What is Obsidian!? Obsidian is a markdown based note-taking tool. It leverages wiki-like linking of notes to connect concepts, docs, notes, and even sketches. With many plugins its very malleable for any purpose you might want to use it for.
Why should I care?
Obsidian, like many note taking apps helps you organize your thoughts. Personally, I have liked Obsidian the most but know many people who use Notion, Miro, Logseq, Evernote.
Linked Notes
Notes are created just as easily as writing in a new file, but you can easily link files together, for example, I have been working on my LLD’s for TEZ this past week. I’ve frequently been writing in multiple files for general notes, and linking other service docs’ information for reference. This non-linear note taking is much easier to work with due to how the brain deals with information.
Creating these links is done with Double Brackets to the file-name youre linking. If you haven’t written this file yet, if you click on that link, Obsidian will create that document for you. Creating these links also lets you see what notes you have that reference your current file. This builds a web of information that is easy to parse and lets you view relevant docs very easily.
Obsidian can also use these links to create a Graph View
Your data is your own / Lightweight / Customizable
Since all the files are written in simple markdown, if anything ever happens to Obsidian, all the data is still there and can be rendered in any markdown viewer (without the concept/graph linkage) Obsidian is also built to be extremely lightweight, which means it can be as complex as you want it to be. There are tons of Core Plugins such as Daily Notes, to make use of, and tons of community plugins to tinker with (Excalidraw, Dataview, Advanced Tables Toolbar, Tasks, Templater, Git) The customization doesn’t end with data manipulation either, there are plenty of visual customizations called ‘Themes’ which can be further customized with your own css to potentially further improve the visual look to your desired tastes. Personally, I use Velocity for a modern, polished look.
Daily Notes
This in specific is the main advantage I take away from using Obsidian. I take a note every day, on the things I am actively doing. I link docs I’m writing, services I’m working on, People I talk to about important things, conversation notes, anything I want to keep track of. This is making it easy to go back and reference things I’ve worked on, what I did, decisions I made. Importantly, I also have a direct day to point to for when I worked on something.
Graph View
Its simply very cool to see the web of information you’ve built. I’ve been using Obsidian in multiple differe ways, for work, personal organization, D&D. And each vault has an interesting graph of information. This graph view also makes it easy to see what notes are heavily relied on by other notes, creating natural gravity centers for things that are ‘important’ to you.