Pkm on Nicole van der Hoeven

obsidian-okrs

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

obsidian-okrs is the set of templates I use to set up OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and goals in Obsidian, as described in the video I made about them (and its blog post).

New Year’s resolutions are infamously left undone. Setting OKRs instead, and reviewing them as you go, gives you a better chance of following through, and keeping them in Markdown notes means the goals live right next to the work they describe.

The templates

The templates are organized into five levels, each one feeding the next:

Core Principles: the values everything else hangs off.
Yearly: a Yearly OKRs note, a template for each individual objective, and a Yearly Review.
Monthly: initiatives, in the form of a monthly review.
Weekly: weekly goals and a weekly review.
Daily: a daily note template.

What you need

The templates use Obsidian’s core Templates plugin plus the community plugins Admonition and Templater. QuickAdd, Periodic Notes, Calendar, and the core Daily Notes plugin are optional extras that make creating the periodic notes smoother.

Try it

Copy the templates from the repository into your vault and follow along with the video.

obsidian-grafana

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

obsidian-grafana turns an Obsidian vault into time-series data and dashboards. I work at Grafana Labs, helping people monitor their systems with open source tools, and at some point I realized I could use the same tools to monitor my personal knowledge management system. It’s a nerdy and totally unnecessary setup, and I enjoy it a lot. I mention it in my post on how I use visuals in my PKM.

The screenshot above was made by running the repo’s own Grafana setup on a copy of the posts from this website.

How it works

A Python script reads the Markdown files in your vault and extracts metadata: word, line, and character counts, file size, frontmatter fields, tags, wikilinks, and timestamps. It runs every five minutes and has two paths:

A log path for history. Only the notes that changed since the last run are written, as structured JSON, to a log file. Grafana Alloy tails that file and forwards it to Loki, with tags and frontmatter fields as labels, so you can see how your notes change over time.
A metrics path for the current state. A metrics exporter exposes totals such as note count, word count, unique tags, and wikilinks, and Prometheus scrapes them.

Grafana ties the two together with pre-configured dashboards: an overview, a time series dashboard for individual notes, a relationships dashboard for wikilinks, a dashboard of frontmatter types, and a word cloud of your most used words. Everything runs in Docker Compose.

What it’s useful for

Understanding your writing habits and how your vault grows, checking how consistently your notes are tagged, finding the notes that everything links to, and keeping an eye on notes with a given frontmatter status or priority. The README also covers installing the Grafana Assistant plugin into the local Grafana.

Try it

The repository has a quick start. You’ll need Docker and Python 3, and a vault to point it at.

My reMarkable Obsidian workflow

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0100

I’m a big note-taker — but what most people don’t realise is that digital notes have only ever been a small part of that. I love analog notes, and lately I’ve loved meshing the analog with the digital using E Ink tablets. The problem with the reMarkable has always been the workflow: there hasn’t been an easy way to get everything back into Obsidian, which — as you know — is kind of important for me.

In this video I show how there’s finally a clean way to tie it all together: reMarkable → Obsidian as a PDF → searchable, OCR’d text.

The setup: a lot of E Ink

I’ve tried a lot of E Ink tablets and readers. My everyday carry is the reMarkable Paper Pro Move, and I keep a full-size reMarkable Paper Pro at my desk. I love them more than the Kobo or Kindle Scribe lines — but the deciding factor was always going to be whether I could get my handwriting into Obsidian without friction.

Step 1 — Sync the PDF into Obsidian

The piece that makes this work is a community plugin: reMarkable Sync by Tim Dommett.

In Obsidian, go to Community plugins → Browse, search for reMarkable, install and enable it.
The first time, you’ll register the plugin — it sends you to your reMarkable page, gives you a one-time code, and you paste that in and hit register.
In settings, choose a sync sub-folder. I put mine under plugins/reMarkable.
Set the sync interval — I have mine sync every 30 minutes, but you can go more frequently, manually, or trigger it on demand from the command palette (reMarkable Sync: Sync documents).

Once that’s done, anything I write on the reMarkable lands in my vault as a PDF — diagrams, cursive, print, colours and all. In the video I write out a page (neural nets, as explained by my partner Noel), trigger a manual sync, and watch it appear in Obsidian.

Step 2 — OCR the handwriting into real text

A PDF in Obsidian is a start, but it isn’t searchable or editable. That’s where OCR (optical character recognition) comes in — turning the handwritten image into text that behaves like any other note: searchable, linkable, modifiable. I keep the PDF too (I like preserving the colours and the handwriting, especially when someone else wrote on my tablet), but I want the durable text version as well.

I automate this with OpenClaw — my AI agent, Iris, runs a skill on a heartbeat that watches my reMarkable folder, notices new files as they drop in, and OCRs them automatically. It even fills in properties I like and, because it knows my context (and sometimes has the transcript too), it can describe diagrams more completely than I’d expect. It correctly read “Neural nets as explained by Noel” and “get diagrams from WhatsApp” — whether I wrote in print or cursive.

That setup is admittedly overkill, and not something I’d recommend to everyone. So in the video I also show the more accessible version:

The accessible alternative: Claude Cowork / Claude Desktop

If you’d like to automate OCR without a full agent setup, the Claude Desktop app (with Cowork) is a great option — especially if you already keep notes, since your vault is exactly the kind of context that makes AI immediately useful.

The prompt I use, roughly:

You are in my Obsidian vault, in the folder plugins/reMarkable. Look for the very latest PDF I’ve put in there and OCR it. If there’s a diagram, describe the diagram. If there’s text — handwritten cursive or print — transcribe it. Print all of your findings into a note in the plugins/Claude output folder, using the same file name as the original PDF.

It reads the latest PDF, describes the diagram (it got “neuron” and “perceptron” — words that were never actually written), and writes the note. Interestingly it did as well as my own setup, because under the hood we were both using the same model (4.8).

Then turn it into a skill. I tell Claude: “Please turn all of these instructions into a skill and call it OCR.” It writes the skill, preserving the paths, and I hit save. Now next time I have a reMarkable PDF to transcribe, I just run /OCR and name the file. If you want to go further, you can even ask it to make this a scheduled task.

(Tip: I use Spokenly to dictate these instructions to Claude rather than type them.)

Why this matters

This simple workflow has made it so I can actually use my reMarkables. I love typing notes on my laptop, but when I’m face-to-face with someone — in a talk, at a conference — a screen between me and the speaker feels distancing, and a little rude. I feel more present without it. And the little Paper Pro Move is far easier to carry than a laptop or iPad.

Now that I know everything ends up in Obsidian anyway, I get to pick whatever note-taking method I feel like in the moment — typing, reMarkable, or fully analog. That same OCR process (minus the reMarkable Sync plugin) also works for OCRing photos of pages from my paper traveller’s journal.

If you’d like to go deeper on how I use AI in my note-taking, check out my AI note-taking workflows video — I cover the different audio transcription tools I use there too.

Arigatō gozaimashita! Mata kondo ne~

Resources

🖊️ reMarkable Sync by Tim Dommett — the Obsidian community plugin that syncs reMarkable documents into your vault as PDFs
🧠 My notes on OpenClaw — the agent runtime Iris runs on
🎥 My AI note-taking workflows — the companion video on transcription and AI capture
🗣️ Spokenly — the dictation app I use to talk to Claude
💛 My Patreon

My AI note-taking workflows

Fri, 29 May 2026 17:00:00 +0100

Just over a year ago, if you’d asked me how I felt about AI and note-taking, I would have told you I didn’t want AI anywhere near my notes. The world is different now, and so am I — I rely on AI in a lot of ways, and one of the easiest places to start is speech-to-text: using AI to convert my voice into something my PKM system can actually work with.

In this video, I walk through three tiers of AI note-taking workflows — free, paid, and (a little) overkill — and show what I’m using at each level.

The framing: note-taking vs. note-making

Nick Milo draws a useful distinction between note-taking and note-making:

Note-taking is collecting — recording information, paraphrasing what an author said, highlighting.
Note-making is connecting — active thinking, engaging with the information, linking it to other ideas, working out how it fits into your PKM system.

The best use of AI right now, for me, is to help with the note-taking part. I like to start with speech because speech used to be a form of input my PKM system couldn’t take very much of. Pre-AI, voice was lossy — you’d have to transcribe it yourself or lose the thought. Now: you speak, AI transcribes it, it lands in your notes, and the AI can keep working with it from there.

Tier 1 — Free

Use your phone’s recording app. iOS Voice Memos transcribes recordings, and the Notes app does too on newer Apple devices. Samsung’s Voice Recorder app does the same on Galaxy devices. For desktop, I demo Spokenly (Mac, Windows, iOS) — drop audio in, get text out.

The friction is manual: remember to record, remember to transcribe, remember to paste.
What you get: quick notes to yourself, captured instantly.
Best for: people who want to get started as easily as possible without paying for anything.

If you want to go local-first, I’d point you at NVIDIA Parakeet and the Qwen models for offline transcription.

Tier 2 — Paid

The second tier is paying for the convenience layer. These tools collapse the first two steps — you record, the transcript appears, and you usually get extras like AI summaries or the ability to ask questions of the transcript (sometimes live).

Tools: Voicenotes, Otter.ai, Letterly, Granola, Gemini on Google Meet, Zoom AI Companion.

For Granola specifically, I use the Granola Sync Obsidian plugin plus a QuickAdd macro (QuickAdd: Macro - Link Granola) to automatically link a transcript to the right note in my vault — in the video I link a Dungeon Crawler Carl recap to its Granola transcript. (The linking script and macro are on my Patreon.)

Tradeoffs:

Your notes live in their system, not yours. Shutdowns, pricing changes, and acquisitions all take your archive with them.
The friction reduction is real, though — if it means you actually capture instead of intending to capture, that’s worth a lot.

Best for: people who want to capture meetings, games, or lectures.

Tier 3 — Overkill

This is my setup. It’s a little ridiculous; I’m going to show it anyway.

Hardware: a Plaud AI recorder. Small, clips to my phone or sits in a pocket. Always running, or started deliberately for important conversations and walks. It can run entirely locally, or upload to Plaud’s servers.
Plugin: my fork of Leonard Sellem’s Plaud Sync plugin for Obsidian, installed via BRAT. The fork adds a couple of things I needed for my own daily workflow.
AI layer: Iris, my OpenClaw-powered AI agent, watches the synced files. Every morning she reads the previous day’s transcripts, plus my calendar and daily notes, and outputs a daily summary, extracted tasks, and flags anything I’ve said I wanted to remember.

I also use “Hey Iris” memos — voice notes I record into Plaud while I’m out, addressed to Iris, that she processes the next time she runs. “Hey Iris, remind me to follow up with X.” “Hey Iris, add this restaurant to my places-to-try list.” They land in my system without me opening anything.

Benefits: I don’t think about capture at all. I just live and talk, and the relevant pieces land in my notes.

Cons: the privacy of people around me. I’m careful about when this is on, and especially careful about explicit consent.

Why three tiers, not one

The slightly absurd thing is that I still use all three levels — in parallel, for different things:

Spokenly for dictating at my desk, sometimes straight into Obsidian, sometimes into a chat.
Granola for meeting notes, and increasingly for transcribing videos I’m watching.
Voicenotes for diary-style entries.
Plaud when it’s ethical to (especially when I’m travelling with my partner and I want a clean record of conversations and ideas we had on the move).

For me, voice is the lowest-friction capture method that exists. No stopping, no finding my phone, no opening an app, no typing. Just talk — and the system handles everything downstream.

That means the gap between thinking of something and writing it down is basically gone for me. Note-taking — the tedious part — gets offloaded. So when I’m in a meeting I can be present, knowing the tool is faithfully tracking what’s said. Whatever notes I do take are then what I think about what I’m hearing, which lets me start synthesising a lot faster.

If you want more details about any of these workflows, let me know in the comments. Arigatō gozaimashita! Mata kondo ne~

Resources

🎙️ The Mechanics of Knowledge Management podcast episode where Malik interviewed me on this stuff
🧠 My notes on OpenClaw — the agent runtime Iris runs on
🎤 My notes on Voicenotes
💛 My Patreon, where I share the QuickAdd linking scripts and macros

Do Androids Dream of Second Brains?

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:00 +0100

We often describe our personal knowledge management systems as “second brains” — but can we really say they think for themselves? In this video, I make the case for instrumenting your vault with an observability stack and layering AI on top, not because it’ll turn your notes into a brain, but because it might get us closer than anything else has.

