14 reactions on “100 Days in Obsidian Pt 2: Hierarchy and Logs”

1. I’ve been using Obsidian a little over 100 days now. So, with over three months of daily use it’s good to review the experience. I will do this in some detail, and it will span several blogposts. To explain both the evolution over time, as well as how I currently work with Obsidian in practice in a more detailed way, as Frank (rightly!) requested.
   My system leads the use of tools
   First off, a key point to make. I am using a system for myself to plan and do my work, maintain lots of things in parallel, and keep notes. That system consists of several interlocking methods, and those methods are supported by various tools. What I describe in my review of 100 days of using Obsidian, is not about Obsidian’s functionality per se, but more about how the functionality and affordances of Obsidian fit with my system and the methods in that system. With a better fit with my system and methods, I can reduce friction in my methods, and reduce the number of tools I need to use in support of those methods. At the same time, the use of a new tool like Obsidian influences the practical application of methods, it creates a different daily practice. Those shifts are of interest as well.
   What I started with
   The image below shows you how my overall system of work and taking in information looks. It’s a personal knowledge management system, that both takes care of the networked nature of making sense of new information and evolving interests, as well as the more hierarchical nature of working on projects and executing tasks. Both start with my general notion of where I want to be headed (‘goals’).

   I used different tools for different parts of that image:

   Excel (orange) for: listing goals (3-10 yrs out), the 3 month planning cycle I keep (along the lines of ’12 week year’), the habits I want to maintain or introduce, and tracking of those habits and project progress/fulfillment.
   Things (red) for: areas of my life I’m active in, projects within those areas, and tasks in those projects.
   WordPress (darkblue) for: daily logs (which I started keeping end of April this year, on an internal WP instance), week logs (internal draft blogposting), and of course for public blogging itself.
   Evernote (blue) for: a list of all my current interests/favourite topics, all types of note taking, related to my work/projects and my information diet.
   Other tools (grey) come into play for feedreading (Readkit), blocking time (Nextcloud calendar in Thunderbird), book reading (Kindle, Nova2), keeping references (Zotero since June, Evernote before that)
   While evaluating my system, I tried Obsidian
   In the spring I had started evaluating my system. I found I was not keeping up several parts of it, had fallen out of practice with a number of elements, and had changed some of my practices without adapting the flow in my tools. It had therefore suffered in its usefulness. Being at home because of the pandemic allowed me to allocate some time to take a better look, and to start testing some changes. On the tool side of that evaluation, I want to get rid of Evernote (as a silo and single point of failure) since some years.
   One change in my system I was experimenting with, was keeping better atomic notes about the core concepts and key elements in how I work. Late last year I thought a bit about atomic notes, i.e. cards with individual snippets, and bringing those collections of snippets and the process of curating them and threading them into e.g. a blogpost or a line of argumentation. In January I came across Zettelkasten and took a closer look, in the spring I read a book about Zettelkasten and knew I wanted to adopt parts of it into my system (linking notes first and foremost, and storing references in a better way). That’s when I started using Zotero to keep references, and stopped doing that in Evernote (Zotero can take website snapshots and store them locally, something I used Evernote for a lot. On top of it if you give Zotero a reference it will find and store a PDF of a scientific article, very useful to read more deeply).
   I started to keep atomic notes, sometimes called ‘evergreen notes’ which I to myself now call Notions, capturing concepts from my work (so not work related notes, but conceptual notes) first in both WordPress and Evernote simultaneously. WordPress (a local instance on my laptop, not online) because I already used it for day logs since April, and it allows relatively easy linking, and Evernote because it is much easier to keep notes there than WP, but linking in Evernote is much harder. I also played with some note taking tools, and that’s when I came across Obsidian. It immediately felt comfortable to use it.
   How after 100 days Obsidian has covered my system
   After over 100 days of Obsidian my use of it has expanded to include a much larger part of my system. Along the way it made my use within that system of Things, Evernote and almost Excel obsolete. It also means I sharpened my system and practice of using it again. This is how the tool use within my system, with the use of Obsidian in green, now looks

   Obsidian now contains some 1200 mark down files. 500 are Notions, atomic notes almost exclusively about my own concepts and other core concepts in my work, in my own words. Mostly taken from my own blogposts, reports, and presentations over the years. The other 700 are some 115 day log / week log / month maps, about 100 proto-notions and notes that contain conceptual info to keep from other sources, and some 500 work and project related notes from conversations and work in progress. This sounds as a very quantitative take, and it is. I have in the past months definitely focused on the volume of ‘production’, to ensure I could quickly experience whether the tool helped me as intended. I think that monitoring the pace of production, which I’ve done in the past months, will no longer be relevant by the end of this year. I used the quantity as a lead indicator basically, but have been on the lookout for the lag indicators: is building a collection of linked notes leading to new connections, to more easily creating output like blogposts and presentations, having concepts concisely worded at hand in conversations to re-use? And it did. One very important thing, central to the Zettelkasten method, I haven’t really tried yet however, which is to use the current collection as a thinking tool. Because I was more focused on creating notions first.
   On Obsidian as a tool
   There are four things in Obsidian that are to me key affordances:

