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I use Obsidian as my primary note-taking platform for classes, research, collecting thoughts, and publishing this site. This note details the way that I use Obsidian, and some of the reasons that I like it.

What is Obsidian?

Should I Use Obsidian?

I highly recommend this app for people who:

• take typed notes or regularly create write-ups and summaries of handwritten notes
  • In particular, people who frequently type in LaTeX or draft writings
• like to store their knowledge digitally
• are interested in the ability to create a highly personalized note-taking system
• want all notes stored in local files in an easily readable format (markdown)

If any of these sound like you, I suggest you try it out at least for a week or two. It's free!

I do not recommend obsidian if you:

• mostly take handwritten notes
• do not care very much what fancy features your digital note-taking software has and
• want to be able to quickly use your system out-of-the box (it can be quite a bit of effort to get Obsidian to the point where it matches your workflow, depending on your style, and even without customizations there is a little bit of a learning curve)

for those on the fence...

The main features of Obsidian that I think set it apart from other note-taking applications out of the box are:

1. internal/wiki linking system
   • this allows you to link to other existing notes
2. ability to embed content from notes inside others
   • an extension of the linking, this makes it very convenient to draft pieces of writing, or to include information that you might edit
3. ability to create and use template notes
   • almost every note that I create uses a template because it allows me to add metadata. I can then query across notes and display relevant information with little effort using [[#Plugins]].
4. strong plugin community
   • if you are looking for a specific feature that is not currently offered in the base program, someone probably already made it
5. highly personalizable appearance
   • I can make my note-taking environment look nice, and that makes me excited to use it!

Tips for Getting Started

My two biggest pieces of advice for just starting out are

1. start writing notes first in the way that makes the most sense for you.
   • If these means putting notes in folders, put them in folders. If this means using tags, use tags. The important part is that your note organization strategy matches what you want to do
2. do not add any plugins to begin with.
   • If you look at other people's well-established vaults online, you will probably see that they have tons of plugins, pretty themes, and thousands of notes. Don't worry about that yet. Don't worry about the "best" ways to use Obsidian.
   • Instead, keep track of what that would improve your personal workflow.

1. Obsidian is a note taking app first.

When setting up your vault, it can be easy to get lost in the sauce trying to create the best file/note organization system with all of the perfect plugins. Compound that with the thriving online community of fellow Obsidian users, each with their own personalized setup, and it can get overwhelming.

It is easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole of optimizing and personalizing, but it is OK if your vault does not look perfect or do everything you want it to yet. At the same time, it is also OK to spend hours optimizing and personalizing if that is what you want to do. The important part is to ensure that it is a means to an end, and that you will actually use your vault.

2. Add plugins to reduce friction

As you use Obsidian, it will become apparent what sorts of features you want. As I alluded to before, there is a massive plugin community. If you are looking for some specific functionality that the core app does not provide, chances are there is some plugin that will do it for you.

3. Keep track of your workflow changes

This will allow you to see what worked and what didn't work. It will also make it easier to see how a change will affect your system.

My Setup

Plugins

Here some of the plugins that I use and what they do for me

• Latex Suite allows me to write in LaTeX efficiently. This is a time-saver for writing math notes and prevents symbolic notation from interrupting the flow
• Dataview is probably one of the most powerful plugins available. It lets me create custom queries of notes and will display lists and tables of the relevant content depending on my needs. This is a key piece in my file organization system in Obsidian.
• Digital Garden of course, is the plugin that I use to publish these notes to web :)
• I recently also added Zotero Integration, Pandoc, and Pandoc References to make managing references and drafting for LaTeX manuscripts easier
• Meta Bind is another one I added recently, which has allowed me to streamline my template use and add metadata to notes faster
• Quality-of-life:
  • Hide Folders for hiding template and attachment folders from navigation
  • Status Bar Organizer to clean up the status bar

Overall Organization

I debated whether I should have one or multiple vaults when first beginning my Obsidian journey, but ultimately I decided to have just one where everything can be stored in the same place. I have since split off a worldbuilding project into its own vault. This made more sense for several reasons including 1) all notes were unattached to anything else in my main vault 2) the large cluster of notes within cluttered my access to school- and garden- related notes 3) it will be easier to publish its own site if I ever decide to do so. My reason being that separating them would prevent me from connecting ideas from different areas of my thinking. Since I am a student and a researcher, I often find my personal thoughts are tied to my classes and work. If your work and personal life are more compartmentalized, however (and you are thinking of using Obsidian for both), then having multiple vaults may make more sense.

Although I decided to have just one vault, I do separate the different "types" of notes that I take into categories:

• School is where I put all notes related to classes and structured learning. You can see some of my Lecture Notes published on this site.
• Concepts are where I place definitions, theorems, and summaries. I think of this as my personal wikipedia/dictionary of relevant topics
• Archive is where I place fleeting notes like notes from meetings, grocery lists, etc that have already been addressed. This is also where all my periodic notes go..
• Thoughts are notes that fall into my my note-taking system that are not concepts
• Digital Garden is where specifically digital garden site content goes - one-off blog posts and menus/maps/Topics

I also have an inbox, where all new notes are created, and where they stay until I process them into the correct location. Finally, there is the dashboard, which contains navigation, lists of notes to-be-completed and their statuses, and a few general vault reference notes.

I use YAML metadata to keep track of notes that I have in each category and easily query them with dataview to make the show up where they need to. The main two that I use are type, which help me organize and categorize notes, and status which help me to see which notes need work.

School

Each course is a folder with the following structure

<course name>
|- <course name>.md   # class hub note
|- Lecture Notes      
	|- Lecture 1.md
	|- ...
	|- Lecture n.md
|- Course PDFs        
	|- syllabus.pdf
	|- Lecture 1.pdf
	|- ...
	|- Lecture n.pdf
|- Main Topics        
	|- unit 1.md
	|- ...
	|- unit k.md

Inactive course folders are moved to School/Archive

Concepts

Have no organization, apart from concepts wiki/writings where I place longer technical explanations about specific topics. For example, I wrote a long(ish) explanation about the use of singular value decomposition in a few different settings.

Thoughts

Are where I store all of the thoughts that are organized according to my my note-taking system and also where I keep my media collection, quote library, and people/entity index. You can read about each of the types of notes that I use for thought-keeping here. The main types of media I collect are music, albums, literature, essays/articles, and films, and each note includes space for me to link them to different themes/topics, creators, and quotes.

I rate the media that I find on a scale of 0-6

0. Trash - actively avoid. Do not seek this.
1. Worse - not worth experiencing
2. Bad - not enjoyable. Do not take the opportunity
3. Fine - passable, has some merits and/or some flaws. Worth experiencing
4. Good - enjoyable if given the opportunity
5. Amazing - worth re-experiencing multiple times
6. Incredible - life-changing, actively seek this

Digital Garden

Is where I keep all notes that are solely related to publishing my digital garden. This includes pages like Welcome or my Rock Garden, true "blog" posts that I do not intend to edit, and my Topics pages.

Mentions