Obsidian on my phone is a smooth experience. I should have done this a long time ago. Now on my new site I'm 100% in control of the code and content and updates. I'm also not paying monthly fees for Wordpress or Squarespace.

Keep your notes out of ClickUp. Newsletter draft done and ready to send to your inbox tomorrow.

The "perfect" all-in-one system you're building? It's not future-proof. Your thinking is your life's work. It's an asset that should outlive any single app or platform. When you build your second brain inside a proprietary, cloud-based app, you're making a risky bet. What happens when they change their pricing, get acquired, or shut down? This is why the foundation of my second brain is plain text files. Plain text has been around for decades. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. By separating my knowledge from my project manager, I gain four critical advantages: • Ownership: The files are mine. Forever. • Privacy: No one sees my thoughts but me. • Speed: Instant capture, no lag. • Future-Proof: My notes will still be readable in 2050. Can you say the same about your current system?

I doubled the speed of my idea capture by breaking my "perfect" all-in-one system in two. The biggest enemy of a fleeting thought is friction. Specifically, the writing and UI lag you get in most cloud-based apps. By the time the app has loaded and the cursor appears and you've navigated to the right tab, the idea is gone. This is why I separate my thinking from my doing. For notes and ideas, I use a tool called Obsidian. It saves my notes locally as plain text files. The benefits are immediate: • Speed: It opens instantly. I can capture thoughts as fast as I think them, with zero lag. • Offline Access: No internet? No problem. My thinking doesn't stop when the wifi does. Stop letting a slow, clunky tool be the bottleneck for your creativity. Optimise for speed.

Here are my public notes on lecture 2 of the History of Western Music Course on by Samuel Andreyev. For anyone interested in how we came to have the current system of the five-line staff and modern modes, this course is fascinating.

Markdown. I love it. Microsoft Word does not. So I made some styles in Word that at least look and work how I want. • I still have a 9-5 • They still use Word docs for everything. At least I managed to get them over to ClickUp for tasks 🥳

By storing your ideas in a cloud-based PM tool, you're making them prisoners of the platform. Think about it. When your personal knowledge lives inside a tool that isn't built for it: • You don't truly own the data. • Your notes aren't always private. • You can't easily export them in a usable format. • You can't access them offline. Your most valuable asset (that's your unique way of thinking) becomes dependent on someone else's server, their UI, and their business model. I choose to keep my ideas in plain text files on my own computer. It's fast, private, and future-proof. Because my thinking is an asset I want to own forever.

Is your agency's ClickUp a cluttered mess instead of the "all-in-one" solution you were promised? Lots of small agencies adopt ClickUp to get organised, only to find that without a clear strategy, it quickly becomes overwhelming and slows them down. After a year of refining processes with agencies just like yours, I've built a proven system to fix this. Introducing: The Agency Operations Accelerator This isn't just a ClickUp setup service; it's a complete operational transformation designed to give you clarity, control, and efficiency. We'll work together to: ✅ Uncover hidden bottlenecks that are draining your team's time. ✅ Design a clear blueprint for your agency's unique workflows. ✅ Transform ClickUp into an automated engine for your operations. ✅ Get your whole team trained and on board for successful adoption. ✅ Provide ongoing support to ensure the system works for you long-term. Stop "flying blind" and start running your agency with confidence. Ready to see how it works? See the full roadmap and book a free Clarity Call at the link below. 👉

Trying out Gems in Google Gemini. I've got a 5-step process for creating social media posts based on my weekly newsletter. I've put it all into a Gem and attached a social media posts swipe file. Now theoretically, I can paste my newsletter content into this Gem and it'll give me 7 posts for social media. I love writing the newsletter. I'm not as keen on writing short-form posts. Let me know if you'd like my 1,016-word AI prompt.

This is what I'm talking about in the newsletter tomorrow. It's my Second Brain split concept. The newsletter is written in Obsidian, but I'm tracking the steps and general notes in ClickUp. Best of both worlds.