This is the video version of the talk I gave at PKM Summit 2026 in Utrecht earlier this year, with the live demos cleaner and the dashboards working without the conference wifi gods getting in the way.

What I cover

🐑 Why “second brain” is the wrong framing

I take a small detour through Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — the inspiration for Blade Runner — and the Voigt-Kampff test, which measures empathy through observed responses to staged scenarios. It’s a useful lens for asking what we actually mean when we say a knowledge system “thinks”: we’re really asking whether it can respond to us in a way that surprises us. Most second-brain setups can’t, yet.

📊 Observability for PKM

Observability is a concept I’ve borrowed wholesale from how we monitor software systems — the idea that you can understand a complex system by what it emits, not by reading its internals. Three steps: instrumentation, analysis, improvement. I walk through what each one looks like for a personal vault:

Instrumentation: a small script that emits metrics about my Obsidian vault — note counts, link density, growth over time, what folders are loud and which are quiet
Analysis: a Grafana dashboard sitting on top of Loki + Prometheus, surfacing things I genuinely didn’t know about my own vault
Improvement: the part where seeing the data actually changes how you work

There’s a live dashboard tour, and a section where I ask Grafana Assistant to edit the dashboard for me in natural language — including writing the PromQL queries I never want to write by hand.

👁️ Meet Iris

About halfway through the video I introduce Iris — the AI agent I built using OpenClaw that lives in my vault, reads my notes, and works alongside me. I walk through:

What “agentic AI” actually means in practice (vs. just chatting with an LLM)
The OpenClaw setup — Docker sandbox, Syncthing, the whole pipeline
Iris rewriting my observability map of content
Iris doing talk-topic analysis on my vault
Iris running benchmark research for a blog post
Iris OCRing my reMarkable handwriting

🌙 Dreaming

The last section is the one I had the most fun with. I argue that the thing most second-brain setups are missing isn’t more notes or better search — it’s synthesis. The capacity to take everything you’ve captured and surface patterns, contradictions, and ideas you hadn’t formed yet.

I introduce OpenClaw’s dreaming feature: a memory consolidation process inspired by how sleep stages work in the brain. Light sleep, REM, and deep sleep each do different work — surfacing recent material, finding unexpected connections, and consolidating long-term memory. I show how each phase actually behaves in my own system.

And there’s a Zhuangzi reference. (You’ll see.)

Resources

🎤 PKM Summit 2026 talk recap (with photos)
🎞 Slides
👁️ OpenClaw
📓 Obsidian
🔄 Syncthing
📊 Grafana

The Architecture of Forgetting — the essay version of why memory consolidation matters
Unlearnings from building Grafana Assistant

If you want to follow more of how Iris works and what I’m learning about AI + PKM, Context Horizon is where I write about it.

Do Androids Dream of Second Brains?

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 11:15:00 +0100

I gave this talk at PKM Summit 2026 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Abstract

We often describe our PKM systems as “second brains”. But can we really say our systems think for themselves?

In Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, the inspiration for the movie Bladerunner, the boundary between humans and machines is tested through observation and subtle signals. In this talk, we’ll explore a similar question for our knowledge systems: what happens when we start observing them?

By instrumenting an Obsidian vault with an observability stack and layering AI tools on top, we can begin to see patterns in how ideas form, connect, and evolve. The result isn’t quite a thinking system… but it may be something closer than we’ve had before.

Slides

nicole.to/androids

Nicole van der Hoeven: A Polymath with Obsidian as a Modern Zibaldone

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 09:40:45 +0200

I joined Malik Alimoekhamedov on his podcast The Mechanics of Knowledge Management for a long conversation about Obsidian, PKM, and the Renaissance-era zibaldone tradition — the personal commonplace books that thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci kept as a hybrid of journal, reference, and idea workshop. We talked about how a modern Obsidian vault can play the same role for someone trying to think across domains, and about what changes when you treat your notes as the exhaust of learning rather than the destination.

🎙️ Listen on Substack

🎙️ Listen on Apple Podcasts

Thanks to Malik for the wide-ranging conversation.

My Year in PKM: 2024 in Numbers

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:36:38 +0100

Rather than a full explanation of what in the world happened to me last year, here’s my year in PKM. I use my Personal Knowledge Management system for everything, so I thought I’d let it speak for me through some statistics I gathered from different tools I consider part of that system.

Doing It in Public: Observability for PKM

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:26:42 +0100

The quest of learning in public with Personal Knowledge Management is really about making what you learn observable and exposing your process, rather than your result, early and often. This is a rendition of a talk I gave at the PKM Summit in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on March 23rd, 2024, and it relates concepts borrowed from performance engineering and software development to PKM systems.

How to publish your notes for free with Quartz

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:00:47 +0100

Quartz just won Best Tool in the Obsidian Gems of the Year 2023 awards, and with good reason. It’s a free, open-source static site generator that works really well with Markdown-based note-taking apps– including Obsidian, which it was originally designed for.

Here’s what Quartz looks like when published.

Learning new things in Obsidian: in defense of remembering

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 12:01:34 +0100

Here’s how I’m learning things in Obsidian in 2024, and the tools I use in my information processing pipeline to read, listen, and watch content and turn that into ideas and output. I also talk about why it’s important to remember what you’ve consumed, and the value of writing stuff down to help you do so.

Links vs Tags vs Folders: knowledge gardening with Jorge Arango

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 19:38:49 +0100

If you’ve ever questioned the benefits of links vs tags vs folders, my guest today, Jorge Arango, has some opinions about which method is best for you when creating a knowledge garden in Obsidian. Information architecture is a field of design that makes it easier to find information, and I’m talking to Jorge today about how the same principles can be used to find things in your notes.

Jorge is an information architect, author, and educator. For the past 25 years, he has used architectural thinking to bring clarity and alignment to digital products and services. He’s the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, co-author of Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, and host of The Informed Life podcast. Besides consulting, writing, and podcasting, Jorge also teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.

Get a 15% discount on Jorge’s book by buying it here and using the code NVDH, valid through January 26th, 2024.

Or, buy it on Amazon using this affiliate link.

How I Refactor Notes in Obsidian

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 12:03:58 +0100

It’s not enough for me to just take notes - they have to be useful, too. Here’s how I refactor notes in Obsidian using community and core plugins to inventory, structure, categorise, explain, and modularise my notes. Refactoring isn’t just for code. It’s for notes too! It’s only through gradually updating my notes over time that I can begin to reap the benefits of continuous note-taking.

Resources

Monitoring (notes)
Coding and writing converging (notes)
Quick Switcher (notes)
Outline (notes)
Search (notes)
Strange New Worlds (notes)
Readwise Official (video)
ExcaliBrain (video)
Obsidian Excalidraw (video)
Note Refactor (notes)

Taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 15:55:33 +0200

In this video, I show you my favorite method for taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian: three tools that work very well together. Snipd is a mobile podcast player app for iOS and Android that integrates with Readwise. With the Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian, that means my highlights and notes from podcasts end up automatically in my Obsidian vault, tagged appropriately.

RESOURCES

Snipd AI Podcast Notes wishlist
Snipd
Readwise
Sample AI podcast notes
@CalNewportMedia - Deep Questions - The Failure of Cybernetic Productivity
@CalNewportMedia - Deep Questions - Decoding Overhead
@masteringdungeons - Mike Shea on Organized Play vs Home Games
The Informed Life - Andy Polaine on Service Design

When Productivity Gets Toxic, with Andy Polaine

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 22:03:46 +0100

We usually see productivity as a positive thing, but what happens when productivity gets toxic? According to my friend Andy Polaine, design leadership coach, burnout can occur when you’ve been doing more than you used to, struggling with the work, and feeling like you can’t say anything to anyone. In this video, Andy shares some tips for setting up boundaries to create mental space and defending your calendar against external pressures.

Check out Andy’s work:

Andy’s website
Reach out about getting coaching from Andy here
Andy’s podcast, Power of Ten
Andy’s newsletter, Doctor’s Note
Andy’s upcoming book, The Design Leadership Dip

Every Single Plugin I Use (Obsidian Tour 2023)

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 23:39:17 +0100

In this video, I talk about all the Obsidian plugins I currently use… all 46 of them. I demonstrate some of them, talk about why I didn’t keep others, and talk through my use cases for each one. These plugins aren’t necessarily the best ones out there for Obsidian - they’re just the ones that are useful enough for my use cases to have them installed on a daily basis.

How I Structure My Obsidian Vault (Obsidian Tour 2023)

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 18:00:09 +0100

Here’s how I structure my Obsidian vault using tags, folders, links, metadata (used in conjunction with Dataview queries), and bookmarks. This is an Obsidian tour of my main vault, and we’re starting with organization. As with anything on this channel, don’t take what you see here as gospel. I’m just sharing my approach in case it sparks ideas for some of you.

Do Appearances Matter in Tech (Adobo & Avocados #05)

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 15:03:33 +0100

My fellow Developer Advocate Marie Cruz and I talk to Imma Valls, a community support engineer who works with us at Grafana Labs, about image biases that people might have, whether that’s piercings, tattoos, or hair dye!

Taking Notes for Work With Obsidian

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 19:00:33 +0200

In this talk, I show why I think taking notes for work with Obsidian has not just helped me learn faster but improved my career working in tech as a Developer Advocate and performance engineer. I take notes continuously as a way to keep my skills relevant. This is a rehearsal of a presentation I gave at EuroSTAR 2023.

The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes (EuroSTAR 2023)

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:21 +0200

Today I gave the talk “The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes” at EuroSTAR 2023, about how I use Obsidian for work and why creating a personal knowledge management system is so valuable in the career of a tester.

Here are the slides.

Text Expansion in Obsidian With Espanso

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 18:12:41 +0200

I’ve gotten a few questions asking me how I do text expansion in Obsidian, because there are a lot of text expander plugins out there. The truth, though, is that I don’t use any of them. Instead, I use a separate, free, open-source app called Espanso to define text triggers and replace them with certain phrases. One of the best things about Espanso is that it stores all configuration in plain text files.

10 tips for starting (or progressing) a career in tech (Adobo & Avocados #04)

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 08:00:25 +0200

Marie Cruz and I did another Adobo & Avocados livestream, this time about 10 tips (five from each of us) about starting a career in tech.

More Than Just Taking Notes: Learning Exhaust

Fri, 12 May 2023 21:18:45 +0800

For me, using Obsidian is about more than just taking notes– it’s about creating learning exhaust. Learning exhaust is the byproduct of real learning, and thinking of my notes as learning exhaust has helped me shift my focus from taking good notes to learning new things well.

Tagging and Linking With AI: Napkin

Fri, 05 May 2023 00:58:39 +0800

In this video, I demonstrate my workflow for tagging and linking with AI using the Napkin.one app. Napkin is an app that uses a fork of GPT-3 to intelligently tag thoughts with keywords that improve over time. I like to use Napkin to tag mostly my highlights from Readwise.

Resources

Napkin
Readwise
The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes, my talk at EuroSTAR 2023

Emergent Note Taking

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:21:15 +0200

Emergent note taking is the process of turning individual notes into something more than the sum of their parts and combining them in different ways. In this video, I talk about how to take notes to be found and how to explore your vault in ways to help ideas emerge in Obsidian.

Resources Mentioned

Emergence, by Steven Johnson: book that prompted this idea (book)
Zsolt Viczián - Book on a Page about Emergence (video)
Visual atomic note taking with ExcaliBrain (video)

Obsidian Bookmarks (new in Obsidian v1.2)

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 10:37:51 +0200

Obsidian bookmarks have arrived in the latest Obsidian version, v1.2. Here’s what they are, what you can bookmark, and how to use them within your workflows. I also go over other, smaller Quality of Life improvements in this release.

Resources mentioned

Organizing PDFs in Obsidian

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 08:01:11 +0200

There are many tools for organizing PDFs in Obsidian, but which one is the best? In this video, I go through several options, including DevonThink, Readwise, Skim, and Zotero. For my (non-academic) use case of organizing my TTRPG-related PDFs, I decided on Zotero– but maybe something else will be better for you!

Resources

Tools

Zotero plugins mentioned

Support MCDM on Patreon

Thanks

Thanks to the following people for their input and help in experimenting:

Andy Polaine
Leah Fergusson
@argentum#3920 on Discord
The lovely folks on my Patreon Discord server

Taking Notes on People in Obsidian

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 13:16:27 +0100

Taking notes on people in Obsidian sounds weird, but I think it just shows how much I care. If I take notes on things that matter, why shouldn’t I take notes on people that matter? Here are the templates I use to remember important things about significant people in my life.

