Obsidian - A Quick First Look

You may not have heard of it before, and that's okay! I'm here today to tell you exactly why you should at least try something like this out if you're a student. I use Obsidian as my Keeper of Notes much in the same way other people use Evernote and OneNote.

I actually moved everything I had in Evernote, OneNote and Notion over to it earlier and have been loving it. I can organise things well, link between notes, tag them and do everything I need to or want to do.

What is Obsidian?

"A knowledgebase that works on local markdown"

"A second brain, for you, forever"

"The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same. In Obsidian, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph."

The quotes above are taken from Obsidian's website.

Essentially Obsidian is an app that helps you to create and keep track of notes, ideas, projects and more. You can link between notes by using [[internal links]], allowing you to jump between ideas instead of just relying on folders and tags.

It allows you to work in a non-linear and non-hierarchical fashion.

How do you use it?

Obsidian uses Markdown (if you've used Discord then you'll be familiar with how to make text bold or italic with *, this is markdown).

To make a link to another note you simply type [[ put the note title in here and then finish with more ]]. This means you don't have to stop, reach for your mouse, highlight text, move your mouse up to the top of the screen and click on the B or I or the link icon. It can all be done straight from your keyboard.

You start with one note, write your ideas and then go from there.

Can you show me an example of a page?

Yeah sure!

I'm using my notes on the Cirque du Freak series as a place to test things out and experiment.

Image 1: What the text you type will look like

Image 2&3: What the display will look like

So what makes Obsidian better?

• Firstly I love the dark mode and ability to have the window I'm working on being semi-transparent. This helps me to focus for longer.

• I don't have to stop typing to make things bold or italic or link to notes (and specific sections of notes too!)

• The community - I have seen great communities built up around Notion and Evernote usage. I've asked my fair share of questions to people who use Obsidian and been amazed at how helpful people are with answering and making sure I understand what I'm doing and why it's working since this involves markdown that I'm not as familiar with.

• Community plugins - some of these have made it so much easier to make notes.

  • I have a literature note template that I can access when I hit alt+e and prompts me to collect all of the information I have in easy to read and understand chunks.

  • I have a template that lets me make quick notes so I don't have to leave whatever I'm working on

  • I have a to-do list available in a sidebar that I can open and collapse whenever I want

• Ability to set up and use templates

• Daily Notes! This prompts me to make a new note each day and to keep coming back to the projects I'm working on or to journal and so on. I then archive these in their own folder and can look back at the progress I'm making

• Tags and links are their own distinct things

  • I can use tags for the note type and similar things to that

    • I have #wip, #complete, #litnote, #chapternote, #characters, and then tags for the genre of book I'm reading.

  • I can use links entirely for linking between ideas, I don't have to worry about navigating through tags.

• Linking to specific blocks (paragraphs) so I don't have to look through an entire note to find the bit of relevant information. I can just link straight to it.

It does take a bit of time to learn and there will always be new things to learn with this, which is a bit of a downside if you're wanting to just start writing and not have to think about it at all. You can just write basic, text only notes and not worry about making things bold or italic or adding links but the real magic with Obsidian happens through these links.

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.