avatarTara H

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Using Obsidian — Two Years On

So I wrote using Obsidian a Year on on May 3rd 2022. It was a look back at how I was still using the app after a year and a bit, and the start of a themed month of blog posts all focusing on Obsidian over on my WordPress. I’ve been editing this for a couple of days, but wanted to share it pretty close to the original date I published Obsidian a Year on so…

Obsidian has changed a lot in the last year for me, so I thought I’d do another look into it.

One of the first things I talked a bit about in the “What is it” section was that you have an editing view and reading view, and this is still the case but with some updates. We now have live preview which I’ve loved using as I can see exactly what my notes will look like without having to have two panes open side by side of the same thing. I’m now able to look at the text I’m writing and whatever I’m referencing rather than wanting another pane to see how my notes will look.

I’m also a lot more confident swapping between things with shortcuts and hotkeys — E for changing the view, O for opening a new note, P for the command palette and so on. This has helped immensely and I can’t believe it’s taken me nearly two years to become this used to these shortcuts.

In the last couple of years I’ve went from seeing a handful of posts about Obsidian to seeing a lot of content on my Twitter feed about it. I’ve seen more creators using it for everything from work to daily life to academics using it to handle research. There’s been so many great tutorials and blogs looking at features and examples shared across the web and it’s been really great to see. I’m enjoying how creative and friendly everyone is and how encouraging it’s been to use this and grow with the app.

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Why use Obsidian

As I said before:

It’s customisable There are plugins like StyleSettings that work alongside themes to make your vault look how you want it to. There’s light and dark modes. You can change line width, font size and so much more

My current Obsidian Theme (border) in Dark and Light mode

Themes: There’s so many great themes to choose from — currently I’m using the border theme in light mode with edits in Style Settings to make it look the way it does. I’ve found this works well for me over the last little while I can also change to dark mode as the day goes on which has been great for using Obsidian through the day

Showing the Yin & Yang theme

Markdown: Writing everything in Markdown has been the best for writing quickly, efficiently and being able to transfer to other sites/ apps.

E.g — **makes things bold**, *makes italics*, # is a headline — #tags work like this though!

You own your notes: I can access all of my notes whether I’m online or offline with Obsidian. I can take all of my notes from my computer storage too, copy them across to a hard drive. In a year’s time I could use a markdown to RTF converter and have those notes still and have them be readable. I’m not locked into having to copy and paste notes.

Plugins: I’d briefly mentioned plugins earlier but this is where Obsidian shines in my opinion. There are some core plugins that come with the app but then there’s others that are community made and all of these just serve to make the vaults more functional and more personalised to your needs. I use Daily Notes and Periodic Notes to keep track of what I’m doing each day and week which feeds nicely into my Google Sheets habit tracking and productivity pack for the year. Then I have Buttons and then Templater installed and enabled which streamlines the process of taking daily notes and makes them more readable. Other plugins I’ve been using a lot recently have been the Book Search which has been incredible for making my 10–39 Reading folder and book page notes.

Graph view: There’s two graph views in Obsidian — your main graph which shows all of the notes and connections between said notes in your vault. This is good for motivation and to see the orphan notes. I use this to see which notes I need to review and connect to others so they’re not just floating in this void. Then you have the local graph view which is on a per-note basis and shows the connections this note has. This is good for checking that you’re creating links between notes and also seeing what ideas are emerging — are these related to each other already? E.g Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad will link between each other but not be connected to using Obsidian a Year on, for example.

Community: Not only is there a Discord server but there’s a forum, subreddit and a newsletter that’s still going strong by Eleanor Konik that I highly recommend. And there’s a lot of Obsidian users on Twitter sharing graphs, notes, tips and more. The community is one of the best parts of using Obsidian in my opinion — everyone has been friendly, welcoming and ready to help.

You can pay for services like Sync and Publish which allow you to share notes to multiple devices easily and share notes online, respectively. These are definitely worth it and make using Obsidian better for me, but they’re by no means necessary.

Things I’ve been doing in the last year:

  • I changed from using 3 vaults to contain my information to putting these all into one vault — my BuJo now never gets published thanks to a setting in the Publish plugin. So I’m no longer worried about that and my Second Brain merged with this so naturally that it made sense to just bring it all together.
  • I’ve been using the local graph more to see connections as I’m writing notes and see where ideas I’m linking here already link with each other. It’s a reminder to have interconnected notes and not just simply note-take but note-make. This is something I’ve been trying to do more of after reading about Linking Your Thinking.
  • I’ve been including media I watch, listen to and read more frequently in my Daily Notes. This has been fun to track when certain ideas crop up in relation to whatever I’m watching — like talking about connecting ideas to each other and being smarter with how you present notes to the world goes beautifully with Better Call Saul and how Jimmy McGill is a great orator. It naturally came up and it also inspired a closer look at some of my older notes.
  • I’ve also been building MOCs more over this last year — collecting ideas together.
  • I’ve built my work portfolio in here too — something that will never be shared via Publish — but what has links to pages in the rest of my vault. Connecting what I’m doing at work to what I’m learning outside of it. This has been incredible for really showing that I’m learning and taking in more and more about the work I do.

I’ve been trying to use Obsidian more to not just collect notes but to start increasing my output — what I’m writing in my blog and what I’m actually learning. I have my Publish page as my Digital Garden. This has meant I can learn in public way more easily — if people want to see my notes then they can. I’m still publishing edited, well crafted things to my Medium and the like, but this is a space for me to grow and learn and connect ideas in a way that just doesn’t happen as easily on other sites.

Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you enjoyed what you read and want to support my work please consider leaving a tip in my virtual tip jar.

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