Taking Notes for Research with Bianca Pereira

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 08:56:48 +0100

Bianca Pereira joins me to talk about taking notes for academic research as well as general knowledge creation. Bianca is a researcher, a software developer, a feminist by ideal, and an educator by passion, and she comes with a lot of experience in working with PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) and Tools for Thought.

Below is the transcript of our conversation.

Introductions

NICOLE: Hey, everyone, I’m Nicole van der Hoeven, and on this channel, I like to talk about tech, travel and taking notes. My guest today ticks off a few of these boxes. Please welcome Bianca Pereira. (Portuguese) Good afternoon, Bianca, how are you?

BIANCA: (Portuguese) Good afternoon, Nicole, I’m doing well. (English) Thanks a lot for inviting. I’m really excited for our chat today. I really enjoyed chatting with you, and I want to see whoever is here with us today. So if I like to invite, if anyone wants to participate in our chat, maybe can just send us a message down there.

NICOLE: Yeah, leave a comment with questions that you want to ask Bianca or me, or both of us. But Bianca, (Portuguese) Could you introduce yourself, in English? (English) I practiced that so I needed to say it.

BIANCA: Oh, okay. That’s really good. Yeah, well, my name is Bianca Pereira. I’m a researcher and a knowledge management coach as well. So my focus, when you think about taking notes, managing papers, managing the literature, the source is really like, how can we do personal knowledge management for the purpose of research? So how can we create notes so that we can write research-driven outputs later on? Research-driven outputs can be like papers or they can be an essay or a blog post can be anything that is based on research. So it’s really like how can we do the whole process of personal knowledge management for the specific purpose of research? So that’s what I work on now. And I keep doing my own research as well in computer science, as we talked before.

NICOLE: Rodrigo said, “Good Portuguese.” (Portuguese) Thank you, Rodrigo. (English) I’m trying. I moved to Portugal. But maybe we should explain that connection, why I am randomly speaking to you in Portuguese. You’re from Brazil, right?

BIANCA: Yes, I’m from Brazil, from Rio de Janeiro. And I learned that Nicole, you’re speaking Portuguese because you’re also living in Portugal, right?

NICOLE: Yeah, of course, I have to learn that.

Research isn’t just for academics

NICOLE: I thought it was interesting when we were talking about this stream and I said, “I wanted to call it taking notes for academic research.” And you said, “Oh, well, it’s not just academic research.” You said that you wanted it to be broader, just research in general and also knowledge creation. Can you talk a bit more about the distinction between the two? ‘Cause when I think research, I automatically jump to academic research.

BIANCA: Yes. Yeah, many people, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Let’s write academic research.” I’m like, “No, please, no.” Because at least like from my perspective, I think research, it’s not just inside of academia. Everyone not only can do research, but many people do research in their jobs. Even like when you are going to create content, for example.

So for me, researcher is more than someone who went through a PhD or went through like formal academic research, but they’re all people who are using critical thinking for the purpose of creating new knowledge. For example, someone is in a company, the company is facing a problem and they need to solve a problem, which may be very specific to their company. So they need to do some research. They need to use some tools that we use for doing research to solve the problem to come up with innovation to solve something inside of the company.

So for me, from my perspective, that person is a researcher, even when it’s not an academic researcher, for example. So that’s why I like to think about research as the process of knowledge creation when you’re using critical thinking for that. So for me, I think like anyone and everyone could become a researcher or is already a researcher, even when they don’t call themselves researchers. So that’s why I was like, “Oh, let’s try to not…” Don’t say, “Oh, only who is in academia is a researcher, only who went through a PhD is a researcher.” I don’t think that’s the case. I think everyone can use the research for their work, sorry, in their daily lives.

NICOLE: That’s really cool. By that definition, I think I would classify as a researcher and I had never really thought of myself as one. It’s very meta, but I’m taking notes on this while we’re talking. And you said that one of the things that differentiates, I’m paraphrasing here. One of the things that differentiates research from like other forms of note taking is critical thinking. Do you also think that there is a sort of rigor that is applied? Like maybe when people think research, it means that you’re collating things from a lot of different sources? Or do you think that that is necessary for research?

BIANCA: I think, well, it depends on what you mean by rigor. If you’ve been on rigor, like, “Oh, more like in the academic sense, you need to write in a given way. You needs to like to have your argument very strong for lots of experiments.” I think there are multiple, it can be a little bit more lightweight let’s say, when I talk about research in general. But there is a level of rigor that is important, which is related to the critical thinking, which is really like, okay, and I’m just like, I just woke up in the morning and I thought about something. I say, “Ah, this is true, or this is the thing.” Because I think it is. I don’t think there is any rigor on that. It’s just like someone has their experience and they’re right about that.

But that’s not what I mean by research itself. It’s really like, try to create an argument. And it’s hard when I talk about argument, because when you think about argument, you think about two people fighting. That’s not what I mean by an argument. So an argument is really like, “I’m trying to justify why I believe on something.” Rather than just like, “I believe on something, this is the truth.” It’s like, “I believe on this and those are the reasons. This is the reasoning behind why I believe on that something.”

So this is the level of rigor that we need to have in any research. And sometimes to justify, we need to do full experiments and all those things. That’s when there’s really like professional research. We need to do experiments, we need to do like a lot of literature research to synthesize literature to justify why you believe on something. But it can be very simple, really like checking a few sources, checking from your experience as well, mixing those things to justify why you believe that something’s true of something is the case. So that is a level.

NICOLE: I like when you say that, when you specify that it’s an argument, but not between two people. And it kind of made me think about how when I write something and something that I’ve done research on, I like to use steel man arguments. And the idea, I mean you maybe know this, but just to explain to other people, there’s something called a straw man where sometimes in order to prove a point, people construct this very flimsy argument and then they show how it’s wrong. But I really love constructing a steel man which is a contradicting point of view that is actually valid in some ways. And that way, when you are able to convincingly show that that steel man is incorrect or inaccurate, then it kind of strengthens your own premise. And in that way, it’s like an argument not between two people, but kind of between conflicting ideas.

BIANCA: Yes, yes, yes.

NICOLE: I wanna shout out as well, there’s some people who are saying they use Obsidian for both academic and non-academic research. So Grisha is agreeing that it doesn’t matter if the purpose of the research is for academia. And even William who’s a retired academic, agrees with you about research as knowledge creation. And a note about another Brazilian talking about PKM and Obsidian. They’re a cybersecurity researcher.

BIANCA: Oh, that’s really cool.

Taking notes for topic research

NICOLE: There’s a question here from Jan.

Could taking notes help in topic research? Using Obsidian to write random notes. And I’m interested if I could somehow use it to get some ideas for my thesis engineering field.

This is a perfect question for you.

BIANCA: I would say you can have a whole system just to help your research. That’s the area that I like to talk about. So you can spend one hour, even more hours here just talking about that. But I suppose that you were saying to get idea, so it’s really the beginning of the process of research. So it’s really like, what do I research about? And I would say definitely, you can definitely use your notes for that. I don’t know.

You may agree with me, Nicole, that our research, our notes taking space, note making space is really to put our thoughts in there, to let our minds really flow into the page or in our case, to the digital page. So when it comes to identifying the top, the first thing that we actually need is like, what are our interests? What do we care about? What do you want to work on? What will be spending, if you are thinking about the research topic, what do you spend the next years work on? So it needs to be something that you have interested in learning more about. So I think our note making space is a perfect place to just like put things out. What are the things that I like? Let me write everything I know about them so that you can then decide, okay, which one I want to maybe pursue, so investigate a little bit more.

So I think that would be, and I would say, you ask, Jan, could you take notes? Could take notes help topic recency? Definitely. I think that would be one step that would definitely help in defining what is the topic for your research.

NICOLE: I didn’t actually plan on doing this, but I’m gonna share my screen because this is something I’ve thought about a lot as well. So I have this thing called lightning rods of thought. It’s actually from a D&D or an RPG person.

Sly Flourish is a YouTuber who has the idea of using lightning rods, which is adding things in a game that cause the players to use abilities that they already have. So it’s kind of like attracting what the abilities and interests that they already have. So I had this idea of lightning rods of thought. And this is how I try to find out what things I’m interested in. I mean, there are many ways, this is one.

So this is a Dataview query that I use and it says, it spits out all of the notes that I have by the number of outgoing links, and this is just the top 50. But I am trying to identify maps of content, for example, and it’s going by descending order on outgoing. And then there’s also incoming links. So you could look at it that way. How many notes do you have that are linking to certain notes? And it’s like, these are the things that I am interested in apparently. So it’s just useful for me to start here. This doesn’t mean that I stop here, of course. And I can also embed searches for different keywords. And sometimes, it’s useful to look at orphans, the things that have no links to them. And I’m not sure why. Maybe I should think about that. That’s just as an aside, I didn’t intend to show that, but I thought it was kind of relevant.

BIANCA: Yeah, I think this is really good. I do something similar, although I don’t have the queries anymore ‘cause I’m not actively using Obsidian, but I do a similar thing, which I call it generalizations. So you’re like, what are the things that are making everything else be glued to each other? Let’s say, what are the central topics that everything is linked to or who is linking to everything else? Usually take the ones that is everything links to that, those are the things that I have been working around them a lot. So those are the core for my system as well, so I’ll do something similar so that’s really nice.

NICOLE: Yeah, it sounds like the same thing. It’s like abstraction and finding the highest level of abstraction. And from there, you can start digging into it. So I guess to answer the question that Jan asked, yes, they could definitely help. Taking notes could help in topic research. And one way that you can try to find out what topics you’re interested in is by trying to find these clusters, like what Bianca said, the generalized, the most generalized topics that you tend to write notes around. There’s another question for you from Grisha.

Bianca, do you first take notes on paper and then put them in Obsidian?

BIANCA: No. I still love and in paper, I love it, but there is just no time. So for me everything is like, phone all the time or in the computer is direct and digital because there is just no time. Especially now with small kids, there’s just like not an option anymore.

NICOLE: I definitely get that it’s hard. I always have a real notebook and a fountain pen. But my usage of it has shifted to like journaling and brainstorming and not really like as you say, Bianca, sense making.

AI for research and note-taking

NICOLE: Nikhil asks, “If applicable, have you come up with a workflow regarding materials? PDFs, videos, etc. to use an Obsidian, ChatGPT or GPT3? I’m looking to use it for academic research.” Have you looked into that?

BIANCA: I use ChatGPT most for copy edit for editing. It’s really, really good. I was doing a try, I was okay if I want to do a literature review. A base one like a scoping review, which is like the very first type of, could I use that? I even published it on Twitter sometime ago and ChatGPT has some good things and some very bad things. Sometimes, it’s just retrieving information that is random. I know there are people who use for example to summarize the source. If you don’t want to read the whole source, you just want to know does it talk about it?

Some people use for that. I haven’t tried to use for that. I prefer to process my source in a different way. But those are, I think the best, best, best section on the writing process where it’s actually like, “Okay, I wrote it this way, can you edit a little bit and see if sounds a little bit better?” So I think for copy editing and ChatGPT is really good.

NICOLE: Yeah, I want to add that I also made a video on AI for PKM. I talk about things like using Napkin. Napkin is something that brings in your highlights from Readwise and auto and in a smart way uses GPT3 to tag those highlights. So since Nikhil was asking about different materials, like PDFs and videos, if Readwise processes those, then Napkin could see those and start to intelligently make links.

With Obsidian in particular, since he asked about that, there’s text generator and someone from Mastodon, Rick Raftis actually wrote this blog post that I found really interesting and it is about using Elicit and Consensus, which I don’t really know much about, but I thought that the blog post was interesting.

Obsidian Canvas vs. Scrintal

NICOLE: And so what else is there? (Reading a comment in Spanish)

Greetings from Chile. Últimamente he estado utilizando canva para hacer presentaciones para mis clases, de modo que cuando actualizo la nota citada en la presentación, se actualiza de inmediato visual

(English) Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t even highlight that. So just to translate here, for those who don’t speak Spanish. This person is saying Greetings from Chile and they’ve been using Canvas, which is an Obsidian feature to create presentations for their classes. And so that when one note that is cited in the presentation is changed, then that Canvas is automatically updated. That this is a really good use case for it. And maybe this is a good time to also talk about another alternative for Canvas, because Canvas is for Obsidian and in many ways, I think it’s Obsidian’s answer to Scrintal. What do you think about that?

BIANCA: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, just for who doesn’t know, I was a very passionate, obviously the user until I found Scrintal. Which kind of strange. I still love Obsidian, but I don’t use it anymore.