   it is a viewer/editor, a fancy viewer/editor, on top of plain markdown text files on my laptop. It builds its own local database to keep track of links between notes. Whatever happens to Obsidian, my data is always available.It being ‘just’ a viewer is important because Obsidian is not open source and won’t be. There is a potential open source alternative, Foam, but that tool is not yet developed enough.
   being ‘just’ an editor means using regular text files, it feels like coming full circle, as I have for the most part been note taking in simple text files since the late ’80s. Textfiles always had my preference, as they’re fast and easy to create, but it needed a way to connect them, add tags etc., and that was always the sticking point. It means text files are available outside of Obsidian. This allows me to access and manipulate notes from outside Obsidian without issue, and I do (e.g. on mobile, but also with other software on my laptop such as Tinderbox that I used for the images in this post).
   it makes linking between notes (or future links) as simple as writing their filenames, which is supported by forward search while you’re typing.
   it shows graphs of your note network, which to me is useful especially for 2 steps around a note you’re working on.
   I use Obsidian as simple as possible; I do not use plugins that are supposed to help you create notes (e.g. the existing Zettelkasten and Day log plugin), because they make assumptions about how to create notes (how to name them, which links to create in them). I created my own workflow for creating notes to avoid functionality lock-in in Obsidian: day logs are created manually by keyboard shortcuts using Alfred (previously TextExpander), as are the timestamps I use to create unique file names for notes.
   Timeline of three months of Obsidian use
   Below is a timeline of steps taken in the past months, which gives you an impression of how my use of Obsidian in support of my system has evolved.
   November 2019 I discuss the concept of cards (i.e. atomic notes), curation and writing output
   January 2020 I first looked at the Zettelkasten method and some tools suggested for it. I mention the value of linking notes (possible in Evernote, but high friction to do)
   May 2020, read the book about Zettelkasten by Sönke Ahrens, adopted Zotero as a consequence.
   7 July started with deliberately making Zettelkasten style atomic notes in WordPres en Evernote in parallel, to move away from collecting as dumping stuff in your back yard. Atomic notes only concerning my concepts in my work.
   8 July started using Obsidian, after having just started creating ‘evergreen’ notes
   15 July having made 35 atomic notes, I make a new association between two of them for the first time.
   28 July I’m at 140 conceptual notes. I named the collection Garden of the Forking Paths. I switched my digital tickler files (a part of the GTD method) from Evernote to Obsidian. I had stopped using them, but now it felt normal again to use them. The post I wrote about this, was made from atomic notes I already had made beforehand.
   5 August I find I haven’t used WordPress anymore for my day logs ever since starting with Obsidian, and that I also added week logs (an automatic collation of day logs), and monthmaps (a mindmap at the start of the month listing key upcoming things and potential barriers). My Evernote use dropped to 4 notes in 4 weeks, whereas it was 47 the 4 weeks before it. After almost a month of Obsidian, I am getting more convinced that I am on a path of ditching Evernote.
   12 August I renamed my ‘evergreen’ notes, that contain my concepts mostly, to Notions, as the generic word notes doesn’t make a distinction in the character of some the things I’m putting into notes.
   12 August I write a first long form blogpost made from Notions
   13 August Added Nextcloud synchronisation of the note files, allowing mobile viewing and editing of notes
   31 August I keep track of tasks in Obsidian and drop Things. There was a time I always did such things in straightforward text files. Being able to do so again but now with a much better way of viewing and navigating such text files and the connections between them, makes it easy to ‘revert’ to my old ways so to speak.
   13 September I am at 300 Notions. These first 300 notions are mostly my notions, the things that are core to my thinking about my own work, and the things I internalised over the past 25 years or so, of doing that work. I expect that going forward other people’s ideas and notions will become more important in my collection.
   13 September I describe how I make notions and notes
   September / October I increasingly use my conceptual Notions as reference while in (online) conversations.
   5 October I gave a client presentation (about the Dutch system of base registers) pulled together completely from existing Notions.
   7 October added a ‘decision log’ to my note keeping.
   16 October 100 days in Obsidian, 500 Notions and about 700 other types of notes.
   16 October reinstated a thorough Weekly Review (a component of GTD) into my system.
   21 October I gave a brief presentation Ethics as a Practice, the second this month pulled together from existing notes.
   This all as a first post looking back on 100 days of Obsidian.
   Part 2: Hierarchy and Logs
   Part 3: Task management
   Part 4: Writing connected Notions, Ideas, and Notes
   Part 5: Flow using workspaces
   Part 6: Obsidian development vs my usage

2. @ton fascinating! I‘ll have to give this a proper read later. I missed the first part and I‘m really interested in your system. I change my system (I have no system) every couple of weeks…

3. @ton Maar het is wel een interssant bericht om eens rustig te lezen.

