What Obsidian Made Me Think About

So this is another post about Obsidian because I cannot talk enough about how much this has helped me. Today I'm talking about what I've thought about in the time I've been using this software, and why you should be checking it out.

Writing Seamlessly

The first reason is that I've noticed I've been writing a lot more seamlessly and fluidly since I started using this app. There's a few reasons for this but the most important ones I've found are:

1. I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard to type and to make things italic, bold or even to make lists like this one. It can all be done as I'm writing

2. I never use my mouse when I'm writing a blog post, which means I'm nowhere near as likely to be distracted and start checking out other apps.

3. The fullscreen mode helps with this, I have it set up so I can see the time in the lower right corner still (to make sure I don't spend all day writing, and occasionally break to eat). But I'm not distracted by notifications anymore.

4. Markdown and templates make it so much easier to draft blogs. I don't have to search for my outro to paste it in, I can just simply use the shortcuts I've set up and it's there.

This is one of the biggest draws to me. I have my Obsidian vault set up to be in dark mode, 16px font and currently with the Atom theme (by Kognise). I have CSS snippets to add highlights to certain tags automatically and it's perfect for how I need it.

It's so easy to set up in a way that will help you to write and with as little interruptions as possible.

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

What I'm writing

I also think about what I'm writing a lot more with this.

Rather than having to go between research, open multiple folders and documents on my laptop I can contain everything in one place and filter through information much more smoothly. Everything can be viewed within the app and I can create links or embed sections of documents for easier reading.

That's how I wrote this blog - I had my brainstorm page, and used some of my daily journaling "blocks" that I had embedded to fill it out and inspire my writing.

I also find it easier to structure my posts using this. I no longer over-organise my posts into very niche areas where I want to write much more since I have four headings, and then subheadings, and sub-subheadings and so on.

I can also shift about content I've written easily and see a preview of what I'm writing next to where I'm writing it. This helps me to think about how the text looks to other people.

ObsidianMD logo

Learning More

And perhaps the best thing about Obsidian, in my mind, is how much it's inspired me to learn.

Since downloading this I've been going through the Codecademy courses on HTML, CSS, Javascript and SQL. I would have never tried any of these things properly before, just learned enough to do whatever it was on my website (only using HTML) and then given up.

I used one of the plugins the other day and made my first SQL query to pull information from my daily notes because I was curious about something. It worked and I couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the day. I was so proud that I'd put what I was learning into practice with Obsidian.

The plugins are immensely useful and while you can use Obsidian without them, and you don't need to learn HTML and CSS and Javascript and SQL ... I've found that it's interesting to me. And it's something I've always been interested in but never imagined I could do.

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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.