So Scrintal is an app where you can visually organize your notes. So Obsidian has Canva so you can decide to, let’s say just start with Canva, it’s more like organized in those stuff. It’s too easy to create new notes in Canva, but in Scrintal, everything is visual. So you always like to create a note and then the note appears a card already in the background from what you’re creating. So it’s really to visually organize the notes.

And it started before Obsidian and then Obsidian appear with confidence, like features, features, features. So there and there is now also Logseq, which appears now with whiteboard. I didn’t check yet, but people are saying that it’s actually also really good.

So yeah, I became a Scrintal user at some time ago. Mostly because I was using the phone and the phone at the time, Obsidian didn’t have the mobile app. And for me, one of the main challenge that I had is like, okay, I’m writing something and then I write too many notes and just like start linking and connect to the note. And I jumped another note, jumped to another note, jumped another note. And I always found it hard to remember where did I come from. I was like, “Where did I come from? Where was I working again before I jump into this note?” And Scrintal gave me that automatic note. As I’m creating the notes, the notes are in the background. As soon as I close it, i have all the other notes there. They’re in that same visual space, the same context, let’s say. So that’s what made me change.

I noticed at some point, I was using less Obsidian I was getting kind of stuck in my way of writing notes, in my way of thinking. And then Scrintal was kind of like accelerating, I was like, okay. And that’s when I did the change and it was before Canva, before the mobile app was released as well.

NICOLE: We have a question here from Mickael Fortunato.

By the way, Bianca, are you only relying on Scrintal?

BIANCA: Yeah, nowadays for idea management, yes. Now, I moved with everything into Scrintal now.

How important is visual thinking in PKM?

NICOLE: So let’s talk about this a little bit because I was also an early user of Scrintal. I think I talked to the team before it was released and gave my feedback. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t for me. I actually really liked the visual part of it. I really, really liked it.

What I didn’t like about it was that it’s not plain text markdown files anymore. That view, I mean Canvas is the same. If you use Obsidian Canvas, that’s no longer a standard format, which is also why I hesitate to use it because I just really like plain text. But I do love the idea of adding, of bringing in visual thinking into note taking.

I think it’s very visceral because when we see a note or even like something that looks like a note on the screen, instinctively, we know how to use it because that is a metaphor for an actual piece of paper that we can interact with. What do you think about visual thinking? Do you think that it’s always necessary for research or is it just something, another avenue that might be useful?

BIANCA: I find it, personally, extremely important. And the main reason is when you talk about knowledge creation, we need to be able to get our ideas, to put ideas together. Sometimes a big number of ideas so that we can create something from them or take them and break them down.

So for example, I talk like about sense-making strategies, they’re usually like you put the ideas on a space which will be a board, let’s say. And how now we can connect them, create new things from them, generalize from them, see the context about them. In all those steps when you’re playing with ideas, then you can be creating new ideas. Because what I notice that sometimes, we just take notes about, let’s say, what you found, our source. we have quotes, quotes, quotes. But then what is the idea?

At the end, of the day we want to create knowledge. Where are our ideas? So even my whole note, note making is like each note is one idea, which some people they call the atomic notes, although I don’t know anymore because we have many discussions with people who take atomic notes and we have some disagreements. So basically like each node is an idea.

So when you take ideas and you put them into a board for example, they’ll start to organize them. Or where things that are similar, somehow they can be closer together. If they have another type of similarity, you can now add color to them. If you have available shapes, shapes can have meaning as well. So if all those things you can start rearranging the ideas, organizing, grouping them and seeing how can I find the relations between them and which new ideas come out just by putting those things together?

The visual organization of notes is very important for knowledge creation itself because then, you can see the ideas and reflect about them so they can create something from them. Which pure text usually is really hard to do with pure text. Or with just like 10 notes around the screen, but not in a visual organization.

NICOLE: So this is a related question from Jan:

When is creating a Canvas or something similar necessary? Is it not tedious to do every time?

BIANCA: Well, my take is that it’s important to see why you want to create that. Do you want that as a navigational board for example. If you want to have an overview of everything, your vaults for example. Can you have one board that gives you the entry point to all these spaces in your board, in your vault? That’s one.

Things that you can use for, or can use as a sense-making space, you can bring up some notes or cards that you want to make sense of or create something from that. But I would not say that it’s always necessary.

Sometimes, all we want is just like open a note and do a brain dump, for example. Don’t need a board for that. Or you just want to work on the content of one single note. Maybe explain a little bit more what their ideas about, so we don’t really need a board for that or Canvas for that.

So I think it depends a lot from what you want to do. What do you think, Nicole? What would be your use for Canva?

NICOLE: Yeah, I think, I don’t wanna say it’s necessary because I just hate imposing what I think on other people.

For me, some element of visualization is always necessary. Yeah. And sometimes, that is me drawing up like an atomic visual from the beginning and other times, I’m just all text and then I rearrange the text on Canvas or something or Excalidraw.

And then other times it’s all purely based on the relationships and I’m just visualizing those links in either the graph view or ExcaliBrain.

But I think our visual processing as humans is much more advanced than maybe other senses. Like common sense isn’t common, right? So it is something that we actively have to practice. And so having these visual shortcuts I think is really helpful.

So for me, it’s always necessary, but I don’t always go to the extreme for everything ‘cause yeah, that would be tedious in that case.

Note-taking in multiple languages

I want to jump into Scrintal because it’s been a while since I’ve last seen it, but I can’t resist this question from Deb Leg who says:

As someone who also juggles languages, I’m curious to know how your knowledge of several languages impacts your thoughts or notes process and which languages you use for research and knowledge creation?

BIANCA: That’s interesting. I just use English all the time. Because I figured I started my research journey even when I was in Brazil, everything was in English, all papers were in English and for computer science all technical language was in English, so everything was always English. So I decided to just have one language for my specific, I don’t even know how to call it more knowledge base vaults or anything, I like to call knowledge base.

But one thing that is interesting that I was discussing with one of the members of my community the other day is that ‘cause you’re saying, well, I write in English and in Japanese. And one of the things that we notice with languages is that there is translation and there is how can I actually express this idea in a different language? And sometimes, translation is not the way to doing that. Because I always say, “Well if you take notes, for example, if our notes represent an idea, the title of the note is the name for that. How do we call that idea?” And sometimes, how we call that idea in English is not just a translation from stock in Japanese or in Portuguese. It’s like how do we call that idea in one language and how do we call that idea into the other language?

So that’s one one of the interesting things because I think the main challenge now is really like if you write in two languages, when it’s time to search for your notes, which language would you use to search? So it’s really hard. It’s like, which word did I use? Did I translate? So one thing could be like, okay, I have a title in both languages, if that’s important idea, just have, how do I call that idea in two different languages. But it is really hard to find later if you’re not very disciplined on how we name our ideas or how we write.

NICOLE: For me, I can’t really control it all the time. I think my daily notes for instance, are in a jumble of languages, whatever I was thinking in at that time. So they are messy. But what I do is at the end of the day, I then process it and then I do translate most of it to English.

Some things are naturally in English for me. Like I study, so my native language is Tagalog, English is a second language and it is my best non-native language. It is also the language that I studied in. So when I talk about anything that is like mathematical or computer science related, because in programming, even the keywords are in English, so it makes sense for me to translate those into English.

But what I’ll do is I’ll have an alias in Obsidian with something that I might refer to it as in another language. So for example, performance testing is the main note for it in English. And I’ll put an alias that is “pruebas de carga” which is the same thing in Spanish because I might be searching for that.

And I also noticed that with people, the notes tend to be in whatever language I was speaking to them in. So if I’m speaking to someone in Dutch, then my notes will be in Dutch ‘cause that kind of makes sense.

Omar Ortiz Meraz is saying:

Usually, I reserve each language based on topic.

Yeah, I have a bunch of private notes around relationships and relationship dynamics that are in Tagalog because that’s how I think with relationships. And looks like Omar’s also saying English for technical things, yeah.

Filipino, Tagalog and English here too.

Hey, (Filipino) compatriot, how are you?

Demo of Scrintal

NICOLE: (English) Let’s get into Scrintal, Bianca, if you don’t mind showing us what it looks like now. It’s been a while. It’s been like months, maybe a year since I looked at it. Should I add it?

BIANCA: Yeah. Can you add? Can you see my cursor or?

NICOLE: Yes, we can.

BIANCA: Yeah, okay.

So Scrintal, the hard part is that you are faced with a blank screen and you’re like, okay, there is a world of possibilities but I have no idea how to start. So it’s really like you can just create a note, which is called card here in… I like to think like it’s similar to the physical world, let’s say. You have your desk, you can double click or create that to create a card where you can just write wherever you want and create a title. My idea.

And then they also have this slash comments to actually add things. A link to a card or a link to a board. You can link to from a card to a board. Upload things, emails, add YouTube videos, tweets, upload, and the normal formatting that we have.

And if I want to create a link to another idea, I could just here plus. And then there’s another idea. So let’s say they all just appear on the screen and if you just close everything, they are there in the board already linked to each other.

So basically that’s the basic idea of Scrintal. So you have cards, you can have a desk and you can have a board, which is exactly the same thing of a desk, but you can save a board and give a name to the board. The desk is just one, where boards, you can create as many as you want. So you can just click here. Or for example, if I want to create a board with those, I just right-click, create a board. And then I have this new board, which I can give it a name and add a link for example, inside. Inside of here. So this is a link becomes a link to board rather than linked to a card for example. And it has similarly like have backlinks. So it appears when you have links to boards. In which boards does this card appear? Because a card exists in the panel, the board. It can appear as in multiple boards, it can be no boards at all.

So that’s all those things appear there. And if you want to see the rest here, then you can see all the cards that you have, all the boards you can share, you can actually have multiple people work in the same board. The same set of cards. And here, you can have just a normal search that you can search to find the boards or the cards again. So the cards they exist independent of anything, you can add them to your desk, you can add them to a board. So I can go out here and here on my desk. For example, I clear my desk, my desk is empty. But then the board, you still have those two cards. So you can use a board as an MOC for example if you want. You can use a board to make sense of things and save. It’s pretty similar tool to combine that sense because you can also link Canva I think in Obsidian as well. So those are the main feature.

We can add color as well if you want. You can add tags. Yeah, those are the main things the Scrintal has at the moment.

NICOLE: So we have two questions here on what were also my objections. Rodrigo Alexandre Costa:

Scrintal’s cards or boards format is proprietary.

And a related one:

How can you export your notes from Scrintal?

BIANCA: Yeah, that’s one thing that I have been asking the team for many months, the exporting part. They are working now on a full export of all the cards. Currently, can export one by one in Markdown or by just all the PDF, but they’re working on a export all feature. So it should be here, I think in the next months.

In terms of proprietary, yeah, they just have their own format. They don’t share what’s the format, but then you can export in Markdown. So ideally, in the future you could have, let’s say you write your things in Obsidian, you upload into Scrintal, you change the things there, there download, put back into Obsidian. So you can ideally be able to use both for depending what he wants to do. But yeah, we are not there yet if anyone wants to use that way.

NICOLE: I wanna say that to be fair, Canvas is the same way. So the Obsidian team hasn’t quite figured it out either. That’s kind of why I’m hesitant to use it because it’s no longer Markdown. And technically though, the format is not proprietary, Rodrigo. I don’t know about Scrintal, but for Obsidian, it is in JSON. So it is a standard format, but it isn’t nice to work with. It isn’t really something that you can export to another app or something. I imagine that the Scrintal team are facing the same limitations.

BIANCA: Yeah, well to be fair with Obsidian as well, this is a very new area. Like just now, there is like Scrintal, Obsidian and Logseq pushing into that direction. So there are really not no open standards to deal with this type of data because even the different tools are trying to figure out what is it that you’re creating, what is it that we want to represent, how we can represent that information.

So I think it would be very good to like, if in let’s say five years time maybe, or hopefully before, there will be open standards for those and multiple apps who maybe even work together to try to create those open standards that they all support. So I say, fingers crossed, that will be the future. But yeah, so far, I’m not even sure if there is any open store that would cater for this type of use case. So let’s see where it will go.

NICOLE: I think the closest one would be Mermaid.js. which Obsidian does support, but you have to learn it. And it’s also not as flexible as Scrintal is for example. I want to ask about the board and desk concept though. It kind of sounds like their analogous to maybe folders and subfolders or is that completely wrong?