4. I have used Cultured Code’s todo-application Things a long time, since the end of 2008. I attended a presentation then where Cultured Code explained how they translated their intentions and values into the design of the app, and used their software ever since. It is a beautiful software tool and it has been very useful to me for almost 12 years. And then, since the end of August, I have not used it at all. Before 2008 and Things, I used my employer’s tools (Outlook mostly) and privately used text files. Back in the late 1980’s and in the 1990s I only used text files to keep track of tasks. And that is what I’m doing now again, using Obsidian to create markdown text files.
   Important elements to me in using text files for tasks effectively are:

   being able to link between text files both directly and through tags
   being able to quickly switch between the task list and the resources needed for a task
   having the task lists as part of my overall system, not an island
   Things is good at using tags for tasks (allowing me to e.g. filter tasks on context or needed amount of focus through tasks). I was also able do some linking between Things tasks and e.g. Evernote notes, links that I manually copied between the two, and copied into Tinderbox which I use as a dashboard map for various things. I also used a script at the start of project to create the right first tasks, and corresponding notes in those applications. That way there is consistency between how areas, projects and project tags are used across those applications. It worked but it meant a lot of switching between applications during the day. In my set-up of Things/Evernote and now in Obsidian, I roughly follow the Getting Things Done method (areas, projects, inbox, and marking things as someday or waiting etc.)
   As a side note: I do not use my mobile to look at or add tasks, or mark them completed. I basically always work laptop-first. This means that the availability of my tasks lists on mobile, and the capability to edit them there, is not important to me. In fact, Things is an Apple-only product, and I use an Android phone, so I never have been able to use Things on mobile (I did have Things on my 1st gen iPad back in 2010, but tablets are another thing that never really found a niche in my workflow). In that sense using text files are an improvement: I can read them and edit them, because I synchronise my Obsidian notes to my Nextcloud instance, which my mobile can access (there’s no mobile Obsidian app, and there’s no need for it either, any plain text editor will do after all.)
   As I mentioned in earlier posts, going back to text files feels very comfortable to me. Obsidians features make it rather frictionless even, with transclusion, tagging and with linking.
   The task management set-up
   As described in my previous post on my use of Obsidian, I have a hierarchical folder structure of areas of activity, with project folders within them.
   Each project folder contains a file titled ‘0 [project name] things to do’, where I keep the list of actions currently relevant for that project. If there are sub projects, then each of those has a similar own list of tasks, which are transcluded into the general project list.
   In the 1GTD12WY folder, where I keep the general material w.r.t. future goals and my 3 month planning cycle, I also have two general tasklists. One is the root of all tasklists (called ‘0 root list things to do’), the other is a list of general tasks for the current month (‘0 this month things to do’). The leading zero ensures that tasklist are always the first file in a (project) folder.
   The root and month task list in the general ‘getting things done’ folder.
   The ‘this month’ list is filled at the start of each month, from whatever is in the ticklerfile for that month (it might be quarterly recurrent things like, ‘file VAT returns by the 30th’, or ‘check out the book that is scheduled to be published the 21st [link]’), and from general things not tied to any particular project that came up while making my month map (see previous posting).
   The root list contains all the areas of activity, and for each project within an area the project’s task lists is transcluded. Every project task list links to the root list, so even when I forget to add it to the root list, it will show up as a backlink. As projects in turn may have sub projects with their own tasklist, you get multilevel transclusion. Obsidian allows you to go 5 layers deep so that is more than enough for my set-up. This way a task is only ever in one single list.
   I use tags like #waiting and #urgent to mark task status.
   My root task list with the month list and a project list embedded through transclusion
   At the start of each project I run a script that creates all the necessities for a project. This includes automatically making the task list for a new project, adding a handful of common tasks to it, and adding the link to the root list.
   Task management process
   Daily
   On a daily basis I work with the task lists, in multiple ways.
   I browse through the task root list at the start of the day, and specifically the projects I will be spending time on that day. I look at what is marked #urgent. Both the root task list and the #urgent search filter I have pinned as starred searches, so I can directly go to them from the Obsidian interface. I do not add existing daily habits onto my task list, I might add them for habits I’m trying to develop.
   Above: a project task list, in a project folder. Below: the starred searches to quickly switch between e.g. the root list, the month list, the monthly map and urgent tasks

