How My Notebook Became My Admin Dashboard
In early 2025 I wrote a blog post called How My Notebook Became My Admin Panel. I never shared it here since I didn't expect it to become a stand-alone project, so I'm doing that now because a lot has happened since.
The short version: I'm a solo dev building a real estate analytics platform while working a full-time job. I was juggling too many contexts (code, blog, rentals, bugs, features, while also managing a team of 5 direct reports at work). Every productivity tool I tried died the same death. I'd stop maintaining it for a week, the system would become unreliable, I'd stop trusting it, I'd stop using it. Trello, Evernote, Notion, all the same cycle (more context in my original blog post above).
Organization has always been my Achilles heel. Automation has always been my strength. So instead of forcing myself to become more organized, I built a system that automates away the weakness. The tool I landed on was Obsidian, mostly because it's built on plain markdown files (no vendor lock-in), runs on every device I own, and lets me embed arbitrary JavaScript in my notes.
That last part is what changed everything. I started embedding scripts that monitored external data sources and updated my notes in real time. Then I wrote templates for tenant communication, bug tracking, rental applications. I extracted usage patterns from these templates, building an Obsidian plugin in the process via vibe-coding (before it was even called that). And the plugin kept growing.
A year later, that plugin is obsidian-plus (GitHub). It's free, open source, and it turned my notebook into something I didn't expect: a digital control center for my workflow. A #chatgpt tag on a task sends the question to ChatGPT and writes the answer into my notes. A #Maria tag sends a to-do into my wife's notebook, and she can respond directly into mine. There is no confusion about the source, my own notes are colored white, responses from outside are color-coded blue.
I started using tags for everything I wanted to recall in the future (podcasts, projects, shopping lists), they effectively became the Apple airtags for my thoughts. This tag system has completely replaced the need for a filing system. My obsidian plugin is now a database for my communication, ideas, thoughts and even my music collection. I can search through them via FZF-like search engine:
When a friend first saw this, he said it's how he wished Slack worked: with Slack the focus is on everyone else, with this the focus is on me. There's a DSL for configuring all of this, AI-generated weekly summaries, API and MCP integrations. Tags became programmable, my notes stopped being documentation and started being infrastructure.
I haven't done anything to market this yet. I've been heads-down building. But I'm starting to share more of how this system works, because I think the approach (search engine over filing system, automation over discipline, notes as an orchestration layer) is useful beyond my specific use case. If any of this sounds useful, check out the repo for this plugin or the landing page. Happy to answer questions.
