Obsidian Advice
October 7, 2022 7:27 AM Subscribe
Obsidian users: What advice do you have for someone just starting with the app? Or what do you wish you had known when you got started?
I think it depends a lot on what you are trying to do with it. I guess one piece of general advice I'd say is to not get too carried away with plugins and themes and whatnot out of the gate. There are a lot of really cool ways in which different people use it so it's easy to fall under the spell of shiny object syndrome.
posted by synecdoche at 8:41 AM on October 7, 2022
posted by synecdoche at 8:41 AM on October 7, 2022
Yeah it's 100% about what you are trying to achieve. For a possibly inspiring use case, check out the short book How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.
posted by grobstein at 9:43 AM on October 7, 2022
posted by grobstein at 9:43 AM on October 7, 2022
Response by poster: For a possibly inspiring use case, check out the short book How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.
Reading that book led me to Obsidian!
This is for organizing research and thinking for a nonfiction book project.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:07 AM on October 7, 2022
Reading that book led me to Obsidian!
This is for organizing research and thinking for a nonfiction book project.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:07 AM on October 7, 2022
My repeated advice to any new Obsidian user is: just use it. Write things. Use the easy linking to link stuff together. Think of everything in a vault as a living and constantly shifting draft.
Handful of things I would have liked to have internalized sooner:
- tags can be nested for a sort of tree, where that makes sense for your purposes. #source/author/john_doe, #source/author/jane_doe if that kind of branching makes most sense for how Future You will use tags to search, for instance.
- notes don't need to actually exist yet for you to link to them. If you're rattling off a quick note on "realization about Topic 37" and in the course of those lines you realize it links very obviously to "cultural implications of Topic 23" you can just wrap the relevant bit in brackets and whenever you create the note later, links will go active.
- ctrl/cmd+P for the control palette is fantastic--you can get to a lot of functions with the sort of menus and buttons that drive most other applications, but the palette is powerful and its search-for-commands is amazing
- if you don't know it already, learning a bit of regex search syntax will help a lot when a vault gets big and you need to search up previous notes
It's easy to go overboard with plugins, so there's common advice to concentrate on core-Obsidian use first. But some of them are pretty handy! For book-type projects, you might want to check out the longform plugin which adds some functionality turning Obsidian into a sort of Scrivener for writing projects, with the great benefit of easy linking between draft-in-progress and related research/etc notes.
posted by Drastic at 11:25 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Handful of things I would have liked to have internalized sooner:
- tags can be nested for a sort of tree, where that makes sense for your purposes. #source/author/john_doe, #source/author/jane_doe if that kind of branching makes most sense for how Future You will use tags to search, for instance.
- notes don't need to actually exist yet for you to link to them. If you're rattling off a quick note on "realization about Topic 37" and in the course of those lines you realize it links very obviously to "cultural implications of Topic 23" you can just wrap the relevant bit in brackets and whenever you create the note later, links will go active.
- ctrl/cmd+P for the control palette is fantastic--you can get to a lot of functions with the sort of menus and buttons that drive most other applications, but the palette is powerful and its search-for-commands is amazing
- if you don't know it already, learning a bit of regex search syntax will help a lot when a vault gets big and you need to search up previous notes
It's easy to go overboard with plugins, so there's common advice to concentrate on core-Obsidian use first. But some of them are pretty handy! For book-type projects, you might want to check out the longform plugin which adds some functionality turning Obsidian into a sort of Scrivener for writing projects, with the great benefit of easy linking between draft-in-progress and related research/etc notes.
posted by Drastic at 11:25 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is for organizing research and thinking for a nonfiction book project.
In that case, I'd echo Drastic's recommendation to just take notes to start.
This is essentially my notetaking workflow, which was also inspired by Ahrens' book.
1) Read something and take rough notes along the way. (I read on the Kindle so a lot of these are highlights.)
2) Review the rough notes and find a way to emphasize the ideas that are most resonant to me. (I use Tiago Forte's "progressive summarization" schema which is to essentially do a couple of passes, first bolding interesting ideas, and then highlighting the ones that really stand out.
3) For ideas that are especially resonant, I'll pull them out and make them their own individual text note that articulates not necessarily the original idea but my interpretation of the idea with some commentary that I have on how it relates to other things that I am thinking about. Critically, these notes are in my own words, not just quotations of others. That's because re-articulating the idea is for me part of the process of understanding it. Each note focuses on one idea (an "atomic" note) and includes relevant citations for later convenience.
