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.
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
Hoorde je die swoosh? Dat was oktober die voorbij raasde. Of zoals ik eerder deze week las, 213 maart tot en met 243 maart. Ik ben nog altijd blij met mijn thuiswerkplek en maak het nog meer mijn eigen plekje om de komende maanden door te komen. Zo heb ik dit weekend weer vinyl van zolder gehaald en naast me in de kast gezet. Lekker oude plaatjes draaien terwijl ik zit te werken. Op dit moment staat 4US op van Doe Maar. Wel zo toepasselijk in deze tijd toch?
Blog on!
Wat is de moeite om te lezen?
Afgelopen week was het internet jarig. Op een respectabele leeftijd van 51 is het internet één van de grootste uitvindingen van de moderne tijd. Inmiddels is het internet, en specifiek het web, een integraal onderdeel van ons dagelijks leven, met de bijbehorende wetgeving en restricties. Maar het gaat nog niet ver genoeg voor de wetgevers. Het NRC artikel”De tijd van internet als vrijhaven is straks geschiedenis” legt uit hoe Amerikaanse en Europese beleidsmakers de komende tijd trachten de macht van de grote internetbedrijven in te dammen.
Het belangrijkste punt is dat op dit moment platformen als Facebook en Youtube niet verantwoordelijk worden gehouden voor wat gebruikers er op posten. Je voelt aan alles dat dit niet klopt en dat er iets moet veranderen. Maar hoever moet je daar in gaan met wetgeving? Bestaat het gevaar dat je grote techbedrijven juist in de kaart speelt met andere wetgeving? Of als je het anders bekijkt, kan een striktere wetgeving nog altijd garanderen dat start-ups de vrijheid krijgen om nieuwe platformen te ontwikkelen?
Is het voldoende om alleen te zien wat illegaal is, of wat schadelijk is? Elliot Harmon van het EFF gaat in een opiniestuk in NYTimes nog een stap verder. Maak antitrust wetgeving nog strenger en pak de verdienmodellen van grote techbedrijven aan. Zij verdienen nu aan het zo lang mogelijk gebruikers op het platform te houden en zo meer data te kunnen verzamelen om aan adverteerders aan te bieden. Daar gaan ze ver in. Van manipluatie tot polarisatie. Naast wetgeving rondom de soort informatie die wordt geplaatst, zou het ook moeten gaan om de waarde van de informatie en de waarde van het netwerk van de gebruiker. De vraag is of onze Europese politici zijn opgewassen tegen de lobby van Big Tech en de rol die Amerikaanse beleidsmakers spelen na de komende presidentsverkiezingen.
Wat gebeurt er nog meer?
Dat was dan best een dingetje deze week. Morning Brew, met 6 miljoen winst in 2019 een van de meest succesvolle nieuwsbrieven in de USA, wisselde van eigenaar voor 75 miljoen dollar. Dát Morningbrew verkocht zou worden hing al langer in de lucht maar het was nog onbekend aan wie. Dat wordt dus Insider inc. Zij nemen een meerderheidsbelang in de nieuwsbrief, die zich richt op business nieuws en daarnaast een aantal verticals heeft zoals Marketing Brew en Retail Brew. De groei zit volgens Insider CEO vooral in de advertentiemarkt. Met 2,5 miljoen abonnees op Morning Brew is dat inderdaad een lucratieve markt. Ik verwacht in 2021 een nieuwe industrie rondom nieuwsbrief-advertising zoals we ook zagen bij social media en podcasts.
️♂️ Ik schreef deze week over mijn doorlopende zoektocht naar het perfecte systeem om notities te maken, taken te beheren en overzicht te houden. Ik vrees dat ik er nooit uit ga komen. Ton Zijlstra gaan intussen onverminderd door met een prachtige serie over 100 dagen in Obsidian.
Een aanrader voor gebruikers van Obsidian: de Obsidian Clipper van Joost Plattel.
En dan verschijnt deze week het Newsletter OS van Janel. Een verzameling Notion notities om volgens een gestructureerd plan je nieuwsbrief te starten. Van onderwerpkeuze tot platform en distributie. Alle elementen komen langs. Het is geen goedkoop pakket maar wel waardevol als je serieus van plan bent een nieuwsbrief te starten.
RSS lezer Inoreader breidt hun geweldige software uit met annotaties en notities bij artikelen.
Nieuwsbrief van de week
Elke donderdag stuurt Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten een persoonlijke nieuwsbrief. Boris is sinds jaar en dag het gezicht van techsite The Next Web en de bijbehorende conferentie. In zijn nieuwsbrief laat hij vaak een kijkje achter de persoonlijke schermen zien. Soms hilarisch, altijd waardevol.
Meer (inter)nationale nieuwsbrieven vind je op Thanks for Subscribing.
Wil je nog beter op de hoogte blijven wat er in de nieuwsbrief-industrie gebeurt? Mijn dagelijkse nieuwsbrief Newsletter News brengt je de beste links en tweets van nieuwsbriefmakers.
Dit was de OPEN nieuwsbrief weer voor deze week. Heb je tips, verbeteringen of een goed aanbod? Stuur me een bericht of reageer onder de blogpost bij deze nieuwsbrief, ik lees alles! En als altijd, een gedeelde nieuwsbrief is een blije nieuwsbrief.
<!–
–>
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.
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.
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
Thanks for an awesome post. I think that I have quite similar ideas to how you think about notes and note-taking, although the terminology is different. But even so, you raised several points that were not only linked to my own thinking, but gave me new thoughts and ideas to work with. Cheers for that.
