For the past few years, I have been tyring to find the perfect personal knowledge management (PKM) system. I have tried many different apps, including Evernote, Notion, Roam Research, and many more. However, I have never been able to find one that I am happy with. I still haven't. There isn't a system that not only works for me, but looks good and is customisable. That being said, sacrificing looks for functionality is something I am willing to do. I decided to settle on Obsidian. The good thing about Obsidian is that it allows you to customise it almost endlessly. There's probably a plugin for anything you want to do. If there isn't, make one yourself. That's the beauty of Obsidian. It's a blank canvas that you can make your own. While there are pre-built themes and extensions, the downside is that you have to do a lot of the work yourself.
I had used Notion for at least a year, and at first, I loved it. It was a great way to organise my notes and tasks. The databases feature, which I still miss, was a great way to orgnaise my notes. However, my way of thinking didn't align with how Notion worked. I found myself spending more time organising my notes than actually writing them and by the end it just felt really cluttered.
Now, in Obsidian, I just create a new note and start writing. I have a few templates that I use, a daily note system, and some plugins that I use to make my life easier. But, other than that, I just write.
So, how do I take notes with Obsidian? Let's find out.
What is Obsidian
Obsidian is a free, closed-source, markdown-based note-taking app. Its main draw is that it allows you
to create a network of notes, which you can then link together and view in a graph. Instead of meticulously
crafting the perfect note, you instead just write separate notes and they are linked together through
[[wikilinks]] and tags. There are many systems that you can apply to Obsidian. But, I like to use the
Evergreen Notes system - more on this later.
Customisation
Plugins
I have many plugins, even one that I have created myself. However, here I will only talk about the crucial ones that I can't live without. If you want to see all of my plugins, then check them out on my notes site (reference).
Advancted Tables
This is used to create markdown tables on the fly with /table. If you've dealt with
markdown tables before, you'll know how much of a pain they are to create and maintain. This
plugins makes life a lot easier with features such as: alignment options, table formatting and allows
you to easily add and remove rows and columns. To use the / commands, you must have
the setting turn on in Obsidian.
dataview
This isn't an essential plugin, but I do use it in my daily notes to curate all of the past tasks that I haven't yet completed.
Kanban
I talk about the importance of Kanban boards later on. It creates a kanban board that can be viewed both as a board and a regular obsidian note.
Periodic Notes
This is a crucial plugin for a daily notes system that integrates nicely with the templater plugin. Later, I show you how I use this to create daily notes for journaling and tracking habits.
Remotely Save
A huge downside of Obsidian is that you have to pay for cloud storage and syncing. It's quite
in-expensive, but if you consider paying for it for a lifetime it quickly adds up as an extra
expense that you don't need. With the remotely-save plugin, you can save your notes to a WebDAV if you
have a NAS or to Google Drive, One Drive, and many more. This is a great way to sync your notes across
multiple devices.
Templater
Templates
Obsidian does support templates by default, however, the templater plugin provides a lot more features. For example, you can run JavaScript, at one point I was categorising notes by folder and automatically filtered them into the correct folder by the filename e.g. if the file had a year at the end "About Time (2013)" then It would put that file into the films folder. Now I realised that it is easier to just tag notes to sort them rather than using folders.
The most essential template that I have is the daily notes template which looks like this:
properties:
- university work
- swedish
- and so on ...
'''dataview
TASK
FROM #daily AND -"#recycle"
WHERE !completed AND !contains(meta(section).subpath, "Habits")
SORT completed
'''
## <% tp.date.now("HH:mm:ss") %>NOTE: I have used three speach marks (''') instead of backticks here so it could all go in one codeblock.
I have CMD + D bound to create a new periodic note with the default template
as the daily note template. This creates a file with the date as the name and puts it into the daily folder
e.g. January 20th, March.mdx. I use the American date format here as I think it looks nicer, I will be
accepting hate mail. This allows me to check of daily habits and write down thoughts as I go
through the day. I pair this with Espanso to quickly create timestamped headings by typing ;now (reference).
Types of Notes
There a many types of notes that you can take. I like to keep mine simple. I have a few different types. These are: daily notes, source notes, evergreen notes, canvas notes, map notes, and kanban notes.
Source Notes
When I want to learn a new programming language, I create a source ntoe. This is where I can just throw up all the information on to a page. I then use this to create my evergreen notes.
Evergreen Notes
I split my evergreen notes into three sections. The first is the summary. This is where I write as brief
as possible what the concept is. The second is a place for any other notes or ideas related to the
conept. In this case, I related the idea bad to callbacks in React. The third is where I put
any references or resources that I may need. The point of an evergreen note is that you are forever
building on top of them. They are a living document that are never finished. You tag them with
#evergreen and then link to them from other notes. This is a great way to build up a knowledge base.
Then, when you want to revise a concept, you just look for the tag related to it and you can see all
the notes you need. I then tend to make flashcards from these notes.
Daily Notes
I like to keep track of waht I do each day. I use the daily notes plugin to create a new note for
each day. I also have a daily notes template that tracks daily habits and pulls in incomplete tasks
from the previous days. I used to journal at the end of each day, bt I found that I never really
did it. So, instead, I jsut write something down when it happens. I use Espanso to quickly create
timestamp headings on the fly.
Canvas Notes
This is a type of note that I rarely use, however, it stills comes in useful from time to time. I use canvas notes for when I want to brainstorm ideas. I use the default canvas page to create a canvas note. This is a great way to visualise ideas and concepts.
Here is canvas note that I made when I was initially learning Swedish. It was nice to keep in the background if I ever needed to quickly look up a common mistake or Swedish character pronunciation.
Kanban Notes
This one is probably pretty self-explanatory. You've probably come across a kanban board before. It was
highly popularised by Trello. I use them to keep track of tasks related to projects. I use the
kanban plugin to create a kanban board.
Map Notes
This is where I keep my dewey decimal system. I have a map note for each category and then a map note for each sub-category. This is a great way to orgnaise your notes, this is what I use for my University notes.
The map emoji is a great way to make your map notes stand out. As you can see, I also have a backlink to the main category note. This is a great way to navigate your notes. A benifit of this, over having folders, is that the notes can be in multiple categories. For example, a note on the history of computing could be in the history category and the computing category.
Backup and Syncing
Everything in Obsidian is stored in a folder on your computer. This has many benefits over cloud-based
note-taking apps. But, it also comes with some downsides. A benifit is that you own your data. This brings
a sense of security and privacy that I like. I can write anything I want and know that it is safe. A downside
of this is backing up your data and syncing it across devices. At first, I strictly wrote notes on my
computer. But, I soon realised that I needed to be able to write notes on my phone too. Instead of paying
for Obsidian Sync, I decided to setup a WebDAV server on my Synology NAS. This was surprisingly easy to
do and means I can sync my notes across all devices. This is done through the remotely-save plugin.
You can find out more about how to do this here. A nice thing, is that you can also
save plugins and themes across your devices through using this method. However, I found this broke a few
plugins and wasn't really reliable enough. Oh, and you can also save to Google Drive, One Drive, and many
more with this plugin too.