Background

I have been using the note-taking software, Obsidian, for a little more than a year, and it has been a major quality of life upgrade for me. Prior to this, I used Evernote for several years, thanks to the recommendation of Tim Ferriss. Initially, I was a happy customer, but over the years, the subscription costs mounted and the quality of the app degraded. I tested Joplin and Notion but they proved inadequate for my needs. Finally, I landed on Obsidian, finding it through the videos of No Boilerplate. My usage pattern has settled down enough over the past year for me to be able to discuss it.

I have used physical journals and notebooks for as long as I can remember, and continue to do so, if only as an excuse to use my fountain pens— perhaps a topic to make a separate note about. However, digital notes have a major advantage: searchability. Using a note-taking software with a good indexing/search feature keeps your writings from getting buried in the digital landfill that you will inevitably create. Knowing you have a reliable system for storing and retrieving your writings goes a long way in encouraging you to write, and think, better.

All notes in Obsidian are Markdown files. Thus, any application that can open text files can open your Obsidian notes. This shields you from vendor lockdown or a format deprecation. Your notes are future-proof. Regardless of the direction Obsidian goes in the future, your notes remain accessible to you.

Here Is How I Use Obsidian

Overview

  1. I have the app on my laptop, desktop, and mobile. My vault is synced across all my devices using Syncthing.
  2. I keep the folder structure as flat as possible. All the notes go in a single folder called Notes. I have folders for Calendar, Attachments (images and other attachments go here), Templates, Scripts, Resources (contains symlinks to larger PDF files stored elsewhere), and Periodic.
  3. I avoid using folders as the main organization tool. Instead, I use tags and frontmatter properties such as ’topics’ and ‘subjects’.
  4. Tags, at the top level, are for content types, not for subjects or topics. Some examples of the tags I use are ‘annotation’, ‘blog’, ‘deprecated’, ‘remember’, ‘revisit’, ‘handwritten’, and ‘quote’.
  5. Subjects include ’economics’, ‘computing-and-programming’, and so on. Keep this limited to a handful. Traditionally, this would be the names of folders in a folder-based hierarchy structure. The advantage of using subjects as a frontmatter property is that a note can have multiple subjects.
  6. Topics can include anything: ‘configuration’, ’taxation’, ‘adam-smith’, ‘syncthing’, etc. Have as many as required.
  7. I have a script that converts subjects and topics into second-level tags (like ‘subject/economics’ and ’topic/syncthing’).
  8. I use a number of core and community plugins (see below). Also, note that I do not store personally identifiable notes/materials in the Obsidian vault; I don’t need to trust community plugins that way.

Plugins

  1. I have most of the core plugins activated. They are quite self-explanatory; I will not get into them much here. The Bases and Command Palette plugins are particularly useful.
  2. The Obsidian ecosystem benefits immensely from community contributions. The core system can remain lightweight while the community plugins help extend functionality beyond anything currently offered by other note-taking apps. I use these community plugins.
    • Colored Tags for making the tags look pretty.
    • Dataview helps treat the vault like a database. I can use SQL-like commands to query my notes. The Bases core plugin has taken over most of what I used this plugin for.
    • Front Matter Timestamps manages my frontmatter properties for created and modified dates.
    • Full Calendar replaces my other calendar apps.
    • Harper is a spell-checker.
    • Notebook Navigator creates an Evernote-like interface.
    • Omnisearch for searching through my vault.
    • Periodic Notes is ordinarily used for journaling, but I use it for task management (with the help of Tasks and Templater).
    • Reminder for hour-based alerts.
    • Sentinel for updating created, modified, and opened dates in the frontmatter.
    • Tasks for task management.
    • Templater for creating templates. I have templates for new notes and blogs.
    • Text Snippets for replacing a pattern with another.
  3. I recommend keeping the number of plugins down to only those you really need.

Scripts

I have Python scripts to help me create rollups, convert frontmatter subjects and topics into tags, format notes into blogs, etc. There might exist plugins to do these tasks, but this is the workflow I have established.

Blogging

Obsidian, Hugo, and Cloudflare are integrated as part of my blogging workflow. I have a blog template that mainly creates the frontmatter the way I need it to be. I draft my post. Once I place the appropriate tags in the frontmatter (‘blog’ and ‘published’), I run a script to format the post in the manner I need for Hugo and create the necessary folders. Then I manually upload the blog folder to Cloudflare to deploy this blog.

Resources

  1. See Getting Started with Obsidian for the official documentation.
  2. The YouTube channel, No Boilerplate, has several excellent videos on the topic: Introduction, Capture, Process, For Writers.