You’re welcome Michael!
Writing my Notions and notes these past months as part of my revamped personal knowledge management system, I realised as the collection grew that using the collection as a thinking tool also requires remembering more of what is in there. Not to make the notes superfluous but to have more top of mind material that serves as a starting point in interacting with the notes I have, as well as to be able to weave that more easily into current tasks and work. I also expect it to aid creativity, as a large chunk of creativity is recombination of previous elements, and remembering more elements lowers the threshold to new combinations.
Both in Andy Matuschaks notes and in this long article by Michael Nielsen about his use of Anki, spaced repetition is discussed in the context of note taking, and it got me thinking (I write ‘thinking’, but it was as much working through the mentioned material and distilling the concepts key to me from it, as it was chewing on it mentally and adding that to those same notes. Thinking is more interacting with my PKM, rather than sitting down looking into the middle distance as per Rodin’s bronze).
Anki is a tool (on laptop and mobile), that allows you to train your memory with flash cards and spaced repetition. I’ve used it in the past, e.g. to increase my vocabulary in French and to better read cyrillic script, but not with much energy or effect. It felt uncomfortable to be using card decks made by others for instance. Making my own flash cards from scratch always seemed a daunting task as well.
With my now much better set-up of notes however I have a great starting point to create my own decks of flash cards. As I am obviously not the first one to realise the potential of notes collections for flash cards, there is already an Obsidian plugin that pulls out questions and answers from my notes, and puts them into Anki. It comes with a wiki that documents how to set it up for yourself, including how to mark various types of questions and answers in your notes.
The key feature is, that I can add a question and its answer as a part of any note, and the plugin will pull it out and export that to Anki. It means I can e.g. end a note on three key aspects of distributed applications, with an Anki question and answer about those three aspects, which will get exported to Anki. Better still, I can add multiple questions in different forms about the same thing to that note, e.g. a follow-up question for each of the three aspects. Having multiple versions of basically the same question means I can phrase them for different memory hooks in parallel. This will enhance my own understanding, and allows me to place notions in specific contexts for instance.
I have now installed the Obsidian to Anki plugin in Obsidian, and the Anki Connect plugin in Anki (so it can ‘listen’ for automated input).
Some things I hope this will yield benefits for is:
making it a more deliberate choice what I want to remember long term
making it easier to remember the basics of a new field of interest
making the effort to remember a habit
improving my skilled reading
using remembered material to better connect new notes to the existing corpus
making it easier to internalise new / relatively new material
The way I’m approaching it is to have all my flash cards, whatever the topic, in the same single deck. This as I see my notes collection and all the stuff I remember as a interlinked network of topics and material. Splitting it up in some sort of thematic structure precludes a whole range of potential connections and associations, and is artificial in that it makes a current perhaps logical distinction the norm forever.
The coming 12 weeks or so I’ll work on two habits:
adding questions to my notes as I work on those notes, and
using Anki daily to review those questions.
@neil it’s a really nice UI for local working, but I want a public garden ultimately, and I’m not sure about Obsidian Publish, so I may end up with another tool. Publishing the markdown files to other systems seems to lose the backlinks mostly. Tiddly+Stroll is appealing at the moment, tho I’ve not yet tried to install.
@nicol @neil For a client I’m currently trying to publish part of my markdown notes through github as a wiki on github.io using ReSpec (https://respec.org/docs/) as it can directly work with markdown files as source. For my own digital garden in Obsidian I’m not contemplating publishing anything (other than as collated output on pages is my site)
ReSpec Documentation
@ton @neil that’s interesting, thanks. I’m guessing technical specs/docs need internal [[double-square]] linking in the same way (which sounds like the main thing lost if publishing Obsidian MD directly https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-github-pages-for-digital-gardeners/2622/7).
“Obsidian+Github Pages” for digital gardeners?
@nicol @neil tiddlywiki is working on refining its publishing system afaik 🙂 I don’t think you can do anything wrong by starting to mess with emacs since it has so many useful applications. Org and tiddlywiki share many similarities in what you can do but while TW might certainly be more intuitive with a friendlier interface at first emacs is to me a more suitable „base“. If there’s one notetaking facility that I trust in being maintained, FOSS, while developing
@nicol @neil through a determined userbase, it’s emacs. Many of the connections to its outside simply work better, and I’d say largely bc of this userbase. I can use Caldav to sync calendar and tasks, there are refined tools for webclippin, syncing and integrating with Zotero, etc which are things I want to have down the line so I rather learn some emacs^^
@rosano @ton Here’s my nowtions page if you’re interested 🙂 https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/nowtions
nowtions
@neil @ton @edsu @mike_hales I’ve noticed this Obsidian Obsession lately: an enourmous amount of people discussing linking and note-taking in depth, but barely a few that actually do something with them. Collectors gotta keep collectin’!I just use a pen and a plain notebook and jot down thoughts, summaries, ideas, anything, usually accompanied with clippings, stickers and photos. I re-read it at semi-regular intervals. Sometimes. I used to adhere to the silly GTD methods, but in the end, I just do whatever I feel like. Some chapters of my research come to me at night. Have a pencil ready in the vicinity. As Ton said, while re-reading, I annotate and link (mostly implicitly), and then write something new that will become the “original” work. Most of the times, it’s just a simple schematic with a few arrows. I wrote about how to keep a journal in https://brainbaking.com/post/2017/07/journaling-in-practice/
Journaling in practice
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.
Share this:TwitterLinkedInFacebookWhatsAppEmail