I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about note-taking apps, particularly Obsidian, and I’m curious about the appeal. Why do people take notes in general, and for what purposes are they using these apps? What makes Obsidian (or similar apps) useful for these purposes? Any insights or personal experiences would be appreciated!
I take notes because I know I can’t remember everything. Meeting notes, ideas, little things here and there… Stuff I’d normally put in a paper notebook. But you can’t search in a paper notebook - and that’s where obsidian comes in. And I can link every project and meeting together.
Keeping records of things you might need to reference later is an insane super power most people don’t appreciate.
How many times have you been in a situation where you vaguely remember finding a good link online that explains something, and you could really use it right now, but you can’t remember exactly how you got there?
So you spend a long time searching, and maybe you find it, maybe you don’t. But you’ve wasted time and lost your groove.
For many jobs where it’s your job to sit at a desk and know things, this happens weekly, if not daily. If you get into the habit of capturing the information you need, you’re just so far ahead of the game.
I’m really good at my job. I’m not smarter than my colleagues and I don’t have a better memory , but I’ve honed my ability to recognize when I’m encountering something I’ll probably need again in the future, and then capture it. And sure enough, when I need it the second (or third or fourth) time, I’m not reinventing the wheel like my peers are. I just look up what I used the first time. It’s literally my only competitive advantage, but it’s insanely powerful.
Honest answer? I can no longer read my own handwriting after a short time… 
You take notes and reference them later… or not.
Pretty much the gist of it
I’m building an archive of content and knowledge because I have amnesia and it’s better to have a personal wiki of the stuff I know than relying on google every time.
I organize the vegetables I can grow in my temperate zone and the needs they’ll have for growing, as in water, trellising, pest protection, etc etc. I include the nutritional advantages of each and hashtag each nutrient, so if I want to figure out everything I want to grow that has vitamin K, it’ll show me all the leafy greens that contain high levels of vitamin K
I have a collection of planes I think are really cool including pictures with them. I also started an adjacent node network for individual engines used in aircraft.
I do little creative writing projects and exercises that I keep collected and sorted. Sometimes they are small, sometimes they approach novella size. If they are larger, it’s convenient to break it down into smaller notes that contain scenes of a larger story or narrative.
I keep my album reviews and general music writing in a folder, just so I can look back and see what fascinating facts and stories I collected about them, including credits and categorical identifiers. I have a reference subfolder containing musicians that are also tagged in the album notes, so I can click on a musician and see what other projects they were in that I wrote on.
I have a folder for important people, so when I hear about a fascinating individual in history such as Minnie Vautrin, I make a page for them and collect a timeline/biography about them over time that I can reflect on whenever I want
On top of all that, that plugins make it super easy to do productive things with the app. I was able to make a custom button that opens a side pane with Wikipedia homepage, so I can quickly reference things, cite things, copy and paste passages. Copying from Wikipedia also copies the citation links, so I can click on a passage I copied and it will open up the cited reference from the wiki page automatically.
It’s just a really versatile way to keep track of things if you’re someone who thinks a lot. I have interests all across the board, from art to history to hobbies to science, and having a way to track all of that and get it off my mind has allowed me to free up conscious space to think even more. Whatever your interests are, keeping track of them in obsidian is a huge buff
People use it for journaling, obsessive data collection, studying for school, all sorts of things. It’s ultimately so customizable and let’s you organize it for whatever you want it to be. Too many people take their memory for granted, having a recordable place to keep all your thoughts helps you retain way more information while also freeing up your biological RAM
Shit that took me hours to find a working solution for is gonna be written down. Code examples. Photo editing tricks. Cool stuff to do with my kid (with links and descriptions). A ToDo list. Creative ideas that pop up…
I’m not a machine. I can’t remember everything.
And the most important thing, keeping it in a note means not having to keep it in my mind.
I can just let it go without having to worry about forgetting it
It’s literally my second brain, there are swathes of details in there about relationships, conversations I’ve had, all the profiles of everything my company sells, those annoying procedures you have to do once every 4 years and can’t remember.
Like getting a new router and the process of connecting it to my IP.
Anything I want to offload and might need to know/do again, goes into obsidian.
I’m only here for the linking.
Before Obsidian, I had a bunch of random .txt files scattered across my computer and a heap of hand-written notes on my desk.
Obsidian really was a nice place to give these notes a proper home. Plus, the ability to link between notes is amazing.
Ideas about my area of study. I don’t really use paper, i write it in obsidian.
About philosophy, psychology, anything I’m interested about.
Also about my goals in life, in this specific year. And how I’ll accomplish them, to the level of tasks.
Everything structured. It’s hard to know how to structure it, in an automatic way, but it’s amazing.
The linking is an amazing feature. you can focus on very precise stuff. And then see the whole picture.
Obsidian is actually enjoyable to use in a way that other products are not. The ability to customize it and automate it just sparks joy in me for some reason.
After losing track of what was popular in the software world while suffering from a depression sparked withdrawal from tech news, I started reading a few blogs in later 2023 and saw Obsidian being talked about at great length so I downloaded it and set out to learn its ins and outs.
