Meet Obsidian User 🌿Annette Raffan 🌼

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with fellow Obsidian user Annette (🌿Annette Raffan 🌼).

We sat down in a Zoom call and talked for some time about studying, university, manual note-taking, productivity and how Obsidian and other note-taking tools fit into our lives.

This article is going to sum up the conversation, mainly focusing on Annette’s answers to the things that I asked.

This is the first time that I’ve had a conversation with someone from the Obsidian community, so thank you Annette for reaching out!

Let’s get started…

My responses to Annette’s questions

We structured the talk in an interview style — first off Annette asked me some questions of her own, about how I see people taking notes at university, as well as how I take notes on my lectures effectively using Obsidian.

The general takeaway from this part of the conversation was that universities don’t do much to teach students principles underlying knowledge management. I had to take the initiative when learning how to manage my knowledge.

We also talked about my current workflow for taking notes and managing knowledge for my degree — I mentioned how I make flashcards to study so that I can do minimal work to get the output I require to pass the exams.

Then it was my turn to ask questions of Annette…

Interviewing 🌿Annette Raffan 🌼

“What’s changed between your original degree and your PhD now?”

“ I took notes on paper originally, filing them away in folders by lecture. I no longer have this content, which I now regret, because it would have been nice to have access to that body of work!

In my original degree, it was unusual for people to take digital notes — it was something that I’d tried, but digital note-taking really started with the PhD.

As you might have noticed, I’m a bit of a scatterbrain so there are notes everywhere. I’d started forgetting things when I was researching for my PhD. There’s so much research in the world, so many pieces of research to keep track of, and I was losing my data file that contained this information.

I realised I couldn’t go on like this for the next three years of the PhD, and became more aware of PKM, learning that there were means of building a system that contained all of my knowledge rather than having it in different places.

Notion didn’t really work for me, and I didn’t have high hopes when I saw Obsidian. It seemed to code-y, but after trying it, I thought ‘This might work!’. I started putting my notes in Obsidian and everything made more sense; I was able to free up space in my head to remember other tasks that were important.”

“You mentioned freeing up room in your mind for other tasks. In keeping with this, how do you manage important tasks within your life?”

“Yes, I have a planner that’s about 30 pages long, that I’ve personalised to myself and the way I like to do things. It contains daily pages, a few sheets for notes, and pages for weekly, monthly and quarterly notes, with a section for goals as well.

I tried using digital tools like TickTick and Todoist for a while, but, like Notion, they didn't sit quite right with me.

Task management is still quite elusive for me, and this planner does the job better than anything else I’ve tried. I bought an online template, from which I can just print out the pages that I want to use and put them into the planner.”

“I know you’re studying for a PhD. Can you tell me more about what this entails, maybe go into some details about where Obsidian comes into this process?”

“Obsidian is mainly for making notes on sources for my research. I use the reference manager Zotero, where I store all of the data related to these sources. They’re imported into Obsidian using the citations plugin, collecting all the references in one place.

I’ll read a paper and make notes on the methods, results and major conclusions of the paper — when I’m reviewing, all I need to do is glance at this major conclusions section to grasp what was investigated and concluded in this source.

Within the vault, there are pages for each method that the different authors have used across the sources. I’m looking into changing this at the moment because of the volume of links that this has created.

I’m investigating how different plant species grow together, and how complementarity effects between them can improve soil structure. Using this mode of organising my files I can look at which sources have used the same methods as each other and, using the major conclusions section of the note, I can quickly see whether they’ve reached a similar point as each other through their individual research.

I also tag my notes with the topics that they cover, using the plugin Dataview to view the selection of notes that contain a number of tags. For example, if I wanted to see all the notes that mention soil structure, root architecture and mycorrhizal fungi, the list becomes quite small and again, I can compare the major conclusions sections of each source.

A recent addition to my vault was the Smart Connections plugin, which allows me to see further connections between all of my notes. However, I’m not sure how effective this is because of the fact that I haven’t made full notes for all of the sources that I’ve imported so far. But it is useful to find some unknown links between notes.”

“What are your thoughts and feelings around the amount of productivity and PKM content on the internet? How do you go about navigating people’s thoughts and opinions to make your own choice?”

“Firstly, I think that it’s always worth having an open mind — if someone says that something’s amazing, I think ‘Oh okay, I might have a look’.

I stuck with Obsidian for a year, which was plenty of time to see whether it works for me or not. I still don’t like how code-y it is with the YAML and things like that but at the same time, I knew I didn’t like Notion.

The same as everyone, I kind of suffer from shiny object syndrome, but I think that if people share what they’re using to be productive, and how they’re using it, you can use this advice to go in with a better idea of how you might use this certain tool.

My own content is a mixture of tool-based advice and information surrounding the underlying methods of taking notes, with the intention of informing people’s choices in programs based on why they want to use a certain tool, not just because someone else has said to.

I don’t think that it’s unproductive to try different things, but it’s important to make a decision quickly about whether a certain thing is going to work or not, otherwise you risk wasting time in your indecision. For example, I never tried tools like Tana and Logseq, because I’m convinced that I don’t like outliners. My mind just doesn’t work like that.

Part of the issue that I had with Obsidian was that there’s no structure when you first install the app — you’re entirely reliant on being able to evolve your own system, whereas something like Capacities at least has a minimum viable structure to it, with the objects.

Starting simple and progressively making things complicated might work for when you’re starting out, but I have 800 reference files. There’s no time to wait for a system to evolve to something more complex in Obsidian. It feels like I need to start again, so I’ve begun to use Capacities!”

Those were the main points that I covered during my time with Annette. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and learning about how someone uses Obsidian as much as I did during our conversation.

Follow 🌿Annette Raffan 🌼on Medium. Check out Annette’s website and newsletter using these links.

Thanks for reading!

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