   Whenever I am in a meeting on a project, I have the existing corresponding task list in front of me, right next to the notes I am making during the meeting. After, or during a meeting I update the tasklist, through adding, splitting, deleting or rephrasing.
   When I add a task to a list, I also add links to notes that are relevant to it, e.g. the meeting notes where the task originates, or the note that contains the rough notes and current status of a task. I link/mention the things I need for the task. This lowers the threshold to start doing a task.
   While adding a task I may add tags that help me select which ones are fitting for the current context (e.g. level of energy/focus likely needed, or specific context in which to do them). As I’m only working from home due to the pandemic I currently don’t use contextual tasks yet (in Things I’d tag things with #train e.g. if it something I can well do while commuting to a client’s office).
   When a task is done, I copy and delete it from the task list, and paste it into the day log (see previous post). That way the day log contains all the things I’ve completed that day, plus anything else that came along and wasn’t on the task lists. (I use the day log for time sheets and the weekly review).
   Weekly
   During my weekly review, for each ongoing project I remove no longer relevant or finished tasks, add things I realise will be needed in the coming week(s), and scan the horizon for anything that will become #urgent in the next 3 weeks to mark them as such. I also review the #waiting things to see if anything has slipped my mind.
   Monthly
   Each month I check if any new projects need to be added, or which ones to close down and remove from the root list. While making my month map I add the resulting tasks to the relevant project list, and I add the tasks resulting from things in next month’s tickler file to the task list for this month.

5. Wat een ijzersterk idee, zo’n weeklog door je dagelijkse notities in te voegen. Ik gebruik Espanso als textexpander, en heb direct een substitution rule gemaakt om ook een weeklog te genereren. Met een paar toetsaanslagen direct een weekoverzicht. Goed stuk weer.

6. Ik heb met veel interesse de blogposts van Ton gelezen hoe hij na 100 dagen Obsidian gebruikt als zijn Personal Knowledge Management instrument. Na een hoog over introductie over zijn eigen werk- en projectprincipes (enorm interessant!) duikt hij in twee posts de diepte in, hoe hij Obsidian inricht om dagelijkse notities te maken, gevolgd door wekelijkse reviews en maandlogs. Daarnaast is Ton in de zomer overgestapt van Things naar Obsidian om zijn taken te beheren. Let wel, na 12 jaar gebruik van een taakmanagement-tool, stapt hij nu over op Obsidian. Ik ken Ton langer dan vandaag, dan zit er toch echt iets in Obsidian wat de moeite waard is.

   Deze zoektocht van Ton begon al langer geleden, na een besluit om afscheid te nemen van Evernote. Het frappante is dat ik Ton daardoor weer op het spoor kwam. We kennen elkaar al zeker 15 jaar uit de Nederlandse blogosfeer, maar de laatste jaren was ik hem wat uit het oog verloren. In 2016 kwamen we elkaar online weer tegen via zijn blogpost How to Leave Evernote en sindsdien vinden we elkaar geregeld op diverse onderwerpen, van Indieweb tot networked agency en knowledge management. Ton’s inzichten en zijn manier om uit verschillende bronnen en onderwerpen nieuwe kennis te vergaren waardeer ik enorm en is iets waar ik nog altijd veel van leer. Zo ook in zijn overstap naar Obsidian, waar ik al eerder over schreef.

   Ik neem zelf ook afscheid van Evernote. Ik ben bezig om notitieboeken uit het verleden kritisch te beoordelen of ik ze nog onder mijn vingertoppen wil hebben in een app, of ze als archief op een harde schijf opsla “voor ooit”. Zoals het nu loopt ben ik op 1 januari 2021 weg bij Evernote. Dat is nogal wat, als ik nu een oude blogpost teruglees uit 2005 waar ik al tegen dezelfde problemen liep als nu. Maar waar ik juist een eerste beta van Evernote besluit te gaan gebruiken. Ik dacht dat ik Evernote pas later ben gaan gebruiken, maar mijn blog bewijst anders. Hoe dan ook, het is de evolutie van software en mijn eigen voorkeuren. Tijd voor iets anders na 15 jaar…

   Ik heb al een paar van Ton’s tips overgenomen. Zoals de dagelijkse notitie om bij te houden wat er die dag gebeurt. De laatste vijf dagen in Obsidian ging vrij goed, al heb ik het nog niet in mijn gewoonte om na een bepaalde actie dat even in een zin op te schrijven. Dat zit niet in de tool, het automatisme of het proces. Dat heeft alles te maken met mijn mentaliteit dat ik van de ene naar de andere taak overspring. Ik neem weinig ruimte voor de reflectie en een stap terug te zetten wat er is gebeurd, wat het betekent en er een korte notitie van te maken.Ik gebruik wel een iets ander proces dan Ton. Ik ben ook fan van Alfred, maar voor het maken van de dagelijkse notitie gebruik ik een automatisch script in Keyboard Maestro. Deze maakt elke ochtend om 8:34 (ik hou wel van random tijdstippen) een nieuw bestand in mijn daglog aan. Hetzelfde wil ik nog doen voor het Weeklog en Maandlog.

   Ja, mijn Vault in Obsidian heet Frankopedia!

   Ik ben met Obsidian gestart vanuit Roam Research. De export van Roam heb ik in Obsidian gedumpt. Dat betekent dat ik veel random notities heb, lege bestanden van gelinkte woorden uit notities en een vrij ongestructureerde structuur. De folders van Ton brengen me wel op een idee om dit anders in te richten.

