Preaching to the choir: Using Obsidian

If there is anything that I hope this post will bring, it is that you try out Obsidian for yourself if you think it might help you like it helped me.

Sounds almost lite I'm recruiting for a cult, doesn't it?

In a way, I think I am; I've seen many an article or video on Obsidian on the internet singing its praises. Without the actual singing.

But why am I even writing this when there are so many others that have content on it? It's because what I have seen is mostly dives into the app itself, various aspects of it or the plug-ins.

What I want to do is to give you the user-view of how it can support your daily work.

The situation

Working as a consultant, it is not unusual for me to shift my place of work and what I do on a day-to-day basis, being involved in one or two projects and one or two customers.

On my current assignment however, I found myself working with more than five different customers within the same company and up to ten different projects or initiatives with each of them requiring a different level of support from me.

Don't get me wrong, I love the work I do and being able to help so many projects and initiatives in different ways is professionally incredibly rewarding, but as I began to realise just how different all these projects were so did my problems begin with keeping it all in my head.

Solutions?

I started the way I usually do: notepad/textedit.

And... it was a disaster. I had files everywhere, using nonsense filenames, one file maybe containing one name, another four names that were in the same project and so forth. Did I write it was a disaster? Well, it was. Disaster. Moving on.

Next bright idea: a personal wiki!

Next challenge: I need to run it locally. On a mac, more exact a dual-core Macbook Air from 2015 with 4GB of RAM, so not the strongest machine on the planet. I get it running with some elbow grease. It works... barely. Main problem becomes to update it as the editor on pages times out so that changes get lost. Looks cool though with an LCARS coat of paint. Also makes it hard to read and the default theme for some reason makes the browser slow down.

"Why are you not using OneNote?" I can hear some ask. I did mention I was running on a 4GB machine, right? Running Outlook, Opera GX and Teams on it and it's down on its knees. Adding OneNote would turn it into a swap-monster, SSD or not. Even running it in the browser is heavy.

A wild volcanic glass appears

At this point, I'm considering to go back to either classic pen-and-paper or get a separate tablet. I start to leer at the reMarkable 2 for notes, I browse and search google and youtube. And I find Obsidian (not the glass).

I watched a video by Debi that talks about a second brain. After a short while I start to look up the software, what platforms does it run on, how would I sync it between home office and office, can I even sync it, etc.

I learn about some built-in and third-party add-ons. I like what I see. I stop the video, download and start to mess around with it, looking and the files it generates, how it stores its data, the syntax of markdown etc.

I like what I see

I start using Obsidian in my daily work and by this time my manager at the customer is getting worried about if the workload is too high since I tend to be in a bit of a panic state during our status meetings; not good.

The change is gradual, but the more I put data in it and Obsidian does what it does, the more I get a grip of my work life to the point where if I don't remember something right off the bat, looking it up takes about as long time. Also with time, my notes become more detailed, expanded and interconnected to the point where I can look up a given subject and then see what has happened, on what dates and so forth. And everything is done locally.

Oh, and everything syncs with iCloud, and should do the same with OneDrive, Dropbox or other services that use a file/folder architecture towards the OS.

Why it's great: Daily notes

One of the default plug-ins is called plugins is called Daily notes and it does what it says on the tin.

Either automatically or on a button click it creates a new note, titled with the current date at the default location or a location of your choosing.

Perfect to keep a log of what you are doing, stray thoughts and the like. You can also link in other notes into it so that you can jump between different notes though links.

And this brings me to...

Why it's great: Graph view

When you add link to notes, they become connected. And in Graph View you get, guess what, a graphical view of how your different notes belong together. As an example: I have folders and notes that bear the name of the project, both to organise the notes, but also to link them together, since linking to folders seems to work, but doesn't. Anyhow, when I, in graph view, mouse-over a project note, all the other notes that are connected are highlighted. So I can see on what days I was working on this particular project and any other notes that connect to it, like a person of interest list.

I'm not saying that you MUST work with several projects to find this useful, just that this is my current use-case for it. Besides it makes for an impressive display when you show it off to managers.

Why it's great: mermaid

No, I'm not talking about the mythological beings or the J-EDM group. I'm talking about diagrams/graphs-as-code.

When I've done diagrams before I've used tools like Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Visio and draw.io. But all those tools have one thing in common, the diagrams, even if saved in XML are barely human readable and thus you need the software to edit them. They are, in a word, static. In a prior assignment I got introduced to PlantUML and the plug-ins for VIsual Studio Code and it opened the entire world of diagrams-as-code. I've since been using both the dynamic and static approach, depending on the use-case.

In difference to PlantUML, mermaid becomes part of the note itself, framed by start and stop tags, whereas PlantUML had a minor dependency with its file extension.

mermaid allows you to visualise sequences, flowcharts, entity relations and a lot more. In honesty, sometimes the options make the approach difficult, but the easy of editing to try out other variants is welcome. That said, mermaid is very powerful and very flexible, and that can cause confusion on how it parses at times. Especially when you try to visualise several events happening at once in parallel with sequential elements.

It might confuse you at times, but it is worth the investment.

Why it's great: saving, syncing and platforms

Obsidian saves what you do constantly! This might be a blessing or a curse, depending on your circumstances, but this way, should something happen, you might lose a few seconds of writing. For me that equals about a word or two.

Then there is syncing. And it's pretty easy. Obsidian stores its files in something it calls a vault. A vault is a directory, nothing more, nothing less. And that directory can be.... well anywhere a directory can be; your filesystem, a cloud storage service like iCould, OneDrive or Dropbox. Anything that to the OS looks like a filesystem. And the beauty is that Obsidian keeps looking in that directory and its sub-directories for new directories and files. So you update in one place, it appears on the other and vice-versa. Obsidian also has a sync service. Never tried it since i use a cloud service, but I would imagine it works along the same principles.

What about platforms then? I'd say most of the ones you'll encounter and/or need are here; Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS. It's probably been ported to others too since it is open source.

Why it's great: files, directories and formats

Everything, say for stored graphics, in Obsidian is text. And not just text, it is plain text. And the folders you create are directories. So you don't need a special program to look at it, per-say. a simple text editor/viewer is all you need.

Plain-text files, in directories. Simple. This was you're also not locked into having to use Obsidian. If there is something else that reads md files, like VS Code for example, then you can read everything there, no problem.

The formatting language is markdown, the same used in github and other places. The syntax will take some getting used to, like with anything unfamiliar, but after a while many things come as second nature. You just get used to it.

Why it's great: Plug-ins

I'll just on this briefly for this subject could carry an entire book.

There are loads of them, both maintained by the Obsidian team and created/maintained by third-party developers. If you need a function or a quality-of-life improvement, it's likely that someone thought about it and made something. And if not, Obsidian uses a JavaScript interface so adding something is not too difficult... says the non-developer.

The plug-ins I use are Daily notes and one to make it easier to create tables, can't remember what it is called, but there are several different ones.

The long and short of it

There are most likely a heap of other reasons why Obsidian is being widely praised. but the reasons here are specific to why I think it is a good application for my use-case and I encourage you to try it, if you haven't already.

If you think I'm wrong or should try something else, please tell me in the comments.