Why I Started Using Obsidian

Growing up I was always curious about why we were supposed to take notes. I saw everybody else doing it and I even did it myself without really knowing why, or what purpose it served. It sounds silly when I say that but honestly, I couldn't tell you a single time I would go back and really look at my notes primarily because they were never my preferred method of study. In the long run, which was the best use case for written notes in my opinion, I wouldn't be able to review them anyways. There was approximately a 0% chance that I would be able to find notes I took over a year ago. Either they were misplaced, thrown out, or I just forgot they even existed. At this point, I was taking them just to take them until I finally had enough and just quit taking notes altogether.

I found alternative ways to study that I thought might be more effective for me. I'd watch YouTube breakdown videos, look over old tests, do pretty much anything BUT take notes and review them. Finishing my first two years of undergrad with a ~3.85 GPA while operating this way didn't really help in showing me the error of my process, it only assured me further that what I was doing was working well.

This continued until I entered upper division classes at Davis where I quickly realized this wouldn't fly anymore (as if my family telling me the very same for years wasn't enough of a hint). It was at this stage I had my first epiphany. Why worry about my previous concerns about losing notes when I can use an Ipad and never misplace my notes ever again? Upon having this realization, I promptly started using GoodNotes which actually solved some of my problems and felt like a revelation at the time. And after reflecting on it? I can honestly say that it really WAS a revelation. Taking notes in class became incredibly convenient and studying for any class anywhere with just an Ipad was great. It reduced the friction enough in the note taking and reviewing process that although it still wasn't my preferred method of study, at least I was taking notes again and reviewing them a couple times per quarter. So what was the issue now?

As I mentioned before about the long term use of notes, there was always the chance I could misplace or forget about them. I'd forgive you if you thought that this issue was solved with the Ipad but for me, it wasn't! Perhaps this is just a testament to my ability to be disorganized but I would like to think that it's normal to forget about GoodNotes notebooks when you have 12-15 classes to take notes for, every single year. The digital clutter on my Ipad made it such that there was no chance I would actually look at 80% of those notes 1 year down the line, even if it was useful on the 3-month timescale. Only the recent notebooks at the top of the list were what I saw upon opening the app and 9 times out of 10 those were current notebooks I was writing in and not notebooks I was reviewing. Losing notes every year is almost the same as losing knowledge, you don't retain much of what you learn years down the line. Still, I was now at least looking at a fifth of the older notes I had which was definitely an improvement but it resulted in the imparting of one final gripe onto me about my note taking experience.

There was the fundamental problem of the lack of relation notes had between each other. If I was looking at a concept in my Bio 3 class notebook and I needed to review something from Bio 1, I'd have to swap notebooks and potentially look through the entire thing before I found the actual information I was looking for. This is a serious issue when considering the long term efficacy of notes. Ideally there would be a way to connect those two spaces together independent of their location in separate notebooks, as they were related after all. Along the way between that thought and now, I'd end up try other solutions like Confluence or Notion but nothing really stuck. Nothing until last week at least.

One of my connections posted, recommending Obsidian as their top pick for note taking. While it was something I'd heard of before, I put off trying it for a while due to my 6 month block interning at Amazon and Roblox where my notes mostly found themselves sitting in the form of documentation for my team. That is, not something I would be able to access after my internships. With no expectations I decided to download it and found a few tutorials to see how other people set up their workflow around Obsidian. When I tell you my mind was blown, I'm definitely underselling it. It fit so well into my mental model of what taking notes should be like that I felt as if it was an integral part of the learning experience that I was only now finding out about. Every single issue of mine was solved, even ones I hadn't named in this post.

Obsidian was

• Private: your data is stored locally
• Searchable: you could look up and organize notes in a variety of ways
• Readable Anywhere: obsidian files are all markdown so even in plaintext your file is readable across devices and locations
• Customizable: there are tons of plugins I could write 3 more pages about but instead I'll put it simply, you can do things you haven't even thought of yet

And finally the most important feature, Obsidian is RELATIONAL! You can connect your notes to each other with links creating an elaborate but necessary graph or network of information. Our brains are relational and our notes are an extension of our knowledge base so it only makes sense that our notes should function the same way. Many of the issues I brought up can be summarized as the disconnect between the way we store information in our brains and the way we store information outside of our brains. I won't be losing any more knowledge this year. Obsidian solved that for me.

I'll leave my current knowledge graph below as an example of what an early stage note-network could look like in Obsidian, with each node being one of my notes. Also, as you may have guessed, I wrote all of this in Obsidian. Thanks for reading.