Note that sometimes this will spur a thought that's not just based on something else that I have read, but an actual original idea. That's the best moment and the kind that makes the whole process worth it.
4) Create links between that note and others, usually with some kind of comment on why I think they relate (otherwise I will forget).
When a topic of interest starts to emerge I will create a separate note that links together all of the related notes. These get called different things, like a structure note or a map of content, but they do the same job—creating one place where you can see all of the notes that relate together based on some topic that is of interest to you. These might be general topics, like, say, "History of Basket Weaving," or something that is more personalized for you or your work. I generally will create a structure not as part of my writing process when I am trying to collect my thoughts on the topic. Ideally, these topics start to emerge organically based on what you read and write about.
I will say that this kind of note taking is a deep rabbit hole and there are a lot of folks who can be dogmatic about how it should be done and what is the one true way. The best way though is what helps you do whatever it is you want to do with your notes and research.
posted by synecdoche at 1:23 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
As synecdoche said, there is a lot of “content” out there on note taking, and everyone wants to tell you how they do it. I listened to this podcast yesterday, and I felt like they did a good job explaining their reading/research/note taking workflows, and also gave a good summary of the Building a Second Brain book and school of thought. It might give you some additional directions to consider for your workflows.
posted by bluloo at 1:40 PM on October 7, 2022
posted by bluloo at 1:40 PM on October 7, 2022
I wouldn't say I'm a full-on Obsidian *expert*, but I've been using it for a good while & it's stuck with me, so here's the stuff I would've wanted to hear from myself when I got started:
• Don't be scared off by the "Restricted Mode" toggle (unless you *are* in a scenario where you should be that cautious). That's where a lot of the neat stuff of Obsidian lies, in the community.
• Don't be prematurely prescriptive about your organizational structure. It's easy to want to go 110% in on tags, and tag-clouds, and... Those are great tools, but let them come to you. Otherwise you'll build a structure the way you think you want it to work, vs. how it'll reveal itself with use.
• Take some time to find a theme you like. Especially now that they've recently done an update that affects themes, it should be stable for a bit & you want something you like. (but also, there's a good number of themes that want to rope in a whole lot of other tool & organizational assumptions)
* Related to the previous one, this space has a *lot* of people who want to tell you about the One Way to Do Things. That's partially that they figured their approach and want to share it; but also this space attracts a lot of people who want to make it their brand & become passive-income thought-leaders & can tell you the secrets to finally organizing your brain/life by organizing your notes (for only $40 for the book, but sign up for the 6-day email course for free, and by the way there's a super-exclusive cohort/membership based *class* that's normally $3,000 (but if you're on the mailing list, for 48 hours there's an exclusive coupon code!)... etc.)
Some of what some of them have to say can be useful, but keep a step removed & a discerning eye/ear at the ready. If something could be worth that much, it'll be worth that much because of the effort you put into it. But buying in doesn't mean you'll summon that effort automatically.
* Adding timestamps can be good. Yes, in theory everything'll be living documents, relevant and updated; but you're like me, because I'm giving advice to past-me, and present-me knows that I have a habit of trying to mind-dump on a topic to get it out of my head & then I'll come back to it some months or years later. And at that point, you don't want to trust in file metadata. Especially if you're syncing between devices. Write down when you did that mind-dump, it'll save you later.
* Spend some time sharpening the metaphorical axe, but don't let it get in the way of actually using it. It's worth spending a little time here & there figuring out what plugins or tools might help the way you're using Obsidian; but it can draw you in & if you spend all your time trying to make the perfect workflow, you'll have a perfect vault without substance within it.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:00 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
• Don't be scared off by the "Restricted Mode" toggle (unless you *are* in a scenario where you should be that cautious). That's where a lot of the neat stuff of Obsidian lies, in the community.
• Don't be prematurely prescriptive about your organizational structure. It's easy to want to go 110% in on tags, and tag-clouds, and... Those are great tools, but let them come to you. Otherwise you'll build a structure the way you think you want it to work, vs. how it'll reveal itself with use.
• Take some time to find a theme you like. Especially now that they've recently done an update that affects themes, it should be stable for a bit & you want something you like. (but also, there's a good number of themes that want to rope in a whole lot of other tool & organizational assumptions)
* Related to the previous one, this space has a *lot* of people who want to tell you about the One Way to Do Things. That's partially that they figured their approach and want to share it; but also this space attracts a lot of people who want to make it their brand & become passive-income thought-leaders & can tell you the secrets to finally organizing your brain/life by organizing your notes (for only $40 for the book, but sign up for the 6-day email course for free, and by the way there's a super-exclusive cohort/membership based *class* that's normally $3,000 (but if you're on the mailing list, for 48 hours there's an exclusive coupon code!)... etc.)