I documented my learning process in Obsidian as it progressed. I’d download a plugin, watch a YouTube video, configure my setup, use it for a few days and then write a post for my blog. I’d cross post it on Reddit and use a hashtag on Mastodon. I went for months living and breathing Obsidian. I started doing all my writing in it. I pimped out the template for my daily note, incorporating more and more of my life into it. I integrated key email messages via IFTTT, Dropbox and Hazel. I synced my bookmarks from Raindrop.io. I started using Omnivore as my read it later service simply because it automatically imports into Obsidian. I started my first GitHub repository to share 500 Markdown notes containing my quotes collection. I managed to get Obsidian to do every single thing I’d once used Evernote for.
Because of Obsidian I’ve been able to learn blogging in the 21st century. I have four different blogs on three different platforms. I’ve got good notes and records and tens of thousands of words of web posts in my vault. Although I still write about the app once or twice a week, I’ve moved on to writing reviews of other software and even into non-technical writing. It’s amazing that something as simple as a plain text editor at its core has been at the center of my tech and real-life revival. It is so powerful and so extensible that it almost defies belief. The community around the app is generally helpful, supportive curious and open. I’ve even interacted with the CEO of the company right here on Reddit.
The brain is good for having ideas, not for remembering them
Life is easier when you take notes. You don’t have to remember things you just check your notes. I am so much more productive and organized now.
I use it for:
- Structured notes when studying
- As a repository for thoughts, ideas and plans for a project e.g. a recent kitchen refurbishment
- a place for notable quotes, thoughts, ideas, charts, diagrams that I anticipate I might value sometime in the future
- reflective journaling
The third bullet is my most frequently used.
I’ve become quite disciplined at avoiding scrapes of paper and scribbling on handouts, etc. Everything goes in the single vault . I can access it on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop and browser so it’s always to hand. I must have looked things up in there at least a dozen times in the last week.
I had paper pads. With a pen loop. Drawings. Notes from past projects, date. It’s clunky, keeping it around. (Like in 2002, when I could take walks with my entire MP3 collection with my big DELL laptop in a satchel bag, with wires, keeping a camera)
It’s a “second brain”, a place where I can jot down ideas, organize them. Refer to them.
Very useful when you’re stuck with ADHD. Ideas popping at the most inconvenient time. At least I can jot a word or two on today’s daily note.
With ADHD it’s possible to write two words at the same time. I type faster on a keyboard than by hand so text files on a keyboard is more comfortable.
Also, compared to a physical note book. Try doing search on dead trees books.
Obsidian has something very close to what Wiki does when using one for managing your knowledge (“knowledge management”). Wikis are useful to help others in the future, and you can make links, include a copy of another page into another (“transclusion”).
Apple notes barely only allows to organize notes in folders and links. Synology Note is barely functional. Notion seems cool. Evernote was cool too.
But most of them are hard to manage and you can’t link.
Obsidian does like a “wiki”, but it’s on your device. You can sync. AND the killer feature: it’s just text files in folders.
I had Wikis for years. A virtual machine with Web server and running either MediaWiki (what runs Wikipedia), or Confluence, or self hosted GitLab. But maintaining them, protecting access to them so my personal knowledge doesn’t get leaked. The hassle. I changed many times when it comes to servers and personal lab.
As a programmer and Web developer, I have folders of text files (in Markdown) already. But I didn’t think about editing them from an app (other than my Programming editor and source control with Git).
I had to migrate 20 years of poorly organized and barely functional notes from (almost all) the aforementioned apps, and my past wikis and had to hack around with database backups, export scripts. Some notes were forgotten in a backup rotting on my NAS. As for my folders with markdown files, it was just a drag and drop!
No need to maintain a wiki instance, database backup, VPN connection to my home lab. My home lab can be in a power outage, or I can be completely offline and see my notes i need to the best way I’ve ever imagined.
Now, it’s just a bliss!
I use Obsidian to take notes, but also used it to ESCAPE from something that was dragging me down - I escaped from two things:
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Constantly sending myself emails about stuff I found that was valuable, but I didn’t have time to look at during that moment. Then needing to constantly cleanup or snooze them in my inbox. Now I just store them inside lists in Notion.
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Constantly adding too many tasks to my tasklist, that would keep coming up every day and needing to be rescheduled constantly. Now I can just add these as notes to projects/lists and access them only when I’m working on those things.
I like Obsidian because out of the box it is simple.
Lots of other note taking apps try to do too many things, like Notion, or Amplenote which tries to force a workflow and tasks onto you.
In Obsidian I just made a folder structure, then started taking notes. Gradually I can do linking, tagging or whatever but it doesn’t distract from my REAL work. Note taking should enable your work by allowing you to clear your head and your workspace, desktop etc. Too many note systems actually create work, with Obsidian I follow the KISS principle and it’s great.
Why do people take notes in general
Have you never been to school…?
Well originally the following reason:
I wrote a lot of stories with games like frantic fanfic, which was it’s connected universe, and wanted to easily link events / characters across stories
Why i use it now:
I forget stuff,
I like writing programming documentation
I use it as a blog
I use it to save my old manuals, so that I don’t need a big ass folder of random device manuals
I use it as a todo list