Obsidian.md

Published on October 24, 2023

What if there were a tool that could revolutionize the way you take notes, organize your thoughts, and build your personal knowledge base—adapting to your unique needs and offering the highest level of privacy and security, all while being incredibly user-friendly? The answer to all these questions lies in Obsidian, a note-taking app that's so much more than just a digital notebook.

Obsidian is not just another app where you jot down random thoughts or to-do lists. It's a space where your ideas come alive, connect, and grow into a web of knowledge. Imagine being able to hyperlink your thoughts within a note, creating a semantic network that visually represents the connections between your ideas. This is what Obsidian offers—a graph view that lets you see your notes not as isolated islands but as an interconnected archipelago of thought.

To truly grasp the power of Obsidian, it's helpful to see it in action. I've created a time-lapse screen recording that showcases my web of notes in Obsidian. In the video, blue nodes represent existing notes, red nodes signify potential notes, and green nodes are tags. This visual representation is not just aesthetically pleasing; it's a functional map of your intellectual journey.

Furthermore, Obsidian stores all your notes as simple text files with a .md (Markdown) extension. This means your notes are not locked into a proprietary format; they're accessible across different platforms and are future-proof. Moreover, since Obsidian stores all your notes locally on your computer, it offers unparalleled privacy and security. In a world where data breaches are all too common, this feature is a breath of fresh air.

Let's delve into the mechanics of note-taking in Obsidian. My process starts with literature notes, which are comprehensive notes taken from any source—books, articles, podcasts. From these literature notes, I extract singular ideas to create atomic notes. Each atomic note is a self-contained idea, rigorously referenced back to its source material. This creates a rich tapestry of interconnected ideas, each clearly attributed to its origin.

What about moments when, while writing a note, a new idea or term comes to mind? That's where Obsidian's double square bracket syntax ([[ ]]) comes into play. By enclosing a term or phrase in double square brackets, you create a potential note—a placeholder that you can come back to and explore later. It's like planting a seed in your garden of knowledge, one that you can cultivate at your leisure.

The next time you find yourself drowning in a sea of disorganized notes or struggling to make sense of your thoughts, give Obsidian a try. It's more than just a note-taking app; it's a tool that can change the way you think, learn, and organize your life. In a world that's increasingly complex and interconnected, wouldn't you want a personal command center for your ideas?