BIANCA: Well, first there is no subfolders. You cannot have a board inside of a board, for example, board is a separate thing. And they’re not totally, they are similar a folder in the sense of container. Like it can bring things inside of it, let’s say. You can put cards inside of a board, but the same card can’t exist in multiple boards. So they don’t have the limitations of a folder because in a folder, like you put on a folder and that’s it. You cannot really put in multiple, you can create shortcuts, but that’s another story. But then really like folders, is this folder or in that folder? Whereas boards is really like, okay, you can just put on a board, remove, put it back again, put in five different boards. So the boards are much more flexible in that sense.

Taking notes on source material

NICOLE: So there are a few questions about how you would actually use these boards for research. So for starters, someone said if you were taking or making notes from an article, would you make many atomic notes or one main note? And then my question is, would you also like create a single board for that article and have all of your notes on there? Or would you make a board per day? And then a follow up question is from Jan who is asking about the serendipity aspect of it. So what if you just want to be able to explore your notes and discover new ones?

BIANCA: Just try to remember everything. I remember this.

For the input one, as I said, like I work with idea note, let’s say, so each note is one idea. So when you’re reading a source, there are tons of ideas in the source that you want to capture and understand. And there are main ideas that spring out. Why are you reading the source? So I have like tons of notes that come out from reading one single source. So I have multiple notes from that. They all link back to the source, but I have multiple notes on that.

But in my case, I’m playing now with creating a board for that because someone asked me the same question, I’m like, “I don’t create a board for that.” So I was like, “I’ll try and see if there is any benefit of doing that.” I did not find any benefits so far, unless you want to make sense of all those ideas together. But then you can create a board later. But while I’m reading a paper, I don’t really use a board. I just like, there are many ideas that I start to, many notes, many cards that I start to create, create, create, create. But I don’t actually create a board for that specific input. I don’t see any specific utility unless I want to make sense of those ideas even in isolation from the source or get group of ideas or things like that. Yeah, so that’s that.

NICOLE: So Niky Dix seems to be familiar with your work. They say that you have a brilliant method for using a combination using OneNote and then making atomic notes. Can you explain what they mean?

BIANCA: Yeah, well Nik is from our community. Because there is a process. one thing is like for example, how I do it, I create many notes. And what I talk about this, I’m not sure if Niky is referring to that, is the idea when we have the bibliographic note where like I call the input note, it’s a note that represents the source itself.

So this my note that represents the source and I have all my ideas linking to that source. And the reason why I link to that note and not direct to the source then I am talking about is because then I can see, I can answer two questions. One is where this idea came from because it has a link to the source and the other is like, what are all the ideas that came out from this source? So just go into the note, the backlinks shows me all the ideas that are related to this source. So I think maybe that’s the what Nik’s talking about. Using the OneNote to represent the source.

So I don’t use a board to represent the source to say, ah, this is the source and all the ideas in the source. Instead, I have one note and all the notes that refer to that are linked back to that source. So the backlinks by now can take, what are all the ideas that came out from that source? I don’t know, Nik, is that what you’re referring to?

NICOLE: Another person is also asking, “So you have a base note for the source and connect all notes?” So if I understand what you’re saying, yes, you have a note that is for that source and then you either explicitly connect other notes that have, like, you create notes of ideas from that source and you either explicitly link them or rely on backlinks to connect them to the base note. Is that right?

BIANCA: Yeah.

On the usefulness of highlights

NICOLE: And is it like, do you use something Readwise to do that? Or do you just manually create a base note?

BIANCA: I manually create, and actually, I was teaching a few weeks ago and one of the outcomes was that many people say, “Okay, I’ll remove my Readwise subscription.” because I’m really like, the whole flow, I talk like, highlight is good, but use highlight as a way to say, this is my note. There are many shortcuts especially for research.

‘Cause in research, you want to create knowledge. So our note should not be just a highlight. It’s like how can we have our own understanding inside of our system? And Readwise sometimes like, okay, I highlighted this in Readwise I can just put later into my system. And what usually happens that when we take that approach, let’s say we highlight and see we process later, later never arrives. So we end up just like our notes are just highlights, but we never process our understanding of what are the ideas that came out from reading that, from try to understanding that So that was like, well maybe highlight is good for when you want to reread the source, but if it’s the process of understanding, really need to write down what is our understanding. And if we use a tool that just say highlight to see it later, later never arrives.

NICOLE: Yeah, I think that’s when the problem is when you treat something like Readwise or any read it later app as the end of the process, then that’s still a very superficial way of learning really. I kind of treat it as the beginning. And then I process it from there. Jan is saying:

Do you mean highlighting encourages resource hoarding rather than taking notes?

I definitely think it does. Do you agree?

BIANCA: Yeah, I agree. Like especially when it’s highlight only. If it’s highlight only, then I think that’s the worst of the worst. Because sometimes, okay, I highlight and then Readwise, you just create my notes. I just import from Readwise into my Obsidian for example, and I have my notes with my highlights. But then like, so what? Those are other people’s words, other people’s thoughts, something they try to communicate, but what did we understand for that? What do we try to do with that? I think it means a little bit in the personal knowledge management. So I totally agree with you.

The one-pass reading strategy

NICOLE: So Niky Dix is saying that he was referring to the one pass strategy where we use free writing from one source and then make idea notes using the pick a phrase and then create idea notes and reverse outline. Okay, we need to unpack this. Can you explain what he means?

BIANCA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a solution to this process, the highlight and the process later and later never arrives.

So when it comes the time to write from our research, there are no notes. Because we didn’t actually process those highlights with our understanding and build the knowledge that we want to write about.

So what I develop is what I call the one pass reading strategy. So that is when you finish reading, you have all your notes ready. Even if you stop in the middle, you are ready, have all your notes ready for you. So the process where you go, I develop a process step by step how we can do that. And that’s where all those words come from. We are reading something, we feel the urge to highlight something was either interesting, relevant, or puzzling. We stop immediately rather than just highlight and keep moving on, we stop and then start making sense of that.

So it’s really like, let me free write and just write my understanding of what I just read. Even try to explain what the person tried to tell me or try to explain how does it relate to my work or anything that comes to mind really. So just really like free writing that.

And then when you talk about idea notes, many people use the thing of atomic notes, I say, or idea notes as like, okay, what are the ideas in the highlighting? And that’s why I say don’t do that. The highlight is someone else ideas. You want to extract the atomic notes from what you wrote from your free wrote. Because those are your ideas, even if they’re just an explanation of what the person said. So those are the ones that become the atomic notes. And then you may want to cite to mention, okay, these thoughts actually are not mine. They came when reading this quote from the source. So that I can say, this is not mine, it came from this source.

But then that’s where I use and some methods that I teach on how to create those idea notes. Those are the pick a phrase and the reverse outline methods. So those are some methods that to help convert a free writing into idea notes. So that’s a little bit of what Nik was referring to.

NICOLE: Okay. So what’s so interesting is that you’re using different terminology, but I’ve kind of arrived at the same conclusion, at the same process.

I think like Tiago Forte uses the term progressive summarization.

And since you’re a developer, I like to think of it as like continuous note taking in the sense of CI/CD processes. For those who don’t know, in tech, we are now emphasizing a more agile way to work where that is more iterative. So it’s not like in the first pass, you get everything down and you’re done and you move on. It’s like you do, it kind of sounds like what you’re describing, Bianca, where the initial pass is like freeform. You’re not really separating things out yet. You’re just getting through it and then you go back and iterate over it, and then you start creating idea notes that are now in your words, not in the author’s words. And then you keep like continually processing it from there. So I’m seeing kind of a lot of similarities.

Do you think that it is significantly different from other methodologies like Zettelkasten or progressive summarization?

BIANCA: I cannot say that I understand completely progressive summarization or the Zettelkasten. What I understand, progressive summarization is that you stop too much on the source side of things. It’s like you try to highlight and summarize, is it too much on what the other process try to say, and it takes too much time to arrive on you, let’s say.

Whereas my case, let’s say like as soon as you write something that is important, your thoughts should go down, your thoughts should go there immediately.

But I agree with you on the agile process, actually even the people in the community, they heard me talking about agile a little bit because even I call agile note making. Because like yeah, let’s I compare to I guess the waterfall. So there’s a lot of like computer science things going on.

NICOLE: Oh, that’s awesome. I love that.

BIANCA: Yeah, so-

NICOLE: I’ve had a lot of the same thoughts.

BIANCA: Yeah, so it’s really like the process of really iterative. It’s really like put your thoughts out. Because one of the big problems that people have in note making or in writing, especially in research, is that we try to organize first rather than create the things first or express our thoughts first.

So it happens in some note making tools. They force you to think about that because okay, where would I put this note even when I don’t know what I write inside of the note yet. Whereas I see more like, first you express what you want to say. I don’t even know what I’m gonna say, then just write it all down. And then the process of organizing those notes so that I can find them later.

And the atomic note is really a process of organization. We are trying to organize our ideas in a way that we can grow them, using some sense making strategies or we want to find them later. I see that that’s why like the process really like. Write everything down first, then you express yourself. Now let’s start to organize as a second step.

Nicole showing her process

NICOLE: So I want to show quickly this something that’s in the process of me going through and creating and synthesizing my thoughts on it. This is an example of highlights from Readwise. And as you say, this is really like, it’s all source, there’s none of my own thoughts in here, but it’s like a prompt for me. It’s the beginning and then I remember what I thought was interesting about it, and then I create another note but that is about still what the author is saying, but now it’s in my words.

So I like this thesis, an antithesis, antithesis and synthesis kind of structure. It’s the Hegelian dialect and I like that in the first one I talk about what are the main part points of the book? What is the author trying to say? But in my own words. And then I also think about similar ideas that other authors I know or have read, wrote about or said about the situation. Then antithesis is like, what are the things that are wrong or what are the weak points of that book? And then how can they come together?

So obviously, I’m not done with this one and it’s still in progress, but I just wanted to show how it can be done like in Obsidian as well. I guess in Scrintal, this would be… I’m interested that the process is really very similar. It’s just, okay, the tool is different, but we’re actually doing the same thing.

Which tool is best?

BIANCA: Yeah. This one, I like to say like, because most people they ask, “Okay, which tool should I be using? Should I then move to Scrintal?” I was like, “Wait, what do you want to do?” Because it’s more about which type of thinking we are trying to support and then which methods we can use to put that way of thinking to practice. And then what is the tool that I want to use?

So many people say they started with Obsidian, they say, “Well that’s not for me. I want something else.” And they go to Scrintal. Some people start Scrintal, they say, “That’s not for me. I want something else. They go into Obsidian.”

So it’s really like, what do you want to do with the tool? What method supports that? And then, okay, which tool will support me in applying that method? So I like to think more on the mindset, what I call the mindset, and then the methods. Then choose, what’s then the best tool for my use case or for this specific use case?

I think I can maybe share my personal screen. I was saying that I was, I didn’t want to…

NICOLE: Totally up to you. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but yeah, sure. But I really love what you’re saying about tools because people think like, “Oh, my channel’s about Obsidian so I must think that Obsidian is the best tool for everyone.” I don’t, I hate saying something is the best for everyone. I’m like the opposite of that. That is the opposite of inclusivity.

I always say try it out. a lot of these tools are free or have a free trial or a free tier. Use it all. And if that’s Notion or if that’s Evernote or Obsidian, like go for it. We all think in different ways. Why do we assume that one tool will placate all of us?

BIANCA: Exactly. I totally agree with that.

NICOLE: Yeah, if you’d like to share your screen, you can-

BIANCA: Yeah, I’ll try.

NICOLE: Just go ahead and do that.

Languages as thinking hats

NICOLE: And Nik was also saying:

Write first, organize later. Sounds like what Nicole did with her daily notes in multiple languages too.

Absolutely, that is exactly it. My daily note is kind of like Bianca’s one pass process, what is it called? One pass reading. And that’s because it’s just like a log. There are bullet points. I am not really thinking too much about what language I’m writing in, but then when they get processed, I mean, very few people are going to want to read a single article in multiple languages that might not coincide with their languages, right?

Mage Prometheus says:

Writing down your own words immediately helps identify where you don’t understand. I don’t like to read on if I don’t understand what I’ve just read.

Yeah, and I would also add to this, something I didn’t mention with the multiple languages question is I actually use my knowledge of multiple languages to test myself. And kind of like the question that was asked earlier about AI. One thing that I am actively using AI for is to provide me the opposing argument. Here’s what I think, tell me what’s wrong. And that is super cool because sometimes the AI, GPT3. or GPT4 says things and I’m like, I should have thought of that. That’s actually a pretty solid argument that has me rethinking how I should argue, how I should present my evidence.

