For the last few years I’ve been dabbling in woodworking.

Woodworking is a challenge. I have a dedicated space for my woodwork (a garage), and I’ve discovered that one of the hardest things about woodworking is optimizing your space.

If your space is set up properly—all your tools are easily findable and within reach, your workbench is clear, and you have all the materials and tools that you need—then work is easy. All you have to do is find the time.

Keeping the space optimized is the trick, because as you work, inevitably your workspace gets messier and harder to use. And I never want to stop work to clean, so I only have two choices: either clean at the end of every session (which often isn’t possible), or do what chefs do: mise in place.

Mise in place (pronounced meez in plahz) is a french culinary term. It means everything in its place. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Chefs work in an intense environment. They have to work both at extreme speed and with great diligence in order to deliver dozens of meals to hungry customers without delivering a cold or disappointing meal.

In order to make everything predictable and controllable, chefs know the importance of organization. An organized kitchen is a successful kitchen, which is why chefs emphasize organizing everything first, so that they can complete their jobs successfully.

That is, in essence, what it means to mise in place: chefs do all the basic organization tasks first (including things like chopping vegetables and pre-portioning dry ingredients like rice) so that when it is time to start cooking, they don’t have to break their flow to look for anything.

Put everything in its place first, so you don’t have to look for it when you are doing the work. Start the day with the same routine—putting everything in its place—and you will set yourself up for success.

What’s new on Obsidian.Rocks?

Putting everything in its place digitally can be difficult. It’s a lot easier to ignore problems, virtually hiding things under the rug. But it’s a problem I’ve been thinking about more and more lately.

A couple of months ago I wrote about my favorite themes in Obsidian. A good theme can go a long way towards keeping your workspace tidy and clean, but that alone is not enough. You will likely have to customize it for your own purposes.

I’ve recently fallen in love with the Border theme, because it allows you to effortlessly customize your workspace to your own tastes. I love it so much that I wrote an article about “building your own theme with Border”. If you’re interested in fine-tuning every detail of your Obsidian experience without writing a line of code, I recommend checking out that article.

Additionally, I love the auto-hider feature in Border. This allows you to hide any UI elements that you don’t use. I like to hide all of them, but I discovered an unintended side effect when I did this: I often ended up with a million tabs open, and I didn’t realize it.

I generally work on only one or two files at a time in Obsidian, so the tab bar is almost useless for me. But when I hide it, I forget about it, and it gets messy without me realizing it.

I solved this by rediscovering stacked tabs. I use stacked tabs almost exclusively now, and I love it, I don’t think about tabs at all anymore. If you too find yourself with too many tabs open most of the time, then you might want to try stacking them, instructions at the link above.

Question of the week:

Let’s do something a little different this week. If you could ask me anything, what would it be?

I write about what I think my audience would like to read, but I’ve never actually asked.

Do you have problems with Obsidian that you haven’t solved? Questions that have been at the back of your mind for ages, but you’ve never bothered to search for an answer?

Hit reply and let me know. I may respond directly, like I often do, or I might answer them in the next newsletter. Time will tell!

Thanks and ciao~

Tim