In my previous post, I talked about personal knowledge management (PKM). As I mentioned in that post, there are a wide variety of tools and methods different people might use for keeping track of information and learning. One size doesn’t fit all, and you might have different needs or preferences than I do, but I want to take a few minutes to talk about why I love the tool I use — Obsidian.

What Is Obsidian?

Before I get into why I like Obsidian, let me start with what Obsidian is. Simply put, it’s notetaking software, somewhat similar to Evernote, Joplin, or OneNote. A digital app for storing notes you make. That’s it…and yet that’s not “it.” Which brings me to why I like it.

1. Obsidian is Simple, but Can Be Complex

There are a few key characteristics that I appreciate about Obsidian. The first is that it can be complex, but it’s fundamentally very simple. That is, it’s as only as complex as you need it to be. If you hear Obsidian fans talk about the program, you’ll often hear about all the things it can do, and all the plugins available, but you’ll rarely hear people talk about its fundamental simplicity.

You can jot down a plain old text-based note, and then be able to find it later via search. A note requires a filename, and whatever the content of the note is. That’s it. Your note could be a single sentence. It could be an image you copied and pasted in. It can have hashtags — or not. It can be just a few words, or it can be thousands of words.

If you want to, you can include some basic formatting. There’s a slight learning curve to this, but it’s not super-complicated. The formatting is done with something called “markdown,” which is simple formatting “code” similar to what most online bulletin board systems use. It’s almost intuitive, and the kind of formatting that’s used regularly —  italics, bolding, headings, and numbered or bulleted lists — is pretty easy to get used to using. (Some of us have, in fact, been using it for years because it’s the same kind of markdown that a lot of software and online systems has been using as shortcuts for decades.)

becomes

Lists like this:

display like this:

And headings can easily be written like this:

to produce this:

I keep a sample note in my database that has examples of all the various formatting options so that when I want to use something less common (like a footnote), if I can’t remember how to do it, it’s easy to just look and see.

2. Obsidian is “Future-Proof”

There’s a reason for fiddling with this code, simple as it is: future-proofing. Every note in Obsidian is a single markdown file. A markdown file is like a fancy text file. Each one is readable all by itself. That means you can go to your File Explorer (or whatever the Mac or Linux equivalents are), select that file, and open it in Notepad or TextEdit, Word, etc. It isn’t proprietary or limited to Obsidian, and it doesn’t rely on formatting unique to Obsidian.

This is an important element of making the program what’s called “future proof.” With most software, you run the risk that if your program becomes obsolete, or if you stop updating at some point to the newest version, your files become obsolete, too, and they’re either entirely inaccessible, or at minimum they’re a mess because their formatting doesn’t carry over to other programs.

Obsidian is intentionally designed to avoid that problem, so your notes are safe and available independent of Obsidian. Obsidian offers easy access, search capabilities, etc., and it provides added features, but the foundational notes themselves are not tied to Obsidian. Here’s an example, for instance, of one of my notes (where I’ve saved something I posted to Facebook) that I just opened, without Obsidian, directly from the Windows File Explorer:

 

It may not be pretty, but there’s no loss of data. This is what that same note looks like inside Obsidian, in editing mode:

And in display mode:

(Sorry if these screenshots look a little blurry. The computer doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with shrinking them down to fit this post.) Much of what you’re seeing here is what comprises my third favorite characteristic of Obsidian…

3. Obsidian Can Be Interlinked

Obsidian is designed for linking. Not only can you create a clickable link to an internet site; you can link between notes. This is amazing because it enables the software to function much like your brain does. Ideas are naturally connected, and a big part of what makes good thinkers good is that they seek out and find these connections. Obsidian enables you to link notes — as much or as little as you want.

So you can see in the note above that I’ve linked to two other notes: Immune & Lymphatic System and Vaccines and Vaccination.

Linking like this opens up a lot of possibilities. You can bounce from note to note, following the connections like a daisy chain. You can also view the notes that link to a given note — as well as “unlinked mentions,” which the software guesses at based on the words used. See how the software identifies this an unlinked mention to the Vaccines and Vaccination note because it contains the word “vaccines”?

(This is more helpful in some contexts than others.)  So you can keep track of connections you’ve made between ideas, and you can discover new connections.

Getting Started with Obsidian

If you’re just getting started with Obsidian, I highly recommend watching the Obsidian for Beginners series by Linking Your Thinking on YouTube. It was made before the newest version came out, so a few details in the interface might be a little different, but this will help eliminate the learning curve of getting started with new software.

You can also download my sample note that shows the various formatting options. Other than that, just download the app, install it, and dive in!