   Ik blijf echter gereserveerd over een tekst gerichte tool als Obsidian. Ik heb altijd al een voorkeur gehad voor apps die naast functionaliteit ook enige esthetica met zich meebrengen. Een app die goed is ontworpen, waar is nagedacht over zaken als iconen, fonts, kleurgebruik en toetsenbord shortcuts. Evernote was zo’n app. Obsidian is niet lelijk, maar in een app als bijvoorbeeld Notion heb ik net wat meer vrijheid en mogelijkheden om het nog meer eigen te maken. Ja dat zijn frivole kraaltjes en spiegeltjes als emoji als pagina-icoon, eigen pagina-headers, meer visuele mogelijkheden met (taken-)lijsten, kolommen, databases en bookmarks. Het voegt niets functioneels toe aan het proces, maar ik vind het prettig om in te werken. Het maakt Notion wel langzamer, de zoekmogelijkheden zijn nog onderontwikkeld en je kunt de weg kwijtraken als je databases probeert te linken. Trust me, I’ve been there…

   Een voorbeeldpagina in Notion

   Daarnaast gebruik ik dagelijks Drafts op zowel laptop als iPhone om links op te slaan voor mijn nieuwsbrief en om wat korte notities te maken. Of langere blogposts. De eerste draft voor deze blogpost komt uit… Drafts. Ik kreeg recent ook de tip om Ulysses weer op te pakken. Ik heb deze Markdown editor in mijn Setapp abonnement en ik gebruik het geregeld om langere artikelen te schrijven voor mijn werk. Met name artikelen die voortkomen uit interviews, die ik opneem en laat transcriberen. In Ulysses kan ik dan goed met blokken tekst schuiven en annotaties en notities maken bij de tekst. Maar als centrum voor al mijn notities en logboeken? Dat weet ik nog niet.

   De jury is er nog niet uit. Ik heb het geluk dat mijn werkprojecten de komende weken redelijk overzichtelijk zijn en ik eenvoudig kan switchen tussen Notion en Obsidian. Zonder dat het effect heeft op werkgerelateerde taken en projecten. Ondertussen lees en leer ik met veel interesse wat Ton en vele anderen doen op dit gebied. Ik heb mijn eigen dagelijkse Notion nieuwsbrief die automatisch wordt gevuld uit Reddit, Twitter en Youtube. Je kunt je er gratis op abonneren als je net als ik geïnteresseerd bent in de materie. Of je kiest voor de Obsidian nieuwsbrief als die je voorkeur heeft!

   Uiteindelijk komt het neer op twee besluiten: Kíes een systematiek en maak de mentale switch om het te blijven gebruiken. Met name dat laatste blijft een lastige voor me. Omdat ik constant dat gevoel heb dat het beter, slimmer, sneller of efficiënter kan. Dus blijf ik na 15 jaar puzzelen op dit soort systemen. Wat stiekem ook gewoon leuk is om te doen. Vind ik dan.
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7. @ton Just sharing another tool I came across, as I know you had mentioned looking for an open-source tool similar to Obsidian. This one appears interesting as it still keeps some hierarchy and folder structure as well, and I noticed here you mention a hierarchical structure. https://www.dendron.so/Quite interesting this seeming Cambrian explosion of tools for thought right now…
   Dendron