And I do the same thing with languages because I find that for me at least, like certain languages are linked with certain attitudes. It’s kind of like the six hats, the thinking hats from Edward de Bono. That’s what languages are for me.

If I have a premise out there and I think I want to attack this logically, I might try English because that for me is the logical language. But if I want to think about like, well what does this mean in terms of people? I might do Filipino, Tagalog or Spanish. Then if it’s something that’s more like, about freedom or liberty, okay, let’s do the same thing in Dutch and let’s see what I come up with.

It’s actually interesting, the things that I come up with just from putting the same thoughts in two different languages. It’s like, why did I use that word in Dutch? But I didn’t use a direct translation in English. It’s like, okay, that’s kind of interesting.

BIANCA: Yeah, that’s why you see like it’s really about the idea itself, not the words. Because when you start to thinking what is the name for this idea? That’s where it’s like, oh, okay, what am I actually trying to say here? What’s the idea that I try to talk about? So I find that fascinating.

NICOLE: And also agglutinative languages like German, Dutch or even Esperanto, they just let you freeform, push two ideas together that maybe don’t belong. And I love that. We can’t just do that in other languages. So it’s super useful from that perspective. Just putting a name on a feeling or an idea is so powerful.

Sparking serendipity in research

NICOLE: I want to get to the question earlier about serendipity, ‘cause I think that’s really important. So we’ve talked about how you process something for research, you have a base note for the source, you create idea notes that you pull out in kind of like an atomic note process. And then in the base note are things that are just more free form, but still in your own words, if I understand correctly, or is that like a separate note?

BIANCA: I feel I can share now. I managed to share so.

NICOLE: Oh, okay, great, yeah.

BIANCA: Just look at it.

NICOLE: Yeah.

BIANCA: So that’s, for example, this will be what I call, it’s some people call biographic notes, literature note, it’s just an information, what it is, some videographic formation, what is the link. And for example, in here, I don’t have really anything. It’s just a summary. Very tiny one. ‘Cause i still write, see, I’m on page six. I read almost nothing from this book.

But then, those are the backlinks with the ideas that come out of it. There is sometimes information about the person or information about specific idea. And then I have some explanation here, which links to other things. So that’s really how I link. I explain the things and link back.

What I link, I link back to this note, so I can see here what are all the ideas that are related to it. So what I started doing, I started writing sometimes here just like free form, free writing. I just open here. There was something interesting, I just start writing here. And then I separated them as soon as I finished writing.

Before I started reading again, I separate them into their own notes or put into a note if already existed a note about that specific thing. And that’s how I go.

So I don’t keep my original free writing, I just like throw it away, except in some situations. Oh wow. Where it’s more like the decision but it’s more like I’m reporting, I’m writing a decision that I took or is more journaling, how I’m more about why am I moving my research in that direction? If it’s from a source, it cease to exist as one text. It’s actually existing multiple cards that’s breaking down into multiple cards about different ideas.

NICOLE: I gotta say, that makes me anxious just thinking about it. You delete it? I do the same thing, but I keep the original.

BIANCA: Yeah. I say, well if it makes you comfortable, keep it there. And maybe the daily note can come back the best. But for me, it’s just like… Because it’s still there, but it’s nothing in one single text. It’s in multiple place. Each idea is a different note.

NICOLE: So how would you stumble across? Like this note that you have, this sign or symbol. Is there any way that in Scrintal, you can stumble across that in a different context? Like not when you’re looking into this book?

BIANCA: Yes, and sometimes, it happens with me because when you’re creating idea notes, when I talk about ideas, ideas are not just things, for example, this the example here, I have let’s say sign or double articulation.

We could think them as things or concepts, but I can say maybe like signs that have, no something say, double articulation, for example. Let’s a statement. I’m saying that signs have this property. So in that case, I will say sign. And just by doing that, many times, I started writing and I just say, okay, I’ll explain this idea here.

This is a new idea from me. I don’t wanna talk about science or I don’t wanna talk about whatever the word articulation is. I want to talk about the relationship between them. And many times, when I’m doing that, I notice I may think that this doesn’t exist. I will write for the first time, but then as I’m writing I say, whoa, I have a note about that already. It happened many times. So when I start thinking about the relationships with between things, I start noticing, I have notes that I didn’t know that I had before, and they have text in them, they have already content in them. I was like, whoa, I’m really happy with my previous self for having created a note for me, let’s say.

But in terms of serendipity in general, I wouldn’t say that Scrintal is focus on serendipity. It’s not like Napkin. Napkin focuses on serendipity. You open a note and two other notes just appear beside it. And so the focus of is really serendipity. Obsidian, you still have some plug, let’s say, give me a random note that is that level of serendipity.

In Scrintal, is really up to you. It’s really like, just open my card and open a random card and start to read again. And what I find interesting is that’s very often, we take notes, but we don’t read them. I mean, we always go to read something else from the external word, but we don’t read what our previous self wrote, let’s say. Very often. So I think a little bit of serendipity comes just by going to our vaults or our systems and reading our notes again.

NICOLE: Yeah, there are a few ways that I like to do it. I think last week, I released a video just on Serendipity for Obsidian. But I think that the concepts are the same.

Although I do use Dice Roller for Obsidian to randomly select elements from tables or also notes. And you can say like, show me all the notes with this tag. Or you can do a bunch of different things with it.

So I like to use that, but I also like to do chronologically. Like that’s why I used daily notes. In every daily note, I have a link that says like, one year ago today, here’s the daily note. And then I see what I was looking at or what I created on that day. And sometimes, I find seasonal things, like if I’m working on something for Christmas, it’s like, hey, this time last year I was working on that too.

So that’s another way, by date, by topic, random or visualization, which I think Scrintal, I don’t know if Scrintal can, I guess it is good at letting you visualize different ideas, but is there a way to visualize all of the ideas? Like in all of the boards? I don’t really remember.

BIANCA: No. Not yet. I tried, not a very good idea. I tried to put all my notes into on board and not yet. It just like didn’t open, everything crashed. It was just like, okay, lowsy, and we stayed there. I hope that the team has some ideas for that so you can actually see everything. But at the moment, there is no such option.

How do we find the time to make notes?

NICOLE: So we’re already over time. So I just wanted to end on one question from random user:

How is there ever enough time to make notes on everything you’re interested in?

BIANCA: There is not enough time to make notes on everything you’re interested in, that would be the main answer. But I think for the notes that we can take, I think it’s worth taking the time to take and engage with them later on. So I feel that that would be my take.

NICOLE: That’s a really good answer. I totally agree, there’s never enough time. I relate so hard to this question because I want to take more notes on things than I actually have time to take notes on them. But just like anything else, prioritize.

You’re not gonna be graded on this. Maybe you are actually. But for most other things, if you’re just a personal researcher, you’re not going to be graded on the thoroughness with which you attacked every single main premise that the author says.

So feel free to pick the ones that are relevant to you for the work that you are doing. And I think that’s a much more sustainable way of doing things because you never have enough time.

Bianca, thank you so much for joining me. If people want to know more about you, as I’m sure they will, where would you suggest they go?

BIANCA: Well, as we are on YouTube. I’m starting my YouTube channel. I have some livestreams there, but I will start publishing more frequently. And can always comment there and start chatting through there. Otherwise, I’m also on Twitter. Much more active in Twitter. Can just DM me at any moment and we can chat from there.

NICOLE: Awesome. And I also have the links in the description below of this video on YouTube. You can see Bianca’s YouTube channel there, but also, I don’t know why you didn’t even mention it. But you also have now, it’s not a course anymore, it’s a community, right? It’s the Prolific Researcher Community. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

BIANCA: Yeah, the main idea that I changed from course to a community is that many times we take a course and we say, “Wow, I learned a lot.” But then it comes a moment to put everything to practice. And I was like, “Okay, I’m stuck, so how can I get help?”

So the idea of the community that you, you come, you have an onboarding course where you learn how to take notes, how to express your thoughts, how to create a idea notes. And then, later in the second follow up course that you can take immediately or a little bit later. Because when you come to the community, come for a few months. Now that I have my notes, how can I create new ideas from those notes and use and write my output base on my notes.

So there are the course, the onboarding course and the follow up course, and there are a few others coming up, but there is also events or co-working sessions, Q&As, hot seat coaching, many other things.

It’s like, okay, you heard from me, now it’s time to develop your own practice. So then as you develop your own practice, then you get feedback, then you get support from me and from the community. And that’s why I change from a course into more community model because I think the one important aspect, okay, it needs to be something that works for you. That’s why I say it needs to be for each person. And we are there to support each one to decide which tool I want to use, how do I want to implement that? What works for my specific case and what doesn’t work for my specific case?

So that’s the idea of the prolific researcher community. And we have also course about research skills specifically. They’re related to the process of idea management or note making, but we have other things related to research specifically as well.

NICOLE: All right. Thank you, Bianca. I’m so happy to finally have you on my channel. We’ve been talking about it for a while. You’re welcome back anytime.

BIANCA: Thanks a lot for invitation. I I really enjoyed talking to you and thanks for everyone also who join us today. And I hope to be back and I hope to have you my channel at some point as well.

NICOLE: Yeah, absolutely. I’m game, just tell me when and where.

For everybody else, thank you for sticking around. Later this Friday, I’m having another livestream. This time, we’re going to be talking about something less serious than the topic of today’s discussion ‘cause we’re talking about all play, we are talking about role playing games. And I am going to be with my friend and dungeon master, Andy Polaine. We’re going be comparing how he takes notes and how I take notes on the same sessions, on the same campaign. So that should be interesting as well. Thank you, everyone for joining us and I’ll see you on Friday. Bye.

BIANCA: Bye-Bye.

The Future of Obsidian with CEO Stephan Ango and Andy Polaine

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 00:27:40 +0100

What is the future of Obsidian? The new Obsidian CEO, Stephan Ango (@kepano), talks about why he joined the Obsidian team and what he wants to do next. I’m Nicole van der Hoeven, and today I’m joined by my friend, Andy Polaine, to find out what’s on the horizon for our favourite note-taking app.

Key takeaways

10 notable points raised in the video were:

Stephan thinks the proliferation of tools for thought is a positive thing, in that every new tool that uses Markdown makes the standard more futureproof.
Obsidian’s three major pillars are extensibility, privacy, and longevity. Those are things Obsidian excels at.
The things Obsidian is bad at are the consequences of those three major pillars (such as fragmentation, difficulty in sharing, and being restricted to Markdown).
The Obsidian team consists of five full-time people, including founders Licat (Shida, dev) and Silver (Erica, product), Liam (dev of Calendar plugin), and Joethei (plugin reviews and dev ecosystem).
Upcoming features: better metadata format than YAML (think something like Dataview inline fields), better querying of tasks
Stephan wants to keep the Obsidian team small, and grow only when absolutely necessary.
It’s difficult to get exact usage figures for Obsidian, but going by downloads of the app bundle, there are about 1 million users.
The Obsidian team doesn’t want to bring on venture capital investors.
Better sharing in Obsidian is something they’re thinking about, but they need to prioritize use cases.
Artificial intelligence in Obsidian is likely to remain in the realm of community plugins for now.

Below is a transcript of the video.

Introductions: Nicole van der Hoeven, Stephan Ango, Andy Polaine

Nicole: Hello, everyone. I’m Nicole van der Hoeven, and today I’m joined by two special guests. And I’d like to introduce first, I guess, Stephan Ango, or you might know him better as Kepano.

Stephan: Hey, Nicole. Thank you for having me.

Nicole: You’re welcome.

Stephan: Kepano’s great. You can call me Kepano. I’m fine with that.

Nicole: So, Stephan is a designer and an engineer, and most recently, he was announced to be the CEO of Obsidian. So that’s going to be interesting. I actually know you more for the stuff that you’ve made for Obsidian, like Minimal, and also Hider and Web Clipper. But it looks like you’ve been in the industry for a while making, I’d say similar tools.

Stephan: Yeah. Well, I mean, up until now it wasn’t really in the consumer space. I was building startups in more in the B2B area, but I’ve been using a lot of these tools for a long time. So, as a user, I’m older than I look, I guess. I’ve been like, building, I think the first thing that I really got into when I was a teenager was Winamp Skins. And so like, this is like, ’90s, early 2000s, making my first website and things around that time. So that’s how, that was my first, I guess, experience, like, building things in the software world.

Nicole: Awesome. And also here to help me interview you basically, is Andy Polaine, who is a lot of things. Designer, educator, writer, design leadership coach. He’s also co-authored a book called, “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation.” And he has a podcast called, “Power of Ten.” But really, the most important thing is he’s my Dungeon Master. We play D&D every week, and he’s also a good friend. We actually met because of Obsidian. So, welcome to the channel.

