I have used Obsidian for quite some time, but I’ve never quite “gotten” it in the sense that some people do. It’s like emacs for some people, they use it for everything. I mostly open it, scrawl a few notes, and then forget about it for a while - at least that’s been my experience with it in the last few months. I do use it for a few things consistently - tracking my reading and writing my blog posts, but other than that I just scrawl things down every once in a while. I’ll go through these phases where I want to restructure, but it never goes anywhere.
Then I read Steph Ango’s post “How I use Obsidian”. Mind you, I’ve read this post in the past. Something clicked this time. (I also didn’t realize that Steph is Obsidian’s CEO until after it clicked, but that counts for something I would think.)
What prompted this: I was on the hunt for a task management solution and came across Tududi. Just another dud, ultimately, but it had promise. One thing I’ve been frustrated at is the fact that my notes and todos are in separate systems. I have to transcribe anything from my Todoist inbox into Obsidian if it needs to be in my documentation or notes. I don’t do this very often. It’s hard to find notes I’ve taken after the fact, which defeats the purpose of having a PKB. (When working on this project, I found several duplicates because I couldn’t find the original note where I had scrawled down how to do something.) The other thing that’s caused me annoyance is everything in Todoist is treated as a task to be checked off. It’s the quickest way to get something off my mind and find it later, so I’ve been using it, but it doesn’t feel right. I have several projects that aren’t “todos” and it feels like I’m hacking Todoist’s purpose. I’m fine with hacks, but since it’s not a core feature, it’s not really supported, and hard to keep organized - but I’ve put up with it, because it integrates with the rest of my system enough.
Anyway, what I liked about Tududi (and this is what got the wheels turning) was the fact that there were markdown notes alongside todos. Adding something to the inbox doesn’t immediately make it a task to be checked off - instead, it is a thought that needs to be organized. Whether that becomes a task or a note is up to the user, and that made a lot of sense to me. I wondered - can I go back to the drawing board with Obsidian? Especially with the new bases feature, I wonder if this could work.
A few things clicked while looking into Tududi and coming across Steph’s vault template. One, the idea that everything is a note in Obsidian - much like the idea that everything is a file in the Linux world. What I mean by this is I should err on the side of a file being standalone if it has a self-contained idea or object. Metadata determines what type of note it is. If I could treat tasks this way in Obsidian instead of inline like I had in the past, this could work. And a workflow was there - create a unique note to braindump during the day, and come back to organize later (renaming, adding metadata, etc).
Second was Steph’s vault organization. Using wikilinks in list-style frontmatter had never remotely occurred to me, and it made so much sense. Steph is also allergic to the folder structure in Obsidian - when you use categories and other metadata, a note can live (and be discoverable) in several places. When you rely on the folder structure, it lives in one place only, and is a pain in the ass to find. Removing the overhead of questions like “Where do I file this?”, the monotony of moving a file to a triple-nested subfolder, and the headache of finding a file in a nested subfolder - was music to my ears.
All this is built on a few key features of Obsidian - unique notes, bases, daily notes, and templates for structure, quick switcher and command palette for navigation.
What proceeded was a week-long (and still going) obsession with redoing my vault to enable this kind of note-taking. I’m still figuring things out, but it’s been great so far. I also put tasks to the side for now. I can revisit them once I have a foundation of using my vault this way. Maybe in future I can write a more coherent post with my rules, the general structure, category and note types, etc.
As of right now, I’ve already started capturing bookmarks, thoughts, excerpts, books, recipes, meditations, projects… I can see all of these types in their own view, and I can create a new category on the fly without the note having to exist, then go back and add the structure + template later. It’s so cool - but more importantly, it’s functional. This approach enables me to take notes quickly, spend a little time at end of day/week/month organizing them, and thus find them later.
Oh, and I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Obsidian Sync for this. If my data needs to live on someone else’s server, this service is honestly the best I could ask for.
From here, I’m working on a couple next steps.
First is Obsidian Web Clipper to save time when grabbing things that I want to put in my vault to track, quote, read later, etc. I’ve gotten pretty far with these already, I’ll probably make a separate post with my templates up for grabs.
Second is trying tasks out with the TaskNotes plugin - taking the idea of “everything is a note” to its logical conclusion. My main concerns are clutter and scaling - I have 36k tasks in Todoist since about 2022. Without having done a deep-dive, my initial thinking is that I will end up keeping anything that needs to be a one-off task, reminder, or event (date, time, and place) in Tasks.org with CalDAV sync to my Baikal server, and keeping the rest in Obsidian.
EOF