Obsidian — Taking notes to a new level

This article is going to take a different turn than my normal ones, this one is going to cover an application that I have been using for a while to take notes. I am not one that is into the whole Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)space, I just want to take notes and jot down my thoughts so that I can find them again!

I am not a daily note taker, in fact I am a very horrible note taker. I am the one that can’t take notes during a call or meeting otherwise I totally lose the plot of why I am there. So I madly scribble/type after the call to jot down the pertinent bits and move to the next one.

I have tried quite a number of different applications to capture my notes, from OneNote (multiple times), Evernote, generic note app (think Notepad++, Atom, etc), mind-mapping tools and even physical notebooks. None of these have stuck for one reason or another.

Then I found Obsidian about two years ago and it has changed everything for me and my organization. I am not sure if it is the simplicity of the notes or the ability to link my notes together or what, but it works for me.

A Few things that set Obsidian apart

While there are likely many things that could go in the list, these are the most relevant for me.

It’s just plain text in a folder really

When I tried to use OneNote before on multiple occasions if I would want to move to a new PC, share a note or leave a job the transition out was not straight forward. However, Obsidian stores all of your notes in plaintext files in a folder on your computer and folders in Obsidian are just directories in that folder. Nothing fancy, just markdown files that you can read in any text editor or markdown reader. Yes markdown might not be second nature for some, but with just a little bit of learning you can quickly be an expert.

Linking

I think the biggest draw to Obsidian really might have been the linking! You can link all of your notes together and this I have found is extremely helpful. Many times I am working on something that is pertinent to something else or a new feature we are adding to a base function and how awesome would it be to be able to link those…