Andy: Thanks. Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be a co-host. Or co-interviewer. Co-interviewer.

Nicole: Yeah, it’s really weird for me to not take cues from you and roll dice when you tell me to, but, you know, we’ll see how that goes.

Andy: I’ve got the dice here just in case we need-

Nicole: Okay, well I’ve got mine too, so. Anytime you need me to roll a save, I’m ready.

Andy: Well, let’s just roll for initiative to see who interviews first, huh?

Nicole: Yeah. Okay, let’s do that. Rollies, what are you going to roll? Okay. Just a d20. I rolled a two, so.

Andy: I got an 11.

Nicole: You go first.

PKM history and getting started with Obsidian

Andy: Okay, all right. I will, so, really, the first question for you is, it’s kind of under a sort of batch of questions really, about why Obsidian, but how did you get started with Obsidian?

Stephan: First, can you give me any like, buffs or stats or anything as my character would?

Andy: Well, I think you get sort of plus one in design and coding, right? So, yeah.

Nicole: What class do you think Stephan would be, Andy?

Andy: Wizard, I reckon. Or an arcanist.

Nicole: Yeah, I was thinking like-

Andy: No, I reckon-

Nicole: Sorcerer?

Andy: Yeah, or a, you know, someone who kind of makes stuff as well.

Nicole: Artificer.

Andy: Artificer, yeah. That’s what I reckon he is.

Stephan: Back in the World of Warcraft days-

Andy: So high end.

Stephan: I played a lot of the paladin class. I like the hybrid class, but I think that I also in like, “Lord of the Rings” really love, you know, Gandalf and those types of guy, Radagast, you know. I’m definitely into those types of characters.

Andy: Someone who can produce something out of nothing. So. So. As you were.

Stephan: I forgot what your question was.

Andy: Yes, so we’re going to lose half the audience straightaway. So, you know, you were a customer, right? You were a user before you became CEO and pretty quickly I seem to remember seeing your, certainly your theme, I think, probably a couple of other things, seeing you in the Obsidian Discord. So, you know, what was your hook into Obsidian in the first place?

Stephan: We’re getting some comments that your mic is very crackly.

Andy: We are hearing it. This is weird, isn’t it?

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Andy: I had it before.

Stephan: Some people are hearing it.

Andy: I don’t know what’s going on.

Stephan: But to answer your question, I had been using the, over the past like, 15 or so years, I’ve used a lot of different tools to kind of try to solve what for me was mostly a journaling question. So, I wanted to be able to just write kind of, my own diary notes in a tool that, over time I discovered that the Wiki type of format was what I really loved. I kind of fell in love with the wiki link kind of idea. And that idea’s been around, I’m not sure exactly who invented the notation. I think it was the Wikipedia people in the MediaWiki, the kind of like, double-bracket concept. But once I discovered that, I felt that I only wanted to use like, journaling with that. So the one that I used for a long time was TiddlyWiki, and TiddlyWiki has that same kind of bracket notation, but I found that my personal sensibilities as a user, I really wanted something that felt like, very simple and minimalistic. Like, as you may notice from the kind of like, type of themes and things that I’ve made for Obsidian. And when Obsidian came out, I found out about it almost right away, like, in, I guess April, 2020, you know, as right as the pandemic was kicking off. Like, I think a lot of people, I don’t know, around that time were staying at home, were exploring different things and I found out about it, I had spent probably a year trying to kind of customize TiddlyWiki to be a little bit more user friendly, and Obsidian, even in like, V1 or whatever, not V1, it was like, V0.001, was already better than what TiddlyWiki was doing for me in terms of, it had the quick switcher, it had the prompts, it had the file Nav in the way that I wanted. It didn’t quite look like what I wanted, but it had a lot of the kind of, nice user interface patterns that I was looking for. And so I pretty much started making, I took, I was looking back at my notes, kind of preparing for this conversation, and I pretty much went all in on Obsidian after using it just for a couple days. I imported everything, and started making the minimal theme like, immediately. But I was just making it for myself at first. I wasn’t intending to publish it, I just kind of made it to solve my own UI preferences.

Nicole: So I actually used TiddlyWiki quite a bit. The reason that I used it was a lot of, ‘cause I was a consultant at the time, and a lot of the tools that were out there required, like, they were basically on the cloud so it was a SaaS platform that I’d have to log into and not, and those sites weren’t always allowed by whatever company I happened to be working for, so that’s what I loved about TiddlyWiki, that it could just sit on like, a flash drive and it would work. And that’s part of the reason that I started using Obsidian too, is ‘cause it’s local.

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, and that was something, you know, being able to use it on your computer when you’re offline, just having that control. I was, you know, using it on flights, and so that local first idea to me is, I don’t know, I just find it much more natural and it allows you to do things so much faster. And because I have experience, you know, I wouldn’t say that like, being an engineer is first and foremost what I do, but I do dabble in a lot of different things on the code side and using, I use Sublime Text as my main code editor, but having, being used to using like, a code editor, you just expect everything to be there for you, right away, super fast. Like, even a small delay feels like it gets in the way of my productivity in some cases. So, being in the cloud, it always feels a little slow. And I’ve used a lot of those tools in my previous, especially for work purposes like Confluence or Google Docs or those things. And the sluggishness I feel like, really gets in the way of being able to make progress on whatever you’re trying to do.

Andy: Yeah. I mean for me, it was the portability thing. I switched to Markdown for everything, I think, for my blog. Like really, really soon after Gruber kind of released it. And I used to use Notational Velocity, which I think it was probably one of the first ones I know of, of a kind of this idea of a database that just sits on top of a bunch of Markdown files. And then Brett Terpstra was putting together NvALT, and nvUltra, which he’s still working on. And you know, I’ve been pretty disloyal. I’ve used lots and lots of like, every and probably most people, every Markdown out there. And a lot of them are starting to do the kind of wiki thing too, but depending-

Stephan: And there’s so many of them and-

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephan: And I think that is such a great thing that now that the ecosystem of Markdown editing tools is so deep and broad, that I often think that Obsidian, to me what’s exciting about this whole kind of area is like, I’m very curious about how we can make digital information persist over a long period of time. Like, how will the ideas that we have right now continue to persist for hundreds of years in the future? We’ve had books for thousands of years, but we’ve only had digital files for, you know, 70 or 80 years. And I like the idea that something like, plain text could still be around for the next few hundred years. And so using something like Markdown is, like, the file in a way is way more important than the apps. Like, Obsidian will eventually become obsolete because technology changes so much. But hopefully, the plain text will continue to live forever.

Andy: Yeah. I mean a bit like you, I’m gonna ask you about Computer Show actually later, but a bit like you, I’ve been around for quite a long time and I thought, I’ve been in digital stuff for like, 30-something years and I got fed up, but one of the reasons I moved to doing everything, I do all that, still do my invoicing, you know, with Markdown and stuff because I had so many times where like, “Oh the app’s gone out of, you know, out of production,” or “I’ve got so much of my work still on like, CD-ROMs.” I keep an old laptop that’s still got a CD-ROM drive, just in order to be able to view that.

Stephan: Oh, really? You’ve got to transfer those.

Andy: It still runs, kinda like, oh, it’s a, no, but yeah, but some of it’s like, Director MacroMind, actually, Macromedia Director stuff, that that’s the only thing you can play on, so you sort of have to keep the machine for it, too. And I transferred a lot of other stuff, but I had the same thing and I started using Evernote once and then trying getting stuff out. It was horrendous. Had the same thing with Notions, of exporting out of Notion, and it kind of dumps all this other crap in there. And so, you know, yeah, I agree. I think the file format is the kind of winner.

Stephan: Yeah, the file is more important than that.

Dealing with competitors

Andy: I’m interested though more as CEO, that you’ve got, you know, there are a whole lot of, well, I kind of would perhaps a little bit rudely say Obsidian clones kind of popping up. It feels like, in the last, you know, even in the last year there’s been a lot of stuff coming up. So, you know, whether you perceive those, is that a challenge for Obsidian? Is Obsidian kind of, just take its own path that each of them have their kind of own flavors? Now is it a good thing, you see it as a good thing?

Stephan: Well, I see it as a good thing because I am still kind of like, a plain text maximalist. So I think that you have to have a diversity of clients in order for that to kind of last forever. Like, I still think the file is more important than the app. I do think that where it gets dangerous is if there’s too many app-specific syntaxes that start to emerge. I think that is kind of dangerous because it reduces interoperability. Like, I think that, you know, Markdown, for all its flaws, and I think a lot of people have frustrations with Markdown, it has kind of stood the test of time, at least for the past, however many, 12, 15 years it’s been around, I’m not exactly sure, but maybe more at this point, I’m getting old. And so, I think that that is one of the biggest challenges that we have with Obsidian is sometimes we wanna do something new. Like, recently we launched the Canvas feature and there isn’t a, you know, off-the-shelf kind of canvas type of bio format. So we, you know, created a new one that is, you know, open and the type specification for it is out there, but there’s no other client for that file format yet. Hopefully there will be, but I think that that diversity of clients is good because there’s a lot of people who have lots of different ideas about how thinking should work, and Obsidian is not particularly dogmatic, like, a big part of, you know, one of the main values that we always think about is extensibility. So how do we make it easy for individual users to customize Obsidian? And also, how do we enable developers to build on top of it? But there’s a, I think it’s very viable to create a very opinionated Markdown or tool, you know, editing tool that takes a different approach than Obsidian. And I’ve seen many people who enjoy using more than one, different one for different parts of their workflow. So yeah, I think it’s good. I think we’re living through a little bit of like, this Cambrian explosion moment because for some reason right now, in the past couple of years, like, people have realized this a really exciting problem to work on and I think we all learn a lot from each other, so, I see it as a good thing.

Nicole: So one of the things that you said, ‘cause I trolled through your blog while I was thinking of questions for this. You had a post about how great tools choose to be bad at some things. So, what do you think Obsidian has chosen to be bad at?

Stephan: Well, I think that design principles are only real design principles if you can take both sides of it and create something compelling. Like, for example, we talked about extensibility. That’s one of our, I would say there’s like, three major pillars to what Obsidian is trying to be. One of them is around privacy, one of them is around longevity of your notes, and one of them is around extensibility. So those three things are the things that we want to continue being really good at. But you can take the extensibility example as kind of one of our design principles. We wanna make Obsidian super extensible. But you could, I can see why some people would prefer an app that’s not at all extensible, that is, you know, completely designed by one small group of people who are trying to make a very cohesive experience. I think one of the big challenges with Obsidian is we’re always asking ourselves, “What should be a community plugin versus a core plugin?” We’re always asking ourselves, “How can we make community plugins feel more native to the app and more cohesive and intuitive to people? Do they make sense with the rest of the app? Because any developer can basically build anything inside of Obsidian. And so it, I think it is a common point of frustration for some new Obsidian users that they have to download a lot of plugins and some of them feel a little janky. So, you know, Obsidian has chosen to be bad at that, with the trade off that it allows a lot of freedom for people to customize the app. And you can take the same example with, you know, privacy and longevity. Those have their own trade offs as well. Andy, did you wanna say something?

