'💎06' Versatility of Obsidian and why I like it
There was a post on Reddit asking for advice if Obsidian was right for them and as I was responding it made me realize just how much Obsidian can do. I thought I would share my response and start to give examples of how I do certain things in Obsidian that might increase the productivity or workflow for you.
First off. I have adhd. That will explain some of the following.
My organization systems tend to start off OK and then blow up and die.
So far I have:
7,000+ bookmarks across several profiles
…
Hundreds of sort-of-organized notion pages. I don't even bother trying to organize them anymore, I just dump and search.
Thousands upon thousands of google keep notes.
10 trello boards with hundreds of cards (this is the closest to organized I have)
Many many excel spreadsheets (google sheets) were I tried to add projects and rankings via google forms.
If you like that style Obsidian with daily note and dataview are going to be your best friend. I used to have a million and one asdf.txt files that I jotted things down in and abandoned. With obsidian my homepage is the daily note where I can create a new note and from that note I add a tag and write whatever. Then, I can go to a dataview query and see all of my notes with that tag. I now have an insane number of ways to retrieve notes and I’m only using the Dataview third party plugin [for information retrieval]. I can use: the daily note, the title search, the contents search, the tags sidebar, the dataview query, referenced notes and on occasion block references. This is all in a non-hierarchical fashion so I never need to dig into folders. Not to mention I actually use maybe 40 odd plugins and Obsidian is still blazing fast with over 5000+ files (notes, images, documents, files, etc). So yes, I think Obsidian is right for you if you want to put everyone in the ultimate platform because I haven’t even started talking about how Obsidian can be a bookmark manager
I immediately remember having that same feeling of being bogged down with Notion where I ended up having sort-of-organized pages. I tried to keep a database of tourist locations as well as media that I had consumed and it felt like I needed to spend 5 minutes per entry. It looked great, but it made notetaking unfun. Ali Abdaal (a productivity guru who charges a good amount for a course that clones his style but without his good looks and captivating stare) loves Notion and he recently had a course on Skillshare about it. However, there’s a clear distinction between his use cases and ours. He is using it as a CMS for organizing his team and probably has one of his employees do the paperwork (processing the notes) for him where as we are doing it for PKM and are mostly riding solo. If so, that means he’s perfectly okay having someone spend 5 minutes slogging over a note’s metadata whereas it is unacceptable for us. Obsidian can almost look as good, but it’s a helka lot easier to manage notes. Here’s a list of Obsidian related posts that are on the pipeline:
Notion is both flexible and inflexible
Obsidian's flexibility is a key feature over Notion 'notetaking'
Obsidian is better than a bookmark manager
Why I’m moving away from Interstitial Journaling (Logseq)
How my note taking has changed over the years
Standardized notes ‘notetaking’ - Obsidian+Templater
Dataview basics and snippets
I’m only realizing now that snippets are a cheat code
Dataview with style
Galleries, cards and more
Using Obsidian without Obsidian