Using Obsidian in your new job
I recently started a new job and took the opportunity to start using Obsidian from day 1. There was a major limitation however — I wasn’t sure if all the Obsdian plugins would be safe for my office so I decided to only use vanilla Obsidian and see how far I can get.
Almost no set up
I spent almost no time on setup. Since I didn’t want to use any plugins, I just downloaded Obsidian and created a vault using a unique name. Not something generic like “MyObsidian” or “Work”, but something unique like like “Sulaco” or “DN-38416”. I did this because I wasn’t sure if I’d have to duplicate or move the vault to be compliant with IT policies, so I didn’t want to have to remember the difference between vaults named “Work”, “Work1” etc.
I created the vault in the Company OneDrive so that I would be able to access my notes at all times.
Key tags as a new employee
I also didn’t spend any time trying to come up with a taxonomy for my notes, I just started taking notes from the IT briefing onwards and organically found these tags were the most used, at least for the first month:
- #companyunit: Populated by briefings from the various business leads about how their unit contributes to the company and what their goals for the year are.
- #companyperson: Info that a colleague shares and which goes beyond what’s available in the company’s Outlook contact card. It’s really useful to note down how long someone has worked that the firm, kids, holiday plans, hobbies etc.
- #companyproduct: Information about the company’s products, so I can record both the official collateral as well as less…official comments.
- #companysystem: Details of the various systems and 3rd party apps that the company uses
- #meetings: This is more obvious — every briefing and meeting should be clearly labelled and it’s not useful to include it only in the title.
Obsidian’s most useful features for a new employee
1. Easy installation
This is a feature not to be discounted. The fact that Obsidian can simply be downloaded and used without registration or linking to some cloud service allowed me to start using it the moment I got my office laptop and an internet connection (and checking with the IT chap that I could download it)
2. Backlinks and outgoing links
Both link functions were indispensable for my first few days at work. It allowed me to quickly link units, people and processes to each other for later review. People would continually be making references to systems or products or clients, sometimes only in acronyms, and being able to write it down and create a page first, gave me a clear picture of what I needed to invesigate further.
3. Local Graph
I have written before about the utility of the Graph view. It’s less useful here than the local graph, which gives a quick picture of related entities when I’m taking a meeting note.
Non-Obsidian options
Sadly we can’t all use Obsidian at work. In some cases, we might be bound to use company-approved apps like OneNote. I took some time to explore that option and will be sharing my findings soon.
In the meantime, take a look at the rest of my articles on Obsidian:
- How Mermaid diagrams work in Obsidian
- When you should consider switching to Obsidian
- Obsidian’s Graph Analysis plugin
- Using Obsidian’s Graph view for real
- Using Obsidian for group KM
- Obsidian for making sense of things
What other ways have you found Obsidian to be useful in a new job/company? Let me know in the comments or just leave a clap for me.
