An Introduction to Obsidian

Obsidian is a great note-taking program. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to take notes and do other knowledge-work for themselves.

Why Obsidian?

Obsidian allows you to work on local markdown files. This is great for a variety of reasons. Markdown is an open format, you can use it in a variety of other apps. Your Obsidian vault is just a group of notes and folders. And since everything you do is saved locally on your device also, you own your files, you can decide what to do with them. You are protected from enshittification.

Obsidian is powerful. It works great for writing content, for creating content that is interlinked with other things you are working on, e.g. you can create links to notes using [[ ]].

Obsidian allows you to use it how you want, make it fit into your use-case. You can find or create plugins for features you need. There’s a large community.

The desktop app of Obsidian works great, just like the mobile app, and there’s no limits in its features on either version.

• Obsidian’s CEO also wrote about why file over app is great.
• I wrote a more detailed comparison of Notion vs Obsidian, it should give you a better idea of what Obsidian is good at compared to other note-taking applications.

Rules to keep in mind

When you look up content about Obsidian, it gets complicated. It’s fine to explore what is possible with such a program, what system and use-cases people have for it, but set a limit. Explore, and then critically think about what you really need. Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious.

Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things.

How I use Obsidian

I use Obsidian for:

Content Creation: Writing blog posts and my monthly email newsletter.Knowledge Management: Collecting, summarizing, and preparing information (using a “bottom-up” approach).Project Management: Managing personal projects and life aspects like health.Tracking Media: Collecting information on books, video games, and YouTube videos. (Obsidian Bases are great!)

I avoid custom themes. I try to use as few plugins as possible. Obsidian has “core plugins”, features which are already built into Obsidian by the Obsidian team, and “community plugins”, plugins made by the community.

I value a simple long-lasting system. So I use a system inspired from Zettelkasten and Evergreen notes, bottom-up instead of top-down. I wrote in more detail about my full Obsidian vault setup here and go into detail on how to implement the bottom-up approach for note-taking here.

Keep in mind, you don’t need any of this though. You can just create folders and put your notes in there, if you already have a system that works for you, do that.

More about Obsidian

Syncing & Back-ups

I sync my Obsidian vault using Google Drive (Desktop on Windows, DriveSync on Android) and back it up to GitHub from time to time.

I wrote about this setup in detail, and compared it to other ways to sync Obsidian in another post: How to sync Obsidian

Graph-view & Canvas

Obsidian has a cool graph view that often gets shared on social media, but in everyday use it’s not that useful, I rarely use it.

Obsidian has an infinite canvas feature as well, which can be quite cool to visualise your notes, but I feel like it could use a bit more love, I only use it from time to time.

Similar tools

I use Notion for collaborative content/databases (Kanban) and Logseq for short daily notes/journaling.

There are some other note-taking applications which are high quality that I want to mention here, even though I don’t use them as I am happy with my current setup: Capacities, Octarine, SilverBullet, SiYuan, AnyType, Affine.