alt Hacker NewsHow I use Obsidian (2023)
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Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.
He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.
His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
The PKM pipeline is :
Discovering PM solutions upon entering the workforce and deciding to use them for your personal life.
Shortcomings drive you to discover PKM software like Notion and Obsidian.
Picking either one or the other.
Switching from Notion to Obsidian or vice versa.
Starting to write your own PKM.
There is no class of software more entropic because everyone's requirements are so specific to the individual.
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.
For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:
- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.
- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.
- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.
- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.
And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.
If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.
So pick the good ones you like and make your own.
For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.
Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]
Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.
I use the app for two things mainly: DnD DMing and sheet music. I think it’s deep but I mostly just make canvases and copy paste in images and then move those around to a useful shape. I put in tables, text, images, and all on canvases. I don’t use links really, I probably should but I use the known Folder structure to get to whichever canvas I’m working on.
Obsidian is very flexible, and what a lot of these "how I use Obsidian" tutorials miss is to give a reason why the person is actually using it the way they are using it. Seems like this guy is using it mostly to store meeting notes or journaling. Of the many influencery Obsidian tutorials on Youtube, 99% of them seem to be using it to keep notes for creating Obsidian tutorials.
Would be interesting to have differing perspectives from people with different problems and how they use it for those cases.
Don’t over complicate this everyone.
This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.
All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI.
I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I get lots of pdf’s and such so it’s all in one place.
Cool, end of speech. Peace out
I tried Obsidian to build a “second brain”. But eventually just reverted back to notes on my iPad (handwritten) and Vim (markdown) for typed notes.
I actually think Obsidian is a great tool, but I just need something as low friction as possible to quickly jolt something down. Vim and Goodnotes does the trick for me.
I tried Obsidian a couple of years ago when all those „Hack your brain with Obsidian“ videos were flooding YouTube, I even had a subscription.
Turns out my brain is beyond saving, while the program was pretty neat, having to have an extra window open was just beyond my attention span. Now I use a notebook, it is chaotic and has coffee strains but I actually use it.
I use yellow legal pads and 4x6" notecards... and probably ship more substantive writing than 96% of people on the planet.
Curious how people here are using obsidian when taking notes during meetings in the context of AI note taker. I find myself incapable of using features like links as I'm interacting with say a client. I've found AI note takers to be really powerful to help free my mind during meetings though.
Back when I was looking for a new PKM system, I remember a "competitor" (now irrelevant) of obsidian making fun via Quote tweet of the Files over app manifesto, saying something like "nobody cares about the way the notes are stored". Ironically, that mean-spirited tweet made me discover Obsidian, and I've adopted it since then as I strongly agree with the philosophy of sovereignty over the content by them being plain files.
I do care about how files are stored, felt trapped with OneNote proprietary format, and seeing what happens to Evernote, now care even more.
More recently, Andrej Karparthy succinctly captured what's great about Obsidian: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And with the new LLM powered, I find having tight control over files to be extremely powerful
Thank you kepano!
Having tried different systems since the days of Evernote, the _only_ thing that is consistently useful like obsidian is... emailing myself whatever info I have to look up later. I even used to do this for reminders.
Google search in Gmail continues to just work.
But also I want something better than email, so I've been a happy obsidian user for a while now.
Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/
I ended up copying Steph's layouts, I added some Github actions that pipe out files that have specific tags in them and create blog posts in another repo. It works very well for me.
Love it. I try to follow an absolutely minimal process. Even more minimal than this.
I even built my own “second brain” tool to make my own writing absolutely frictionless.
A dump of all files in one folder is the only thing that keeps me sane. I do not want to sort.
I Use Workflowy. The features it adds over plain text/markdown are worth the slight added complexity. I wish it was cheaper and supported tables, but I'll never go back to non-outlined notes.
My PKM is writing in Org Mode and never using any Org Mode features to look things up.
FYI, firing up Claude Code or Codex inside your Obsidian repo location is a game-changer
I tried Notion, Obsidian, and various other note taking tools before I came to accept that I am simply not a note taking person. I just don't see the value in it I suppose.
I use Emacs/org-mode to do the same and much more, without tying myself to specific third parties, but the point remains valid and largely ignored by most until recently: the heart of our information is plain text with potential binary attachments, and managing it as freely as possible, with search&narrow access and the ability to turn it into hypertext, to compute inside text etc is essential to "unlocking" or truly harnessing the power of the desktop computing. This model of personal computing has been denied for ages due to commercial interests in selling countless walled gardens that do only one thing, "UNIX-style", but without the IPC of the Unix CLI.
I use Obsidian, but would never use someone else's Vault template; as these are script files, you neverknow what can be in there without reviewing this. Just a friendly reminder to be cautious
ever since I first heard about Obsidian, the vibe I get is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Every use case I get pitched, there's a better solution, or it's a "problem" that doesn't need to be solved.
If you aren't a researcher in a field, why do you need personal knowledge management? Even when I learn a subject, I find just...taking a flat note file to be way better than all these Zettelkasten stuffs. It all feels very pomodoro to me. It is useful for some people, but influencers have hyped it up into the Grand Unified Solution.
Same with mind mapping. I don't see the benefit. Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it? Like...if it's an area I want more expertise, I'm already hyperfocused on it and remember everything. If I don't want expertise, I don't need PKM. I keep trying to use them, but it feels superfluous. Like I never have to refer back to it.
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I really want to like obsidian but it’s just unusable (for me)
So I built my own thats a bit more lightweight. Think nvalt meets markdown. thats native, iOS and Mac with I cloud sync, and open source.
Check it out if it sounds interesting!
iOS app is still in review ;(
The "messy but functional" approach is underrated. I've tried every PKM system under the sun - PARA, Zettelkasten, Johnny Decimal - and always ended up spending more time organizing than doing.
The breakthrough was realizing that capture friction matters more than organization. If you have to think about where to put a note, you won't capture it.
Now I dump everything in daily notes and let search + backlinks surface connections. The "junkyard folder" approach works because it removes the decision paralysis.
(Still haven't solved the "remember to actually check my notes" problem though. That's where automation helps - birthday reminders, follow-up prompts, etc. The real win is when your system bugs you, not the other way around.)