8. In this next part looking at my use of Obsidian I want to describe in more detail what notes I take and how I take them.
   Taking better notes is the actual reason I started using Obsidian. Using Obsidian for my work, day logs, and task management came later, and that covers the hierarchical part of my PKM system. The note taking part is the networked part of it. The system works for me because it combines those two things and has them interact: My internal dialogue is all about connected ideas and factoids, whereas doing activities and completing projects is more hierarchical in structure.
   I make four types of notes: Notions, Notes, Ideas and work notes.
   That last type, work notes, are the project and task related notes. Things I write down during meetings, notes from interviews, or ideas on how to move forward in a project. These live in the hierarchical structure I described in Pt 2. They can be linked to Ideas, Notes or Notions, or may give rise to them, but they serve a purpose firmly rooted in ongoing work. They are always placed within the context, and folder, of a specific project. This post isn’t about those notes.
   The other notes live in the non-hierarchical, networked part of my system. They are added as I go along based on things I think about and information I come across. They become part of the system and get context not by the folder they are placed in (as is the case with work notes in a project folder), they become part of the system because they get linked to existing notes that I associate them with. They are never not linked to at least one other note. The links over time form patterns, and emergent patterns lead to new insights. Those new insights get expressed in additional links and in new notes.
   These networked type notes come in three shapes, Notions, Notes, and Ideas. Each has their own folder to keep them separated from other material.
   The folders are named Garden of the Forking Paths (for Notions), Notes (which I may yet rename), and the Ideas-greenhouse. I will discuss them one by one.
   Ideas-greenhouse
   The ideas-greenhouse holds ideas I have, ideas that seem like something that can be put to action more or less quickly. They may be connected to notes in the other two folders, or to notes in the project folders. An example would be, that I jotted down the idea of making a digital garden for my company two months ago, triggered by a posting on how a community should have its governance documented in combination with having reread the communication handbook of Basecamp while thinking about remote working. It has since morphed into building a collective memory, and turned into a budding internal website documenting the first few things. This is useful when we are onboarding new people, and as a reference for all of us, so colleagues feel better equiped to decide something on their own or ask better questions if they do need someone else’s advice on a decision. So the ideas greenhouse contains ideas that can be acted upon after some tweaks. They may be refined over time, before such action, or connected to and recombined with other ideas in the greenhouse.
   Notes
   Notes, things I come across that strike me as interesting (filtered by my current favourite topics, but not exclusive to it, to aid serendipity), which I jot down while adding why I find it of interest. They’re more like general resources, in which I can keep/find examples, quotes or pointers, extended with some notes on what I think of them. Notes are things that may result from work notes (something someone said in a meeting, an example held up), or from feed reading (pointers to things, perspectives found in someone else’s blog), regular browsing and reading, or questions that I come up with. It’s a mix of stuff, and that’s why it still is called simply ‘Notes’. I may yet come up with a different name for them. An example would be a note I made last week, called SensRnet. SensRnet is the attempt at creating a national database of sensors placed in publice spaces, by local and national government entities. It came up in a meeting with a client. I jotted it down, adding a few links to its source code on GitHub published by the Dutch Cadastre, and links to articles written by some local governments about it. I also mention the outcome of a project my colleague Marc did a few years ago writing local regulations governing the placement of such sensors in public spaces, and doing an analysis from the legal viewpoint. That’s how a Note starts. I may copy some text into at some point, and summarise it over time, or add other context in which I encountered the same thing again. Notes are ‘factoid’ like, resources written down with the context added of how I found them and why I was interested. That’s different from Notions which are already at creation more about the future use it may have.
   Notions and proto-notions
   Notions are conceptual notes taken from my own work and experience mostly, and give my own perspective on these concepts. Most of the current well over 500 come directly in my own words from my blogposts of the past 18 years and presentations I gave during that time.
   As they are more conceptual than factual I started calling them Notions to distinguish them from the other more general resource Notes. I keep these Notions in a folder called Garden of the Forking Paths (see the name explained)
   Each Notion links to at least one other Notion, and while I write them I think about how what I am writing connects to other things already in the Garden of the Forking Paths (GotFP). I may also add additional links or tags, as I come across a Notion while pursuing something else.
   Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links. That way you see the entire vicinity of a Notion, and it may trigger additional perspectives and associations. It’s a way to leverage the ‘weak ties’ between Notions, which is the place where new information generally comes from.
   Below you see two graphs for a Notion called ‘3D to navigate information’, gleaned from a 2006 blogpost I wrote. The first image is the graph for direct links, showing two links. The second image is the graph for a distance of 2 (links of links), and it shows a much wider picture. It may well be that seeing that graph being created alongside a Notion while I am writing it, leads to adding in another link.
   The Notion ‘3D to navigate information’ is linked to two others, one on how the physical and information landscape overlap and correlate, and one about what I think would be useful functionality for social software tools.

   If you look at the same graph with distance 2, the layer of additionally visible nodes show how my new Notion might be connected to things like online identity, using the environment to store memory and layered access to information. This triggers additional thoughts during the writing process.

