This is a post about how I use the note-taking software known as Obsidian.

First, the caveats. You don’t have to use Obsidian to enjoy the pleasure and therapeutic effects of personal writing. Other software might be better for your needs. Or paper is all that is necessary. Whatever works for you, works for you.

I am sharing this post because how we use our computers isn’t easily observable. As The Social Life of Information described some years ago, approaches to tasks that are readily observed are more likely to be learned and adopted than tasks that are tackled alone.

Obsidian is software that I genuinely I enjoy using.

I picked Obsidian for my note-taking needs largely for three reasons

• Obsidian notes are in plain-text Markdown with a clear file structure
  • This means if the company that maintains Obsidian goes under, I can still read my files. Similarly, if I decide that I want to use another product, it is easy to migrate my notes to elsewhere. As it’s World Backup Day, today I made two copies of each of my Obsidian vaults: one to an external drive and other in cloud storage.
    
• Obsidian is not a cloud hosted service
  • Obsidian notes are hosted on your personal device. I pay for Sync because I like to access my notes from my work computer, home computer, and my personal devices. Of note, you choose to have end-to-end encryption of your syncing. You can also pay an additional fee to have a “vault” of notes published online.
    
• Obsidian is free.
  • It is supported by subscribers and not venture capital.

Also Obsidian is Canadian 🇨🇦 .

How I Track My Days Using Obsidian

Most of my Obsidian use is log-keeping. I have a work-related vault and a home-related vault. Each year, in each vault, I create a new document called log which I add to each day. I add the date as a heading at the top of the page and then add bullet points as I go about my day. Sometimes I don’t document my day until the evening or even the next day. Sometimes there’s a couple points. Sometimes I go into a lot of detail. Sometimes, I forget to add anything at all.

To encourage review, for some of my vaults I add a date and a “on this day” tag. By using this particular format, I can easily browse my past notes.

There are many, many others ways to use Obsidian to journal your working days. You can use Obsidian Daily Notes feature. You can customize your Daily Notes template with built-in checklists to fill in as you crush your day. For me, a single page that grows as the year progresses is really all I need because I supplement this log in several different ways.

The main way I use Obsidian is as my own personal wiki. If I think I have some information that might likely to return to it later, then I will create a note specifically to capture it. Occasionally I find redundant notes and when I do, I try to make the time to consolidate these notes.

For work, I think it is really important to capture essential information into a something that is outside of email. I think this is a good practice because you can easily be shut out of email for a short or long period of time. Also, I think the act of keeping a person wiki is very good for personal sense-making. Personally, I don’t spend much time categorizing these notes or putting them into designated folders, or linking them together as I can usually find what I need either by search or by scrolling through the list of my notes.

This is how these two systems work together. I use my daily log to find the when behind an issue (e.g. when did I first notice that the public printers were having trouble printing Supreme Court decisions).

When I have to find the details about how I solved an issue in the past, I will go to my note for the topic (Photocopying and Printing) and hopefully I find that I’ve documented the problem in the past for future me.

Dynamic Task Lists in Obsidian

Whenever I am writing in my daily log or in a note, and I decide that there’s a something that want to return to later, I will create a task and add a hashtag like #project or #finances or #shopping at the end of it. Like so:

With the Tasks community plugin, the Dataview community plugin and these four lines of code…

… I can embed this dynamic list into any number of pages.

When it’s time to head to the grocery store, I can look at the Shopping page:

Once the task is marked as completed, it is crossed out on the original list and it disappears from the dynamic Shopping page.

Other Obsidian Features that I actually Use

Hotkeys

Hotkeys are great. I only use three but I use them on the regular.

Obsidian Canvas

Obsidian comes with the very simple way to create mind-maps and flowcharts of documents or concepts. With it, you can make an org chart in minutes.

Obsidian Web Clipper / Pinboard Sync

I have been using the Pinboard bookmarking service for almost 10 years now and I have over 25,000 bookmarks saved there. I have backed up and regularly sync these bookmarks into a separate Obsidian vault thanks to the community plugin, Pinboard Sync.

While I have a ten-year ingrained habit that makes it hard to break away from using Pinboard, I have found that do enjoy using Obsidian‘s Web Clipper when I want to capture the images and text of a webpage. Using Web Clipper, I’ve been gradually archiving the contents of all my published blog posts and newsletter entries into a single vault.

Theme of Choice

I chose different theme colours for my different vaults so I have a visual cue to remind me which vault I’m working in. I like using the Things theme because you can add flair to your tasks list, which to be honest, I always forget to to do.

This leads to me to last caveat, which I stuck at the end of this post: Obsidian does not have a wysiwyg text editor, which means you need to learn and use Markdown for best results. If you are like me, you might want to create a Markdown Cheat Sheet to remind yourself how to make external links.

I have one in my Obsidian notebook.