Obsidian for Notetaking
How I use this popular productivity app for university and blog posts
What Is Obsidian and Why Did It Pique My Interest?
Created by a team of two, Obsidian is a popular markdown editor which acts as a second brain for many productivity nerds like myself and others. Lightweight, local and aesthetically pleasing, what first attracted me was its totally cool UI.
Additionally, it was being dubbed the “most secure notetaking app on desktop.” To me, that’s a massive plus, because frankly, I don’t think anyone would like to see the assortment of rubbish ideas and unfinished posts shelved “for another day.” So, you already know that I had to check it out!
After watching 30 minutes of YouTube tutorials, I decided to give this one a crack and downloaded it. Loading it up, I realised just how responsive it was and started playing around with it, tailoring it to my own needs. As always, I had to ask myself the all-important question of what did I want to use this for?
For me, this would entail practically everything I needed to type… except my university assignments because I realised that you kind of can’t hand in markdown text documents for credit when the requirements generally want a word document submission…
The Mothership
But the one thing that wasn’t required to be in the .docx format was my lecture notes.
Coincidently, let’s just say that I hadn’t taken the uh “recommended” amount of notes. So, I knew I didn’t have much to migrate, so after setting aside 2 hours, I migrated my notes into a structure that looked something like this:
Index System and Inner Workings
You’re probably wondering, what are those numbers for? So here’s the lowdown:
- Number 1: Corresponds with what area the subject is in
- Number 2: Corresponds with the different classes/topics I mainly write about
- Numbers 3 and 4: The last numbers of my coding system are there to give structure to the notes.
Here, I’ll show you this system in action:
For all the notes that originate in Obsidian, they get filed under the said heading. In this case, 3 represents that notes in this area will be for my medium blog and 1 represents that these notes will be everything football (soccer, for you Americans) related.
Seems simple right?
Here’s what a story looks like when drafted in Obsidian for my blog. This is without any formatting or grammar checks. That will be done after I get down everything in terms of what I want to write.
Tagging… but Not Really?
You may notice that I have tagged the notes with two tags at the top there: “finished” and “3100 Football.” The first tag is to show the status of the note. This one’s finished, but it can be either “Not Started” or “In Progress” too. Pretty self-explanatory for that one, I hope.
The ones that are not started are the ones that exist but are blank, which I will hopefully get back to at a later date. Those tagged as in progress are just that… in progress. That second tag shows me where the note belongs because I tend to forget.
Without getting into too much detail, there is indeed a traditional tagging system like most of your productivity apps, I prefer to tag my notes using links to other notes, whether they be existent or not. You can tell because the “tags” that are coloured are existent notes, while the non-existent ones are faded.
It’s for Productivity, I Swear!
Of course, I’m not doing this to be different, okay maybe I am, but you’ll see why in a minute because, let’s face it, for us productivity nerds, everything needs to have a purpose. Well, folks, let’s just say the reason why I use links to pages to tag my notes isn’t exactly to boost productivity. It’s for this thing here:
Now, this thing is the best thing about the app. The web view. It shows you all your links to all your notes in an absolutely sick way. But with all those little dots on the page, how can you find a particular note you’re looking for, I hear you ask?
Remember those two tags earlier? That’s how I navigate through my collection of notes on this view of my “Mothership.” It helps that the colour coding of all your different sections is extremely simple to set up.
You’ll also notice that the size of the tag “Finished” is larger — that’s because there are more notes linked to it. Therefore, the fact that weighting is relative to how frequent a link is used also helps navigate this web.
Templates
Finally, I’d like to show you my template system. These templates can be used so that anything you use frequently can be copied over instead of you having to type it all out again, particularly useful for frequent usage of large chunks of texts.
Earlier when I showed you my index, you also would’ve seen the 4th area for templates. This is where I store them for future use.
Here is my classic end note that I use to sign off for the majority of my blog posts. (except those in short form). Replacing the links to some that are existent and useful such as my stories and @ myself at the bottom is all that I need to do after copying that template over.
How About School?
For school, it’s similar, but instead of exciting blog posts, it’s boring lecture and tutorial notes. The landing pages are the same, but the content is of course broken down into classes instead of topics.
My tags break down into LEC (if the notes are lecture notes) and TUT (for my tutorial ones) as well as my trusty link to tell me where the notes belong. If you’re interested, here are some notes on consumer behaviour for my economics course:
Conclusion
There you have it, a definitive guide on how I use Obsidian as a knowledge base for both my school and blog posts! If you feel inspired to check out Obsidian after this, please do because I can tell you that this is one of the best apps I’ve ever used in terms of productivity and notetaking.
Oh, and watch this playlist for help getting started on your journey with Obsidian!
Hope you enjoyed this post!
If you did, all I ask is for some applause to show your appreciation. A comment too if you wish?
Lastly, if you’d like to see more from me, consider chucking me a follow!
Much appreciated,
Ning Choi
Follow The Orange Journal so you don’t miss a post. Do you love to write about self-improvement and personal development? Learn how to be added as a writer here. 🍊
