5 Reasons Obsidian Should Be Part Of Everyone’s Productivity Stack

And why I’ll be using it forever.

Obsidian. It’s solid and reliable.

Yet, at the start of June, I wrote an article telling you why I decided to switch from using Obsidian to Capacities. I don’t need to tell you what I wrote, you can read it here.

I’m slightly ashamed (but not really) to say that I have now moved on from Capacities and am fully immersed in the day-to-day usage of Tana.

This may or may not reveal something to you of my personality.

Well, whatever, because I’m finding that Tana fits in so effortlessly with the way my brain works. There are no folders — just nodes (glorified bullet-points), and supertags (glorified tags).

Tana is a genius app, and I hope it’ll be with me for a long time.

But this article is not about Tana.

Because however amazing Tana, Capacities, Logseq or any other PKM app might be, there are at least 5 reasons why Obsidian should always be in your “productivity stack”.

Here they are.

Obsidian is a calm and personalised writing environment.

In Obsidian, you don’t have to be distracted by tags, dates or menu items.

You can hide it all away and simply enjoy your words and nothing else.

It’s a minimalist and uncluttered environment, where you can change the colours and font to match your mood.

There’s even a plugin where you can literally hide everything apart from your words. Everything goes.

You can’t get more minimalist than that.

And the result, obviously, is that you’re able to focus, and nothing else is competing for your mind’s attention.

Obsidian makes your writing flow.

We’ve all got used to pressing CTRL B for bold or whatever. And we’ve all got used to clicking our mouse on the formatting buttons in MS Word (oh how I have grown to detest MS software).

But in Obsidian you can format your text as you type.

Goodbye, CTRL buttons. Farewell, track-pad.

Hello Markdown.

To use Markdown is to format your text very simply using symbols.

For example:

• # creates a heading.
• ## creates a smaller heading.

You can use up to six hashtags, each creating smaller sub-headings.

• Surrounding your text with asterisks *will make it italic*.
• Surrounding your text with double asterisks **will make it bold**.
• - A dash will create a bullet point.
• Three dashes (this is hard to do in Medium!) on their own line creates a dividing line.

There is more, and it’s easily searchable on the web, but this is all I use, and this all I need.

Your writing can flow so much easier when you’re using Markdown.

Obsidian is always there for you.

It’s there when you need it. All the time.

This is because it’s an app you install on your computer, and your notes are stored on your computer in a location of your choice.

“Local first”, it’s called.

So even if some crazy country decides to shut down the internet, you’ll still be able to access your notes.

Actually, in this unpredictable and volatile world, that’s a pretty good reason to exclusively use Obsidian.

You just don’t know what’s going to happen.

But with Obsidian, you know your content is safe for as long as your computer is accessible.

And you could always back up your files onto an external drive, and even the cloud, for the time when your computer breaks.

Obsidian exports files to PDF.

This is such a useful feature.

Your text doesn’t have to remain looking a little strange, with hashtags and asterisks all over the place.

If you want to give someone your writing, maybe you’ve created a meeting agenda or some notes for someone else, you can simply export as a PDF and Obsidian will turn your Markdown into a beautifully formatted document.

It will even keep the font you’ve chosen to write in.

Exporting to PDF is so convenient.

Obsidian can be used on your terms.

Most other apps have a certain way they want you to use them. You have to fit in with how they work.

But with Obsidian, you get to decide how you use it, what you use it for, what features it’s going to have, how it looks, what you’re going to do with it, etc.

You don’t belong to Obsidian — Obsidian belongs to you.

It will happily fit in with your way of working and won’t complain or kick back in the slightest.

Obsidian will be here forever.

There’s a lot more to Obsidian than what I’ve written here.

It’s so powerful, but it’s a blank slate, and this is why I’ll always use it.

You can make it as complex or as simple as you want — and I keep it extremely simple.

I’m not using it to organise my life anymore — that’s what Tana is becoming.

Instead, Obsidian is a place to type and to process my thoughts, and then I can transfer stuff into Tana as and when I want.

I strongly advise you to install it, if you haven’t already, and simply start typing.

Create a note.

Learn Markdown.

Take it slowly, you don’t have to learn everything all at once.

But I expect that you’ll immediately appreciate the benefits of writing in Obsidian’s environment to that of MS Word.

Word has become a go-to app for so many people across the world — but there’s absolutely no reason I can think of why Obsidian shouldn’t also be a go-to app.

It’s so simple, yet so powerful. And I’ll always be using it.

Thanks, Obsidian. Good work.