Excalidraw on Nicole van der Hoeven

One Year Later: How I Use Visuals in My PKM (Sketch Your Mind Conference)

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:33:18 -0700

Today I gave a talk at my friend Zsolt Viczián’s Sketch Your Mind Conference about how I use visuals in my PKM, a follow-up to my video about Obsidian Excalidraw last year where I shared that I’d changed all my Obsidian templates to hybrid Obsidian Excalidraw notes:

In the talk, I shared how I’ve evolved my use of visuals in my PKM over the last year, including:

Referring to icon and logo libraries that dynamically compile all the atomic visuals I use in my notes
Adopting a visual Zettelkasten-like approach
Creating notes at conferences to track people I’ve met and talks I’ve attended
Using Obsidian Excalidraw to create compelling presentations in lieu of slides
Combining visuals with audio recordings to create literature notes of books I’m reading
Using a full observability pipeline to monitor and analyze the notes in my Obsidian vault

I was particularly excited about the last point. I work at Grafana Labs and help people monitor their computer systems using opensource software. I realized that I could use the same tools to monitor my PKM system, so I set up a pipeline where a Python script scrapes note metadata, and sends information to Loki and Prometheus via Alloy, and then I visualize it all in Grafana. It’s a pretty nerdy and totally unnecessary setup, but here’s the repo for anyone interested in replicating it.

How to Sketch Your Mind in Obsidian and more, with Zsolt Viczián

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 15:30:49 +0200

My friend Zsolt Viczián, a visual thinker and developer behind the plugins Obsidian Excalidraw and Obsidian ExcaliBrain, has written a book called “Sketch Your Mind: Nurture a Playful and Creative Brain”. The book is about how to create a system for visual thinking that helps you to think better, make connections, and make things with your ideas.

Get Zsolt’s book here!

Connecting Visual Notes with Obsidian Excalidraw

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 17:34:58 +0100

Connecting visual notes isn’t as easy as connecting textual notes. Yet those connections are an essential part of taking notes that actually help you learn or remember things. In this video, I talk about ways to connect Excalidraw drawings and hybrid notes.

Visual Note Templates With Obsidian Excalidraw

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:31:57 +0100

How can you create visual note templates that encourage both visual and textual note-taking? The Obsidian Excalidraw community plugin bridges this gap in Obsidian by allowing the creation of hybrid notes: notes that are both textual and visual by default. Obsidian Excalidraw is created by Zsolt Viczián.

Visual Atomic Note Taking With Obsidian Excalidraw

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 16:35:57 +0000

Visual atomic note taking in Obsidian can be a great complement to taking notes in text form if you use tools like the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin. Obsidian Excalidraw lets you link and backlink with images, tag them for querying later, and even embed images AND parts of images. It’s an essential part of taking notes visually while not missing out on the benefits of plain text.

Part of this video was sponsored by Brilliant. Thanks, Brilliant!

Making Notes Actually Useful in Obsidian

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 15:57:17 +0000

How do you go about making notes actually useful? Using notes well entails taking good notes in the first place, processing them, and then creating something new out of them. In this video, I talk about the plugins that I use in every stage of the process, and some guidelines for how I actually make a note on something I’ve learned into content that I (and others) can make use of.

This video was sponsored by Brilliant. Thanks, Brilliant! :)

How to Use the Excalibrain Obsidian Plugin

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 12:11:37 +0200

In this video, I demonstrate how to use the ExcaliBrain Obsidian plugin and what it can be used for. ExcaliBrain is a very powerful plugin, and it can significantly improve your Obsidian workflows. I also mention go through installing and getting started with ExcaliBrain at four different levels of uses for it: letting it infer relationships, setting explicit relationships, creating custom relationships, and finally creating semantic relationships in ExcaliBrain.

Live - Visual PKM With Zsolt Viczián

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 17:48:41 +0200

What is a visual Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and how can it help you make connections between your notes? Zsolt Vizcain, developer of the Obsidian Excalidraw and Excalibrain plugins, joins me to talk about how to use his plugins to make your PKM system more visual.

Zsolt makes videos too! Check his channel out: https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM

How to Make Your Notes Visual in Obsidian

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 16:21:10 +0100

In this video, I demonstrate how to make your notes visual with visual PKM plugins like Excalidraw, Excalibrain, Advanced Slides, and Mind Map. Adding visual elements to your notes, whether through distinguishing text or adding images and video, helps make notes more meaningful to you, increasing understanding and retention.

How I Learn in Obsidian - Keeping up with tech trends

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 16:17:11 +0100

Here’s how I learn in Obsidian by processing articles I’ve read into consolidated notes that help me understand technical concepts. I also show how I improve my learning by incorporating visual elements using Obsidian Excalidraw, Excalibrain, and Advanced Slides.

Visual Map of Content in Obsidian // Excalidraw plugin

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 15:30:37 +0200

Did you know you can create a visual map of content in Obsidian to consolidate your notes? The Excalidraw plugin by Zsolt Viczian can be used to create a dashboard in Obsidian, take sketchnotes instead of text notes, express your ideas visually, and many more. Maps of content are useful for bottom-up thinking, and having a visual representation of your notes can inspire you to consider other perspectives or communicate your ideas in a clearer way.