Obsidian — Personal Notebooking

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I like Obsidian a lot. It's essentially a personal journal and notebooking application, which lets you write in Markdown. Markdown is neat, simple, and very portable if I ever want to run away from Obsidian. Obsidian is pretty simple at core, although there are options, plugins, and other extensions that can make it as complex as you'd like.

I've tried standard word processor notebooking and Google Docs previously for keeping my digital notebooks. It's neat to have rich text formatting, but not-so-neat to have vendor lock-in and difficulties migrating and difficulties syncing across environments. Markdown-based documents can be much more easily transported.

How I Use Obsidian

Tech

  • I have two vaults: a tech vault kept in a private GitHub repo, and a personal vault kept in Google Drive. I keep them separate because I sync the tech vault to my work computer and I don't want my personal notes on my work computer.
  • For the desktop app, I don't use half the buttons on the screen. I hide whatever buttons can be hidden. I keep my Obsidian install pretty barebones.
  • On the phone, I don't use the tech vault at all. I rarely use the journal vault on my phone, but I do have it there and use DriveSync to keep things synchronized. The Obsidian Android app is mostly fine; I had one instance where it inserted a bunch of strange characters into my notes, but that has since resolved.

Organization

  • For document organization, I mostly rely on individual notes with a well-formed title, and folders. I sometimes use tags, but very infrequently.
  • I heavily use "WIP" documents: documents that are actively in progress get WIP prefixed to the title.
  • I prefix things I want at the top with "AAA" and at the bottom with "ZZZ" -- e.g., I have an Archive folder. I don't want it at the top of my folder list, so it gets a "ZZZ" prefix.

And that's pretty much it. I try to keep organization in general relatively simple, maintainable, and straightforward. I don't see much value in fiddling excessively with organization or striving to keep it perfect at all times. It does get messy, but it's maintainable as-is.

Obsidian Folders

The Obsidian folders I use in my work/developer vault.

Things I Don't Do

  • Daily work logs. I don't see much point, and they're hard to maintain without a lot of work. The daily log requires detail and precision to be useful, which takes time.
  • Excessive organization, as mentioned.
  • The graph view is cool, but I don't link my documents together too much, so it's not super useful to me.