Obsidian.md anyone here using it

I looked into zettelkasten a while back. I absolutely love the concept but I wasn't able to make it stick for me at the time. I'm sure I'll give it another go in the future. I try to GTD most things, and I want to organize my references this way.

Honestly I have forgotten most of the zettelkasten methodology beyond the concept of tagged and linked notes, as Obsidian allows you to do and present in a visual graph form. It boils down to a personal wikipedia basically.

You have listed some broad use-cases above, like note-taking for research and writing and things like that, but I'm not sure how many people can see how a tool like that might fit into their lives. So below I'll give a more specific example of a way to use a tool like Obsidian that I think almost everyone can relate to and may find useful. As is common, though, it will take quite an investment of time that may not pay off until years down the road. Here goes...


Build an Obsidian vault (or a zettelkasten) for household documentation.

A very basic purpose or use-case would be to document your home's contents for insurance purposes. For example, you can make a note for a piece of jewelry which describes it, lists the purchase price and date, attach a photo of the actual piece, and then link to it from another note which represents a room in your house. Do the same for everything of value in each room, then link to all your rooms from a note which represents your entire house. Maybe block an hour of time each weekend to work on this, and I bet in a month you'll have a pretty comprehensive set of documentation that will make your insurance agent proud. And it will save you a lot of time and agony should disaster strike.

Once you get the hang of it, maybe move on to something that might apply to a lot of us here on the Tech Board - document your technology! I'm sure a lot of us repeat the mantra at work "document everything", but maybe we're a little more lax about that at home. Sometimes I think about how my wife and kids would manage if I weren't around, and it might be a bit of a disaster. And it's not that they aren't knowledgeable or capable, or that things are always breaking. It's just that there is a LOT going on around here, and even though it's mostly simple to manage it still requires a background of specific knowledge to even know where to begin troubleshooting.

At this moment there are 52 devices on my network, and scrolling through there are at least a dozen that even I don't know what they are or what they're doing. I can figure it out, though, and in the process I will document model numbers, what purposes they serve, and some basic information that would be enough to at least point a layman in the right direction should it ever need to be repaired or replaced.

I think this will grow more important as some of us move further into smart home territory, where I now have devices hidden inside walls and such that a future owner would definitely need to know about (or that future me will need to remember to remove before selling).

And of course, beyond tech you could also document basic stuff about your house such as paint colors, models of appliances, style of misc hardware/decorations/fixtures/whatever, service history with copies of receipts attached, etc.



And IMO the best feature of Obsidian (and many tools like it) is all of your content is stored in plain text. This is absolutely critical for long-lived documents, because any software tool can open and edit them. You can edit your Obsidian notes with Notepad, and view them with Chrome, for example. You can find (or write yourself if you're so inclined) a tool that searches all your notes for $ amounts and list and/or total them up.

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And IMO the best feature of Obsidian (and many tools like it) is all of your content is stored in plain text. This is absolutely critical for long-lived documents, because any software tool can open and edit them. You can edit your Obsidian notes with Notepad, and view them with Chrome, for example. You can find (or write yourself if you're so inclined) a tool that searches all your notes for $ amounts and list and/or total them up.

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I use Markdown, but yeah.. it's an open standard that many, many platforms can and will use for a long time, and still largely makes sense to read in plaintext

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I use Markdown, but yeah.. it's an open standard that many, many platforms can and will use for a long time, and still largely makes sense to read in plaintext

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I'm a huge fan of using plaintext open/standard formats for all kinds of stuff... markdown/html for docs, json/yaml for structured data, toml for configs. Hell I even use a plain text format for household budgeting and business bookkeeping, and there are lots of programs that work with it (I use hledger).

You can use plain text flat files however you want, they aren't locked behind some company's app and will be accessible forever, and they work very nicely with version control.