   I spin out notes and potential Notions from my project notes, as I encounter things in my work where some idea or thought jumps out. Those potential Notions I put in a folder called proto notions, inside my GotFP.
   Processing notes and proto-notions
   Both the notes and proto-notions I touch upon every now and then, further summarising them or adding explanation and perspective, rewording them, linking them to other notes (this is what Tiago Forte calls progressive summarising). Proto-notions may yet become Notes and not evolve into Notions. Some of what starts as a Note may become a Notion in the GotFP, but most will always remain notes. Most ‘factoids’, even if reworded and put into the context of why I find them interesting will always be Notes. Notions usually are about concepts pertaining to vision, values and practices. Linking them is a key part of those concepts, as it binds them into my network of concepts and thoughts, it puts them as atoms into the constellations that make up my perspective of things. Notes can be specific examples of Notions.
   I previously described how I use certain tags and referencing and naming conventions for Notes and Notions.
   Using Notions and Notes
   I use Notions and Notes in my work directly, pulling them into project notes, by transclusion, or e.g. when writing project proposals. I regularly call them up in conversations when something related gets being discussed, so I can re-use parts of them.
   I also use Notions to create new blogposts and presentations. Last month I gave two presentations which were entirely created from collating a few Notions and adding a line or two to have them flow over into each other. One was on government core (base) registers, the other on Ethics as a Practice. Two months ago I blogged about how I see the role of cities, and that too was constructed from Notions.
   Next to actual output, I pull together Notions, and sometimes Notes in what I call ’emergent outlines’ (Söhnke Ahrens in his book about Zettelkasten calls them speculative outlines, I like emergence better than speculation as a term). These are brief lists to which I add Notions that I think together flow into a story. As I use transclusion I can read them using the underlying Notions. Emergent outlines are a lightweight and bottom-up way to write more, that has a much lower threshold than thinking up a writing project and sitting down trying to write it out.
   Feedreading and Notes / Notions
   Feedreading is a source for Notes, sporadically for Notions. I notice a rising need with myself for higher quality material as input. Blog reading is conversational to me, and for a long time I’ve been content with that conversation as it is. Now I more often want to look into things more deeply. A blog conversation is no longer mostly the endpoint and more frequently the starting point for an exploration, leading me down a trail of links deeper into a topic. In the past three months I’ve read more scientific articles than in the past 3 years I think. Scientific articles and other documents I keep in Zotero, and from my notes I reference the Zotero entry. This difference in how I perceive my feed reading will likely shift my focus to how to read those feeds much more ‘inside-out’, i.e. starting from a question or topic, and checking what specific people in my blogroll say about them. This is funcionality more or less missing from feed readers, so it may lead me to want to tinker some more.
   This concludes the 4th part of describing how I use Obsidian. There’s one more coming, which is all about Obsidian’s functionality as a viewer on my markdown files: the use of workspaces.

9. Having described my overall system and how I use Obsidian in more detail for daily work, task management and networked note writing, in this posting I turn to how I arrange for low friction flow in Obsidian.
   An important functionality of Obsidian is that you can arrange different panes in which you can show files or other things. This is useful in various basic ways, e.g. to have a note you are editing open twice, once to edit, once seeing the preview. Or, as in the image below, to have a note open, with search results, a graph of connected ideas, and an overview of backlinks.
   Basic pane layout in Obsidian, search results, a file, a network graph and backlinks
   Every pane can be split horizontally and/or vertically, and again, up to the point it fills your entire screen. This allows me to for instance in a client conversation have my task list for that project, notes from our previous conversation as well as in-depth notes about the work, all in one overview, next to the file in which I’m taking notes from the ongoing meeting itself. While in parallel to all that I still have the ability to pull all kinds of other information or conceptual description during the meeting. This allows me to quickly bring up things in high detail, and easily switch between high-level and low-level things, organisational aspects and the topic at hand etc.
   Where this functionality comes into its own is where you can save specific pane / screen set-ups and switch between them as different workspaces. Since recently there is a workspaces plugin that does this. You can also do it by hand or scripted in the background. The current set-up is always stored in a file called workspace in the Obsidian folder in your vault. It’s a JSON file describing the screen lay-out. If you copy and rename that, you have saved your workspace. If you put it back and reload Obsidian you have reinstated that workspace. The plugin does the same thing but smoothly from within Obsidian itself.
   This means I can switch between workspaces at will, such as:

   The daily start workspace (which includes today’s daylog, yesterday’s daylog, the root task list and month map, the quarterly goals and an #urgent search)
   The weekly review workspace (quarterly goal list, weeklog, review template, root tasklist, monthmap)
   The month map workspace (#urgent, root tasklist, last month map, this month map, quarterly goals)
   The conference call workspace (Project main note, project task list, last call’s notes, new notes, project details)
   Note writing (search, graph, pane with relevant other note(s), note being written)
   The workspace I use at the start of the day: #urgent things on the left, today’s log and yesterday’s log in the middle, full taks list, quarterly goals, and month map on the right.
   This list of handy workspaces may still grow over time I suspect for different aspects of my work.
   There’s one more posting on my use of Obsidian left. It will be more of a summary, on what makes Obsidian work well for me, and why it fits my preferences.

