Overview

Obsidian is a note organizer. I have been using the very basic features for a few months but only recently delved deeper. It’s been game changing. In this post I will lay out a quick list of the resources I used to learn.

For someone who likes to keep notes and revisit them, Obsidian can be extremely pleasing to use. Having a blog is a good alternative but Obsidian differs in a couple of fundamental reasons:

  • it’s easy to use and aesthetically pleasing
  • it allows for seamless linking between notes
  • it’s as simple or as complex as the user desires

I think the best way to describe it is a personal notebook interface.

I started using Obsidian to keep random tabs on ideas. Then I started linking them leaving placeholders for anything I meant to follow up on. I started treating it as a digital addendum to my physical notebook, creating notes for anything digital I wanted to keep for future reference. Soon enough I had a list of notes containing coding snippets, articles, quotes, video links, recipes, and instructions. Then I started using it as a todo list as well. But more recently I discovered how to use it a productivity booster in everything else I do. Here are some use cases:

Write blog posts

Be able to create a blog post using a template. Use the templater plugin.

Meeting Notes

Create notes for meetings and be able to search them later. This could be achieved by logging notes with tags, or by using metadata. If use tags make sure to use tag-wrangler plugin Can also sync it up to a calendar plugin to keep all notes organized and connected to a calendar.

Later on I can create a note that retrieves information from the meetings with the datataview plugin.

Special Events

Connect notes to a special physical event so you can find later This could be notes from a special event like a workshop or a hackathon. Can use a special tag for this.

Learning

Organize notes as I learn something new. Connect and refactor as I go along.

  • Note new things that are interesting
  • come back to connect them to existing notes

Organizing them in a concise manner would be a learning goal, but also could be shared on the web using Obsidian Publish if one wishes to “learn in public”.

Keep notes from interesting meetings

Keep notes from meeting and connect them to profiles and other notes. See this video for a great example of how to organize meetings and profiles using templater plugin and datataview plugin.

Resources

Nicole van der Hoeven has a ton of excellent resources on Obsidian, such as this video

Linkingyourthinking is a great youtube channel with a lot of good info as well.