Obsidian App – Part 2
Just so you don’t get lost in the weeds, let’s review why to use this app. Obsidian is an app to help writers, researchers, and learners keep their notes in an app that uses a powerful system to link your ideas together. Once your personal knowledge management begins to grow, you will see relationships that you had not seen before. The graphing view in the app is amazing. Your findings will begin to organize in clusters or constellations when they are linked together. From here you can use your PKM (personal knowledge management) as a basis to write articles, academic papers or a book.
If you begin to look at Obsidian more deeply, you can see that there are several ways to organize your notes. Since the files are so small, try to file them in fewer folders than you might use on your computer or cloud system. The app is extremely fast when searching for key terms, so you don’t have to be so concerned with hierarchy when filing. For example, just having a Daily Notes folder (where you put your daily journal notes), Inbox (where you put notes made quickly to capture before they escape), Templates, Permanent, and so on will likely be sufficient. It pays to look at some of the videos from the expert* mentioned last month to see what filing system/folder structure resonates with you.
If you have a drive to be creative and organize what you have collected for years into a coherent system where you can quickly find thoughts and ideas, this may be for you. Your sources are articles you have saved, Kindle highlights, Podcasts, or video notes, etc. It’s important to reduce what you read into your own words. Also put references in your notes so if you need to go back to the source, you can.
Your notes might be Fleeting notes which are collected on the fly before you lose or forget them. Another type of notes are Literature notes from readings which may have more verbiage or quotes. The final type of note is a Permanent note which is the essence of the idea expressed in your own words and expressed succinctly.
Learning the app will take time. It is unstructured so it seems more complicated that it really is. The idea is just to get started by adding thoughts in your own words in what interests you. Obsidian has a useful, concise help page that answers lots of questions.
To be continued as I am learning more about Obsidian too.
*Find these on YouTube:
Nick Milo – also see his website at www.linkingyourthinking.com
Brian Jenks
FromSergio
Danny Hatcher
And others, just search in YouTube