10. Over the past few weeks I have described how my usage of Obsidian has evolved since I first used in early July. This is the final post in the series. Where the previous posts described my personal knowledge management system, and how I use it for daily project work, task management, note taking, and flow using workspaces in this final post I want to mention a few more general points.
    These points concern first my overall attitude towards using Obsidian as a tool, second its current functionality and third its future development of functionality.
    First, what is most important to me is that Obsidian is a capable viewer on my filesystem. It lets me work in plain text files. That is my ‘natural’ environment as I was used to doing everything in text files ever since I started using computers. It’s a return of sorts. What Obsidian as a viewer views is the top folder you point it to. The data I create in that folder remains independent from Obsidian. I can interact with that data (mark down text files) through other means than just Obsidian. And I do, I use the filesystem directly to see what are the most recent notes I made. I add images by downloading or copying them directly into a folder within the Obsidian vault. I use Applescript to create new notes and write content to them, without Obsidian playing any role.
    Next is that Obsidian allows me to rearrange how I see notes in different workspaces and lets me save both workspaces and searches, which means it can represent different queries on my files. In short Obsidian at this moment satisfies 3 important conditions for decentralised software: I own my own data, the app is a view, interfaces are queries. Had any one of those 3 but especially the first been missing, I would be exchanging one silo (Evernote) for the next. Obsidian after all is not open source. A similar tool Foam is. Foam is currently not far enough along their path of development to my taste, but will get there, and I will certainly explore making the switch.
    When it comes to current functionality I am ensuring that I use Obsidian only in the ways that fit with those three conditions. There is some functionality I therefore refuse to use, some I likely won’t use, and some I intend to start using.
    I refuse to use any functionality that creates functionality lock-in, and makes me dependent on that particular feature while compromising the 3 key conditions mentioned above. Basically this covers any functionality that determines what my data looks like, and how it is created (naming conventions, automatic lay-outs etc). Functionality that doesn’t stick to being a viewer, but actively shapes the way data looks is a no go.
    There are other functions I won’t use because they do not fit my system. For instance it is possible to publish your Obsidian vault publicly online (at publish.obsidian.md, here’s a random example), and some do. To me that is unthinkable: my notes are an extension of my thinking and a personal tool. They are part of my inner space. Publishing is a very different thing, meant for a different audience (you, not me), more product than internal process. At most I can imagine having separate public versions of internal notes, but really anything I publish in a public digital garden is an output of my internal digital garden. Obviously I’d want to publish those through my own site, not through an Obsidian controlled domain.
    Other functionality I am interested in exploring to use. For instance Obsidian supports using Mermaid diagrams, a mark-down style language. This is a way to use diagrams that can port to another viewer as well, and doesn’t get in the way if a viewer does not support them.

    Mermaid is a way to describe a diagram, and then render it. Seen here both from within Obsidian.
    Future functionality I will explore is functionality that increases the capabilities of Obsidian as a viewer. Anything to more intelligently deal with search results for instance, or showing notes on a time line or some other aspect. Being able to store graph settings in a workspace (graphs now all revert to the default when reloading a workspace). And using the API that is forthcoming, which presumably means I can have my scripts talk directly to Obsidian as well as the filesystem.
    I’ve now been using Obsidian for 122 days, and it will likely stay that way for some time.

11. This page lists some things on Personal Knowledge Management. In 2020 I’m mostly focused on processing material collected through my information strategies.
    For now therefore I’m just listing some of the things I wrote recently about note taking.

    Current description of my system

    Hierarchical folder structure for Areas and Projects, description of day, week and monthlogs
    How I do task management

    Making notes and notions
    How I make ‘notions’ my permanent notes
    My 300th Notion

    Planting the Garden of Forking Paths, a bit more about the note taking process
    Second order notes, Zettelkasten
    Wiki, Blogs, Note taking
    Threading Cards and Zettelkasten
    Threading Cards

12. Thanks for this write up Ton. A question: if your ‘incoming’ notes are in Notes or Notions – which type of notes end up in your project folders? Do you go through your meeting notes and process them into other type of more permanent notes of your project? Or do you move your meeting notes to project folders?

    • Project folders contain notes belonging to, or originating in a project. Meeting notes are in the project (or area) folder the meeting was for.

      From meeting notes actions may follow, which end up in the project’s todo-list.
      From meeting notes ideas or associations may originate which can turn into a Note, Notion, or one for the Idea list (if it is something that seems like it can be put to action more or less quickly).
      In meeting notes there may be little pieces of knowledge or examples mentioned by other participants, which can turn into Notes, or I can add as example to an existing Note. Such a Note, especially if it starts as stub, might be ‘upgraded’ to a Notion at some point in the future.
      Meeting notes may point to existing Notes (pointing to examples, or arguments) or Notions (a concept)

      After a meeting I go through the notes to clean them up, and lift things out that belong in other notes, action lists etc.

13. There are hundreds of resources on note-taking systems so don’t take this post as anything more than a collection that caught my attention. Once you go down the ‘zettelkasten’ or ‘digital garden’ rabbit holes, you may find that it takes a while to get out again.

    If you already have a sense of what the domain of ‘personal knowledge management’ includes, the list below might serve as a useful introduction to a systematic approach to how you think about knowledge work. If you haven’t yet come across what the fuss is about, you could find a reviews of Sonke Ahrens’ 2017 book, How to take smart notes.

    100 days in Obsidian – Workflow and system100 days in Obsidian – Hierarchy and logs100 days in Obsidian – Tracking tasks100 days in Obsidian – Writing notes (this post had the most areas of overlap for me; here are my Hypothes.is annotations)100 days in Obsidian – Flow and workspaces100 days in Obsidian – Final observations

    An interview with Ton Zijlstra by Andy Sylvester, where they discuss some of the posts listed above (you can see the page annotation I made while listening to this podcast).

    An example of my Hypothes.is notes on the Writing notes post in the list above.
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