Three months with Obsidian

A note-taking tool review. A clear yes!

Do we need another article about note-taking? Hm. What do we need? Not completely sure; I am selling and flexing Obsidian today. Are you buying?

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I usually wrote in notebooks but paper is not searchable. When digitalisation became modern, I reactivated Evernote and split my paper documents in keep-shit and throwaway-shit. Evernote served as a searchable archive for my scanned keep-shit.

I like to analyse my fixed costs, ok? As Evernote is pricey for keep-shit only, I researched myself into Joplin, an open source alternative. Migration was easy and Joplin served me well.

But I kept seeing people raving about Obsidian. I ignored them, and happy with Joplin made more and more notes, mostly ideas from the newsletters I read and dreamed I will need in my unicorn, he he.

But then I paused my unicorn idea and had extra time, so I decided to test my future “second brain.” A promise of “a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.” Sounds like 70% of the users wear prescription glasses?

I tested Obsidian wearing my glasses and was sold. Local, free, fast and visualised! Ok, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a life changing experience. But cool.

Four reasons I am almost a fanboy:

1. It's extremely fast and powerful: search, creating notes, moving stuff, shortcuts; you can move around like it’s your own Wikipedia.

2. It stores notes locally. You can move your notes to whichever software supports markdown and avoid vendor lock-in, eh?

3. It enables linking of notes and this means great visualisations. Screenshots below. You can even play a time-lapse, a nice-to-have ego soothing feature. Concept of alias will show you all the notes with that word, so you can easily connect them. Pretty damn cool.

4. It has a great community with a lot of add-ons, themes and helpful people who likely wear prescription glasses.

The "hardest" part would be learning markdown, but you will pick up fast. Recently they released What You See Is What You Get editor, so it is even easier. I miss a direct scan of a documents and OCR in Evernote, but 🤷🏻‍♂️

Experience after three months

Notes can be useful, but also useless. Note-taking tools are probably the most valuable for academia and research. For randos like me their main value is to remember better and maybe get inspired down the road. Anyway:

• Thinking of how to organise my keep-shit and new notes made me anxious; I was questioning if it even makes sense to make notes. So far I did not stop.

• Keep it simple and start. Methods and structures are controversial anyhow; no wonder people make money teaching note-taking.

• Data dumps can be valuable, but they are also dangerous. Hoarding articles, links and concepts makes little sense if you never visit them again.

• What should be a note? Huh. Besides keep-shit and my own writing I store short summaries of things I read and would read again in a year, plus links to different useful pages and tools.

• I am a beginner; I got my base covered and now the question is if I will ever make it to the more advanced concept of Evergreen notes by Andy Matuschak.

Try it with this code: IGOR84

Just kidding, Obsidian is free; their plug&play sync will cost $96 per year. It has the best roadmap ever; make sure to check their privacy statement too! Questions? Let me know, I will be happy to help. For basic intro check this YouTube video by Nick Milo.

Flexshots aka screenshots

The famous Graph view. Everyone who has it flexes with it. Probably to demonstrate “look how many notes I made” like I am doing here. Besides flexing it’s useful to visualise your notes, to click around and to search visually.

Followed by “Look how many notes I made” related to Noah Smith. He writes well.

My homepage with folders on the left and linked mentions on the right. I am team folders and YYYY-MM-DD NOTE TITLE (but not always, as you can see above). Do whatever works for you!

That was it, my pitch for this great project. Get Obsidian here; hit that like button 👇 if it was useful; or drop a comment if the world clearly did not need another article about note-taking!

Check my other posts. You can also follow me on Twitter or check out my collection of excellent recipes. 👌