How I use Obsidian (2023)(stephango.com) |
How I use Obsidian (2023)(stephango.com) |
This is the reason why I find Trilium Notes so liberating, where one note can have many parents.
https://help.obsidian.md/bases
Collaboration was added in Obsidian 0.14 (May 2022)
So I built my own thats a bit more lightweight. Think nvalt meets markdown. thats native, iOS and Mac with I cloud sync, and open source.
Check it out if it sounds interesting!
iOS app is still in review ;(
I don't want to be overly negative, but no plugins are mandatory, there's no "47 step setup guide" unless you want to heavily customize.
And as far as I can tell you mostly replaced some of the weight with AI?
AI "Search Notes", "Organize Notes", "List and filter, tags", "Clean up notes"
I guess I just see this as weight in a different area? You've pushed a lot of the weight and plugins to cloud-based AI?
I am, on principle, very much a fan of "native app, not another Electron view".
By lightweight I mean it’s not a super heavy and bloated electron app on desktop and a slow and janky capacitor app on mobile that takes 10 seconds to launch and that the project can be greppable in a day to build on
And yeah, if you're referring to the whole Electron stuff there, I entirely agree!
He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.
His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:
- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.
- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.
- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.
- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.
And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.
If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
Ultimately, it comes down to: can you find something you're looking for? For most people, this will require some amount of organization as they will not be able to remember the location of every individual thing, but what this organization looks like may seem inscrutable to someone else.
I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.
For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.
for maps, there is an Obsidian Maps plugin. recent addition, built-in as well. I personally don't use it much, but I know the kind of person who would be very happy about it!
and then there is an up-and-coming Obsidian CLI, which is in paid beta. the license is cheap, around $25 for forever access to current and future betas, but it's optional.
So pick the good ones you like and make your own.
For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.
Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]
Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.
Discovering PM solutions upon entering the workforce and deciding to use them for your personal life.
Shortcomings drive you to discover PKM software like Notion and Obsidian.
Picking either one or the other.
Switching from Notion to Obsidian or vice versa.
Starting to write your own PKM.
There is no class of software more entropic because everyone's requirements are so specific to the individual.
Would be interesting to have differing perspectives from people with different problems and how they use it for those cases.
This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.
All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI.
I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I get lots of pdf’s and such so it’s all in one place.
Cool, end of speech. Peace out
But every PDF I download, ebook, academic article, it goes in Calibre and out of my Downloads path.
But sure, when all you have are supported filetypes, then it can be useful.
besides norton commander and its clones
I actually think Obsidian is a great tool, but I just need something as low friction as possible to quickly jolt something down. Vim and Goodnotes does the trick for me.
There was an exception though, where text just didn't cut it, which was a brief period where I was importing vehicles from Japan and needed lots of images, documents and comparisons up on a big digital whiteboard. I used LogSeq for that.
The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.
To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.
Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.
Turns out my brain is beyond saving, while the program was pretty neat, having to have an extra window open was just beyond my attention span. Now I use a notebook, it is chaotic and has coffee strains but I actually use it.
If you aren't a researcher in a field, why do you need personal knowledge management? Even when I learn a subject, I find just...taking a flat note file to be way better than all these Zettelkasten stuffs. It all feels very pomodoro to me. It is useful for some people, but influencers have hyped it up into the Grand Unified Solution.
Same with mind mapping. I don't see the benefit. Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it? Like...if it's an area I want more expertise, I'm already hyperfocused on it and remember everything. If I don't want expertise, I don't need PKM. I keep trying to use them, but it feels superfluous. Like I never have to refer back to it.
I used to live my entire life in emacs org-mode. My memory is shit, if I don’t have a reminder of a task I need to do it probably won’t get done. If someone asks me “hey, do you remember that thing we talked about in that meeting last week?” the answer will be “no, not at all”. If I go “damn, what was that recipe for those pork chops I made last month that were really good?” I will draw a complete blank about what even made them special, but I’ll be disappointed because they were good.
I miss org-mode but as my life became more mobile-phone-centric, it stopped working for me. I ultimately ended up replacing it with two things: Todoist for task management and Obsidian for notetaking.
Maybe the difference is that I use Obsidian for basically two things: keeping track of things that have happened (meeting notes, design decisions, debug sessions) and for things that are a work in progress (software projects at work and for fun, home renovation plans, things that temporally are going to evaporate from my brain before they’re done). It’s a tool that lets me remember what I was talking to people about last week, and a tool for picking up the project I was working on last month. And it syncs great to my phone and iPad Pro for when I’m out of the house.
I haven’t ever gotten to appreciate Obsidian’s task management stuff but Todoist tickles my brain just right for that.
I keep a weekly folder where I toss notes in My todo list exists here my performance log for employees
Unfortunately, most people don’t refer back to it and would wait for someone to do it as part of the spec or project tasks assigned by the Project Manager.
However, I love taking notes in meetings using graphs, arrows, boxes with text, etc. Sometimes, I use an iPad with the Pencil, but I prefer a pen on Paper. This one is usually the one that gets shared, and people seem to like it for understanding the context or for referring back to what they heard during meetings in a simpler, yet faster/easier way.
My methods are inspired by Dan Roam’s Books. I browse/re-read the books pretty often. https://www.danroam.comhe
I do care about how files are stored, felt trapped with OneNote proprietary format, and seeing what happens to Evernote, now care even more.
More recently, Andrej Karparthy succinctly captured what's great about Obsidian: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And with the new LLM powered, I find having tight control over files to be extremely powerful
Thank you kepano!
You can also use it to ask questions like "which of my business ideas might have legs?"
Google search in Gmail continues to just work.
But also I want something better than email, so I've been a happy obsidian user for a while now.
I even built my own “second brain” tool to make my own writing absolutely frictionless.
A dump of all files in one folder is the only thing that keeps me sane. I do not want to sort.
Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.
Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.