Some of what some of them have to say can be useful, but keep a step removed & a discerning eye/ear at the ready. If something could be worth that much, it'll be worth that much because of the effort you put into it. But buying in doesn't mean you'll summon that effort automatically.
* Adding timestamps can be good. Yes, in theory everything'll be living documents, relevant and updated; but you're like me, because I'm giving advice to past-me, and present-me knows that I have a habit of trying to mind-dump on a topic to get it out of my head & then I'll come back to it some months or years later. And at that point, you don't want to trust in file metadata. Especially if you're syncing between devices. Write down when you did that mind-dump, it'll save you later.
* Spend some time sharpening the metaphorical axe, but don't let it get in the way of actually using it. It's worth spending a little time here & there figuring out what plugins or tools might help the way you're using Obsidian; but it can draw you in & if you spend all your time trying to make the perfect workflow, you'll have a perfect vault without substance within it.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:00 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Reading that book led me to Obsidian!
This is for organizing research and thinking for a nonfiction book project.
I don't actually use Obsidian for this but I do use a flat-file markdown text database, so just about everything I do is easily portable to Obsidian. I'll give you a quick overview in case it is helpful. (I do use Obsidian for ephemeral notes, filing, and for data handling that is too loosely structured to fit neatly in a spreadsheet -- Dataview plugin is nice for this. I would like to use Obsidian for "project notes" / draft preparation but I'm not really there yet.)
I have a fairly direct implementation of Luhmann's slipbox as explained by Ahrens. My permanent notes live in a folder called
I keep literature notes separately in the subfolder
That's it basically. The magic promised by Ahrens is that, with this setup, you can "think inside the box," answering questions that are prompted by the content already in the notes, seeing new connections, and so endogenously generating new permanent notes.
Note that everything in the
Everything else is "ephemeral notes." That means the stuff I jot down to keep track of what I'm reading lives somewhere else, and only gets to go into the box when it is turned into a proper literature note. I make oblique little notes to myself about ideas I can't fully express yet, or permanent notes I should write, or things I have to do today, etc. -- those don't go into the box. The box is pristine and governed by rules and I like it that way.
posted by grobstein at 5:02 PM on October 7, 2022
This is for organizing research and thinking for a nonfiction book project.
I don't actually use Obsidian for this but I do use a flat-file markdown text database, so just about everything I do is easily portable to Obsidian. I'll give you a quick overview in case it is helpful. (I do use Obsidian for ephemeral notes, filing, and for data handling that is too loosely structured to fit neatly in a spreadsheet -- Dataview plugin is nice for this. I would like to use Obsidian for "project notes" / draft preparation but I'm not really there yet.)
I have a fairly direct implementation of Luhmann's slipbox as explained by Ahrens. My permanent notes live in a folder called
permanent. They are called permanent notes because they aspire to be permanent objects, with a level of polish and atomicity that would allow them to be dropped into public writing. When I have written a new permanent note, I ask Luhmann's question: what note should this go next to in the box? Instead of the order of notes in a physical box, I rely on the alphabetical sort order of the files. This requires imposing a naming convention on the files. It is [unique code number]-[title].md. In addition, I use the same wiki-like syntax as Obsidian to link notes to related ones in the box. For example, if a sentence in the note I am writing states a claim that is defended (or attacked) elsewhere in the box, I will add a parenthetical link [[to-the-other-note]]. I started out this year with a note called 0001-[title].md. A new note that is not related to anything else in the box gets the next leading number (presently 0155). But, as Ahrens says, this should be a rare occurrence once you have a decent base of notes in your box. Instead, you'll want to put a new note after another note that it is related to (perhaps only tangentially), rather than at the very end of the box. A note that comes after 0001 can be called 0002. But in the likely scenario that there is already an 0002, a note coming after 0001 will be numbered 0001.01. This can be extended recursively, so, for example, I have a note numbered 0126.ff.04.01. The point of the system is to place each note in its desired place in the alphabetical sort order of the folder, just as though it was tucked into a particular place in Luhmann's box. I keep literature notes separately in the subfolder
permanent/literature. These are generally one-file-per-work and titled author-year-title.md. They can be long or short. I try to write them in a way that will allow me to consult them instead of the work they are about for reference. So (depending on how important I think the source is for me), I'll write some kind of summary, and some kind of pointers to particularly interesting or important ideas (with page references, so you don't have to check those later). Permanent notes can and should link to literature notes with the same [[author-year-title]] syntax, plus page refs if applicable, which allows them to be basically turned directly into citations in a piece of public writing. That's it basically. The magic promised by Ahrens is that, with this setup, you can "think inside the box," answering questions that are prompted by the content already in the notes, seeing new connections, and so endogenously generating new permanent notes.