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I have a horrible memory and I juggle a lot of stuff at work so I have to keep good notes to get anything done competently

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I remember you commenting on one of my GTD posts. I know that GTD sounds kind of overwhelming (and I know because my wife tells me so ), but what it boils down to is life is overwhelming and GTD kind of distills it down to a few basic buckets to try to make life the least overwhelming it can be. We have buckets where things go, every task or note has a place, and we work through it via filters and loops so that nothing is forgotten or lost and steady progress is made on larger projects. The hard part is the tooling. If your tools are a burden, you're not going to use them.

I am mainly using it for work, I have years of personnel notes in Evernote and I am not going to migrate those over at this time.

I have switched to Obsidian for work notes and I'm loving it so far.

I have to deal with a plethora of varying information everyday, in one meeting it might be a financial conversation about this months financial statements, and 10 minutes later I'm talking to someone about our recruiting efforts. I have multiple short and long term projects I have to manage. In obsidian I think I've finally found the tool to assist me with managing all disparate information.

I set my structure up to where a daily note is the hub. As the day progresses, I will either make notes within my daily note, but any meeting, conversation, email, etc... gets put in a sub note that I bi-directionally link with the Daily note. I have various templates mapped to hotkeys so while I'm in my daily note, if I'm going into a meeting, I just hit the Meeting note hot key and a new meeting note (template) is created and updates my daily note with a link to the new meeting note. I use the hover preview function to see all the subnote contents unless it's something really important then I bring that info from the sub note onto the daily note via Transclusion.

I've been really blown away with the functionality. The learning curve is really steep if you want to get very advanced with it. I'm still working my way through writing queries for tasks and using Dataview.

I am using the Tasks plugin as kind of a Traffic cop for things I need to remember. If I want to remember to bring up something in my next weekly call with my team, I create a task and tag it with #ToBringUp and #Team. On my template for my weekly team meeting, I have a query on the note

```tasks
not done
tag includes #ToBringUp
tag includes #Team
hide task count
short mode
```

This gives me a list of everything I've tagged with #ToBringUp and #Team. If I want to remember to bring something up with my boss it's #ToBringUp and #Boss. When he calls, I have a hotkey'd note template that has this query on it, that way as I'm talking to him, I can easily see reminders of things I need to discuss with him...works great.

This is my Boss Note template. The query above is in heading section Things to bring up with Boss That gives me a list of things to talk to him about.


This is a flow diagram I made for my Obsidian usage.

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That said, I find searching kinda sucks with no plugins, even with hashtags.

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How are you using your #tags?

Are you embedding them inline in your notes as you type them or are you using them at the note level?

This is what I mean by inline:

Asked #SomePerson why the chicken crossed the road.

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Are you embedding them inline in your notes as you type them or are you using them at the note level?

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Note-level.

I.E.




... this is publicly available info from an e-rate 470 so no worries about confidentiality.

If I know it's for Iberville Parish and it's for MWIFI, I can search for tag: tag: #MWIFI #Iberville and the note comes up

If I don't know it's MWIFI, i can search for tag: #Iberville

If I don't know it's for Iberville, I can search for #MWIFI and #e-rate and kinda sift.

If I don't know that it's MWIFI or Iberville, but I know the date, I can go search through the day

etc etc.

It works, it's just not very pretty, I suppose.

I have used evernote for years but have always struggled with connecting the dots between the data.

Obsidian makes that much easier. That comes at a price...Obsidian has a steep learning curve if you really want to exploit its capabilities.

The one thing I do miss from Evernote is the WYSIWYG note editing. Since Obsidian only recognizes markdown formatting things like centering text, or utilizing different color text don't work. There is a plugin called Highlighter that gives you the ability to highlight text. After getting used to it, I don't find the lack of WYSIWYG formatting to be limiting at all.

I watched a ton of Youtube videos and read a lot of stuff on how to setup and use Obsidian, it took me about a week before the light really clicked on. If you are going to consider Obsidian, I would advise you to watch some videos and think about how you'd want to setup your note structure before you get too deep in.