Throughout my life I have always been a note-taker, and I have tried several note taking apps like Notion, OneNote, Evernote and many others. While some of them do a great job, but none of them ever satisfied my objective!
What is my objective as a note-taker? 📔
- have a central repository containing all my notes
- easy navigation between notes to waste less time
- should be easy to learn and adapt (I never want to waste hours learning the app just to take notes)
- links between notes in a way that helps me connect concepts
- easily accessible, I do not want a cloud sync feature which takes hours to load
Enter Obsidian.md
Guess what? Obsidian got all of these and yet it is free to use and customize as you want! Plus your data gets stored locally in .md files so they are private!
How to effectively use Obsidian?
- keep your workflow simple and efficient to use, while the obsidian UI is great to use, I prefer to use neovim to take notes as it is easily accessible from my terminal and super quick!
- the PARA method: it is a note taking method which I am current using and does the job pretty well, check out para for learning more about it (in short it advices to keep all your stuff in these 4 folders - projects, areas, resources, and archives)
- always use the obsidian link feature to link each note with atleast one other note that you think is related and might help you connect things in the future! Even if
you currently do not have a note that is related to it, you can still link it just use the
[[<note-name>]]to link a note to another and a wonderful graph gets generated too when they are linked with one another!
- To backup notes use the obsidian git to backup all your data into a private repo in github, you can also opt for obsidian sync (but it is a paid plan)
Obsidian provides tons of customizable features and community plugins that you can use to suit your needs, some of the plugins I use are:
- Obsidian git
- Templater
- Explorer
and that's a workflow that can easily get you started with obsidian and customize it as you like!
~aniket