Note that everything in the
permanent folder is a Very Special On-Purpose Note, in the sense that there is no scratch work, miscellaneous filing, to-come-fill-this-in-later, kind of stuff in there. It is the kitchen sink in the sense that it covers every subject matter that is conceivably relevant to my scholarly interests, but in another sense it is very pure: just permanent and literature notes and nothing else. I find this strict hygiene very useful, because it means that I can one-stop-shop for organized and paragraph-formatted prose to put into papers and so on. Everything else is "ephemeral notes." That means the stuff I jot down to keep track of what I'm reading lives somewhere else, and only gets to go into the box when it is turned into a proper literature note. I make oblique little notes to myself about ideas I can't fully express yet, or permanent notes I should write, or things I have to do today, etc. -- those don't go into the box. The box is pristine and governed by rules and I like it that way.
posted by grobstein at 5:02 PM on October 7, 2022
You don't say what OS you're using, or if you intend to use Obsidian on mobile. I'm a former Obsidian user.
I'm not going to throw shade on the product itself. Obsidian is great, and the community around it top-notch. I used it on Mac. What broke it for me was that the mobile experience, on both iPhone and iPad, was awful. I could never navigate between screens very well. This is possibly a failure of mine and not of the software.
I would just advise, if you intend to use it on mobile, to check out how it works on your device before diving in too deeply. I started using Obsidian before the release of the mobile apps and was disappointed when the apps finally arrived. You might explore other text applications on mobile that work better while still being able to retain links, etc.
posted by lhauser at 5:28 PM on October 7, 2022
I'm not going to throw shade on the product itself. Obsidian is great, and the community around it top-notch. I used it on Mac. What broke it for me was that the mobile experience, on both iPhone and iPad, was awful. I could never navigate between screens very well. This is possibly a failure of mine and not of the software.
I would just advise, if you intend to use it on mobile, to check out how it works on your device before diving in too deeply. I started using Obsidian before the release of the mobile apps and was disappointed when the apps finally arrived. You might explore other text applications on mobile that work better while still being able to retain links, etc.
posted by lhauser at 5:28 PM on October 7, 2022
Addendum: I recognize that my system may seem to slavishly adhere to the reported habits of Luhmann. One advantage of doing things this way is that I basically have no more decisions to make about tooling and organization -- I just follow my rules. No need to sign up for note-taking retreats, because the method is comprehensive and works for me.
posted by grobstein at 5:29 PM on October 7, 2022
posted by grobstein at 5:29 PM on October 7, 2022
Smaller, beginner stuff: I keep a folder in my vault (I have only one primary vault) of Obsidian How-Tos, such as a markdown reference, and references for the few plugins I use.
Agree on all the above advice on not going crazy with plugins, but I do love Folder Index. It all depends on the combination of your brain and project, but graph view is not helpful for my work. Having an auto-generated index is terrific for a bird's-eye view, for me.
I use iCloud drive to sync across iphone, mac and PC; works just fine.
posted by moonmoth at 10:54 AM on October 9, 2022
Agree on all the above advice on not going crazy with plugins, but I do love Folder Index. It all depends on the combination of your brain and project, but graph view is not helpful for my work. Having an auto-generated index is terrific for a bird's-eye view, for me.
I use iCloud drive to sync across iphone, mac and PC; works just fine.
posted by moonmoth at 10:54 AM on October 9, 2022
I use iCloud drive to sync across iphone, mac and PC; works just fine.
Oh yeah I've been using Syncthing to sync notes b/w Mac, Android and Linux. Works great. It doesn't have first-party support on iOS though and I haven't tried the third-party solution.
posted by grobstein at 1:35 PM on October 9, 2022
Oh yeah I've been using Syncthing to sync notes b/w Mac, Android and Linux. Works great. It doesn't have first-party support on iOS though and I haven't tried the third-party solution.
posted by grobstein at 1:35 PM on October 9, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by dum spiro spero at 8:22 AM on October 7, 2022