Love it. I try to follow an absolutely minimal process. Even more minimal than this.
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.
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.
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.
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.
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.
Half of my tasks are in my people folder and half my people are in my tasks folder and it all works out fine in Obsidian.
I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.
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.
I tried Obsidian to build a “second brain”. But eventually just reverted back to notes on my iPad (handwritten) and Vim (markdown) for typed notes.
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.
I tried it several times and the one thing that got it to stick for me was having a structure to the markdown. I have an AST parser for markdown body grammar and validate the frontmatter. The structure helps me keep things sane and organized because my brain is all over the place. Beyond that, unlike OP I attach these schemas to folders in my vault per schema.
This is a project that's always on my mind that I never take the time to flesh out. I can't put my finger on the scope. I don't know if I want a full, Johnny Decimaled PKM platform for my entire life, or topical, dense information about things that interest me.
Obsidian is amazing on my desktop environments but I shared the same sentiment with you, on mobile I use Apple Notes and transpose to Obsidian if its worth doing so...
Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.
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.
I like the desktop app, but the android app is such ass. It's bad enough that I wonder why they even bother.
Same, all projects get a .notes folder where plain text goes. Home directory gets a .notes folder also. It helps to have good command over text based search tools.
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.
Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/
Don’t over complicate this everyone.
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
I use Calibre to maintain my PDFs. I've even got my taxes in there, but have been thinking recently that they don't belong in a library and probably should just be printed and stored with other important things like passports and birth certificates.
But every PDF I download, ebook, academic article, it goes in Calibre and out of my Downloads path.
> This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.
besides norton commander and its clones
How I use Obsidian
It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.
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.
I use Obsidian, but would never use someone else's Vault template; as these are script files, you neverknow what can be in there without reviewing this. Just a friendly reminder to be cautious
I really want to like obsidian but it’s just unusable (for me)
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 ;(
> a bit more lightweight
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".
It’s a BYOK so the ai is optional. (And if you really don’t want it it’s a package in the open source app that can easily be pulled out) Since it’s markdown and on filesystem you can just edit your notes with Claude code if you want similar to obsidian.
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
I Use Workflowy. The features it adds over plain text/markdown are worth the slight added complexity. I wish it was cheaper and supported tables, but I'll never go back to non-outlined notes.
How does it compare to notion
offline first, so much faster, no terrible pricing model. Hugely better in my opinion
ever since I first heard about Obsidian, the vibe I get is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Every use case I get pitched, there's a better solution, or it's a "problem" that doesn't need to be solved.
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.
It's literally just a folder of markdown notes with a handy search and file list if that's what you want it to be. That's all I use it for. I think the hyper-organisation stuff is more of a hobby. It's not about productivity it's enjoyable for its own ends.