Andy: I was thinking, you know, it reminded me of what you just said. It was just as you talked about the plugin thing. One of the tricks that Apple did with the iPhone, was to make the phone bit an app. And it sounds just like, a really banal thing, but up until then there were phones, smartphones, were kind of phones with sort of app bits in them, and they were really janky. And I think one of the things also, obviously not having a keyboard, having a touch screen, means that that thing where you get whatever app you’re in is completely the app. All right? So, you know, I’m in FaceTime, it’s completely FaceTime, I’m in Obsidian and it’s completely Obsidian, the whole phone turns into whatever app you’re in. And I feel that, you know, in a way that’s what the plugin mechanism can do for Obsidian. At its base it’s, you know, it’s a text editor that’s browsing as a viewer on a set of Markdown files. But you know, as soon as you start putting, particularly some of the more powerful plugins in it, it becomes something completely else. And I think, I find it really kind of powerful that you can switch that stuff on and off. I can see that the, you know, I was sharing my students the other day ‘cause they were talking about design research and how you can use Obsidian, and quite a lot of them use Notion. And I can completely see why they use Notion, right? ‘Cause it’s just, you know, zero learning curve for them. Until such time as they want to take that stuff with them, and then they’ll find out. And I think some of that stuff’s a bit like doing backups. You find out the hard way, right? But I kind of feel like that is a, it’s been a smart trade off to make with Obsidian, with the plugins. And I was just wondering at this point-

Stephan: But it has its downsides. I mean, I think the point, you know, on privacy, the way we think about that is that is having ownership over your files. They’re not in somebody else’s database. They’re on your computer, on your device. You know, if you choose to use the first-party sync, everything’s end-to-end encrypted, and so we have this kind of strong pillar around privacy, but it has the trade off that it makes certain things harder for us. For example, people ask us, would we ever see a web client for Obsidian? A like, online, you know, cloud-based Obsidian? And that’s a lot harder for us to do because we don’t have access to your files. We would have to compromise on that value of encrypting your data and kind of being able to see that information on our side in order to be able to present it back to you. And that makes things really tough. Unless, there’s some, we’ve thought about this question a lot, but it really is a very hard problem to solve. But for someone who, you know, for whatever scenario they might be in, either can’t access a local app because they, you know, there were computer restricts, you know, apps and they can’t download Obsidian or they’re on a school computer and they have to access it from the school computer, it does present a limitation. But I think strong principles force those kinds of trade-offs where you could take either side and make a compelling and legitimate app. We just, you know, have chosen our own particular set of trade off and that’s what that blog post was about. So. So there’s other things that Obsidian is bad at as well, like, relating to longevity and like, the choice of using Markdown, for example. It’s not the most intuitive to some people. I can come up with a long list of things that Obsidian is bad at, in favor of something that it wants to be really good at. And I think that’s a, making trade offs is our job.

Nicole: Well, one of the things that I hear a lot is that Obsidian is too developer focused, or some people think it’s not approachable. And I think it comes back to what we’ve been talking about. You do have to make a decision, you do sacrifice a little bit of usability in exchange for flexibility and modularity. My background is in performance engineering, so I care a lot about performance and I love this idea of making the most streamlined possible app, and then just leaving room for extensions so that other people can make their own decisions. I would rather have that, than have an app that has everything baked in and I have really no choice as to what to turn on or off because my use case is going to be different from everybody else’s.

Andy: That’s Microsoft Word, right?

Stephan: Yeah.

Andy: When you just have the sort of, bloat and they get those screenshots, sometimes, of every palette open and there’s about this much space, they actually edit some text.

Nicole: By the way, do you like my shirt?

Stephan: Oh yes. Classic.

Nicole: Where’s yours?

Andy: Yeah.

Nicole: How disappointing.

Stephan: I know, I haven’t, I’m such a minimalist-

Andy: It’s a print.

Stephan: I haven’t gotten my Obsidian merch yet, but, yeah, you’re looking good over there.

Andy: So, you know, you’ve been contributing to Obsidian, pretty much from the get go, and then you started working with them. What is it with them? It’s the, the Licat and Silver, basically-

Stephan: It’s the smart, yeah, the smart team.

Joining the Obsidian team

Andy: Two-person team. So, you know, how did that, I don’t know how much you can reveal, how did that come about and then, and what was the sort of transition? When was there this kind of moment of like, “Hey, how about becoming CEO?”

Stephan: Yeah, well, it was a very organic process because I, you know, was running a different company at the time when Obsidian first came out. And so, I had, you know, started building minimal theme, a bunch of different small plugins here and there, the Web Clipper. And I was a very vocal in the Discord and forum about some of the things that I thought would be, you know, improvements or bug fixes. And at the time, the Obsidian community was way smaller than it is today. And so, I was often interacting with Licat and Silver, the founders of Obsidian, through the Discord. And just kind of, just talking very organically about here are some things that could be improved, here are some, you know, bugs I found. Can you help me with this feature of Minimal that I am trying to, you know, build into my plugin? Can you give me some feedback on how to do this properly? And so, we started interacting, you know, talking about Obsidian for a couple of years. And, I’m not exactly sure at what point it started, and maybe it was around the time that, I’m trying to like, actually remember, but I think there was like, a Gems of the Year contest where Minimal won like, the Best Theme category, and I think I started DMing more with Silver and Licat around that time, and just kind of getting to know them just over chat in Discord. And they found out that I had been, you know, running some startups and asked me for some advice on a couple small things here and there. And so we just kind of kept that conversation going, and at some point last year, there was this kind of idea that Obsidian wanted to kinda reach the 1.0 release. And the 1.0 release, I mean I think it, you know, it’s funny that it, it was really a milestone moment, because we, that’s when I started becoming involved in the project and they asked me to basically create the new default theme. And so I was working with them part-time, kind of taking a lot of my experience on Minimal and bringing that into the core app. But also, they were asking me about some of the things that I felt were on my like, top priority list of small details that we felt were still kind of embarrassing or like, wanted to really get nailed down before we could really feel like we could call it a 1.0. And, that’s when I started working much more closely with them, as well as Liam, who is now a full-time part of the team. You might know Liam from the calendar plugin. He’s amazing. We have basically five people full-time. Joethei, you might have seen around the community who helps a lot with plugin reviews and the developer ecosystem, and then a few other folks who’ve been helping us part-time, like MG Meyers, who you might know from the Kanban plugin and style settings is working on, has been working on Canvas and kind of like, led the Canvas effort. And so, the more conversations kept going on with this project, I just realized it was so much fun and I love Obsidian so much. Like I just, I really want it to continue to be an important tool in my life, in a very selfish way, but also I think that Shida and Erica, Licat and Silver, are such mature like, entrepreneurs, they’re quite a bit younger than me. They make me feel old all the time. But it’s a great exchange of knowledge and yeah, so we started discussing this idea and they were on board. I think it’s a very, we have very complimentary skills. I’m really excited about, like, Licat’s one of the most incredible engineers that I’ve ever worked with. I’ve worked with a lot of like, amazing engineers throughout my life and I have like, so much respect for him. He’s just super, super impressive and continues to be like, they’re both gonna continue to be involved for the foreseeable future. And Erica has just an incredible mind for, you know, product and how to think about what users really care about. And so, and has been, I think, the person who’s, in a way, influenced why Obsidian has such an amazing community more than anybody else. Just kind of from the beginning, making that an important part of Obsidian, I think is a lot of credit to Erica. So, seeing, like, getting to know them just made me realize like, there’s nothing that I would rather do than help that community continue to grow, help make sure that Obsidian has the, kind of like, structure that it can last for a long time, kind of going back to that principle of longevity that matters at the app level. How do we actually make that viable at the company level so that the kind of, product and the company can be aligned? So yeah, that’s why I kind of believe that-

Nicole: I also just wanted to call out-

Stephan: Very organic.

Nicole There’s some people who are asking-

Stephan: Oh, where do we get the merchandise?

Nicole: Where do we get the merch? By the way, I bought this. And it is here.

Stephan: Yeah.

Nicole: Just so everybody can see, ‘cause there’s some awesome things on there.

Stephan: Yeah, I think it’s-

Nicole: I want I wanted to ask you-

Stephan: Yeah.

Building intentional tools for tool builders

Nicole: Yeah, it is. So I wanted to also ask you, earlier when I was introducing you, I said that you have worked in similar spaces, which I realize now is a bit odd because the companies that you had worked on before aren’t note-taking apps. But what I meant by that, is actually I’m seeing a theme in what you’ve worked on and it’s all about creating things that are minimal, intentional, well-made. And I think like, in your previous company, Lumi, you were talking about packaging, and making that a little bit more transparent and intentional as well. I know you’re also an industrial designer, or you claim not to be one anymore, but that’s also something that permeates your work there as well, doesn’t it?

Stephan: Yeah, I’m a generalist. I like to dabble in a lot of different things. And so, it has taken me in a lot of different directions, but I think the common theme is I’ve always been interested in making tools. So everything basically in my professional career has been a tool of some kind. So in the case of Lumi, it was a tool, it was actually two different tools. One was for factories, to help manufacturers kind of bring their capabilities online, and a tool that helped businesses who need to collaborate with manufacturers, find the right manufacturers and work with them. And so, I like building tools that kind of empower individuals to do something that they couldn’t do before. And so Obsidian definitely fits into that because I feel like, I mean, in my own personal life, it’s been so rewarding and exciting to use Obsidian. Like, I feel like, my thought process is clear and more reliable when I’m using Obsidian. And I feel like, that’s such an exciting superpower that I have that I want to help more people get that feeling, too. So yeah, like, throughout my life basically like, that theme just keeps coming back of like, making tools that help other people do whatever they’re trying to do.

Nicole: And it’s also helping other people make other things, right? ‘Cause like, you know, you’ve also worked on things like, that kind of pare down what is out there, because there’s an information overload that’s out there and I know you’ve made like, Tidy, which kind of streamlines what we even see on the page. What do you think, is there anything in Obsidian, ‘cause we’ve talked about things that it’s bad at. Are there any big features that you’d like to introduce to it, that don’t detract from, that don’t make it like this bloated bit of software but still are along the same lines of being intentional and helping people?

Stephan: Definitely. I think that the area we want to keep working on is the primitives. Like, what are the basic things that you can use that you can build on top of? So, we have a public roadmap that’s not always the most up to date, but one of the big things we’re working on right now is around metadata. So, a lot of, I’m a huge fan in my personal use, of DataView is one of my favorite plugins for Obsidian, and I use it for everything. And kind of asking ourselves like, “What can we do that would enable the user and developer ecosystem of Obsidian to leverage metadata even more?” So, you know, you can, there’s a couple different ways that you can add metadata to your notes with Obsidian. One of them is through YAML in the frontmatter, and one of them is through DataView has these like, custom fields. So that’s an area that, we want to, like, the author of DataView had to create this new notation with the double colon. You know, you put a key in a value and separate them with a double colon, and that notation was essentially invented by the author of DataView because it’s so painful to write YAML. And so, what can we do to clean that up a little bit and make metadata feel more like a first-class citizen from the user’s perspective, but also enable more developers to build on top of that. Yeah, API docs and developer portal. I’m looking, I can’t even remember what we have on here. Tasks. There’s a few other things that we have up our sleeve at the moment, that I’ll be excited to share in a little bit. Talking about the roadmap-

Nicole: A few questions, Stephan-

Stephan: Yeah, go ahead.

Nicole: You mentioned DataView. I know that he’s working on DataCore, right? Is that going to be something that’s going to be built into Obsidian or is it still going to be a community plugin? Honestly, I would never use Obsidian without DataView.

Stephan: You know, I haven’t really, I’m not exactly sure what the goals of DataCore are. I’m not super informed about what he’s trying to do with that. I think that our job is always to find the right balance between what feels like a core plugin, what feels like it should be part of the community. And so, I think that long term we do wanna have good ways for people to add metadata to their notes and perhaps view kind of an output of that in some way. I think that’s kind of a long-term project, but in the short term, the metadata improvements is really about making it a lot easier to add metadata to your notes and then hopefully that makes things like DataView easier to use. But maybe long term will consider some more ways that people can like, look and view their data, or the metadata from their notes. I do found that DataView, one challenge with it is it is pretty nerdy. Like, it does require, it has a syntax that’s a little bit, you know, like, SQL and I think that that’s not the most user friendly. So we’ve seen quite a few plugins pop up, like DB Folder is one that’s kind of interesting that makes it a little bit more WYSIWYG. And that’s one of the big benefits that we have as a community is that people can build plugins that optimize for different types of users. People who love writing SQL, they’re gonna love using DataView, but people who prefer something more WYSIWYG are gonna prefer a different type of UI. And we can be patient in our approach to what we actually wanna build into the core because we could just kind of watch what people like, what people make, and decide later down the road what we wanna build ourselves.

Growth of Obsidian as a team and company

Andy: Do you think there are, I mean are there any plans to then grow the team? Or is partly what makes it special, the fact that you are a very small team?

Stephan: I think that for now we wanna stay really small. We wanna be as small as we can be because, you know, one of the other things that’s really important that made me want to join Obsidian, is that from an early stage, Shida and Erica decided that they didn’t wanna bring on investors, like, venture capital investors. And I have, throughout my career, worked and built companies that have used every single funding model under the sun. Like, my first company was one of the very first Kickstarter campaigns ever, back in 2009. I’ve gone down the venture capital route, I’ve done bootstrapping, like, I’ve tried it all. And I think when it comes to the goals of Obsidian that we’ve been talking about, like, longevity in particular comes to mind, but also privacy and extensibility, I find that is not very compatible with the VC route. And, you know, if you just kind of survey the ecosystem, you’ll find that actually, almost all of the kind of big PKM apps, if you wanna call them that, have raised a lot of money, like, millions of dollars from, or hundreds of millions of dollars, even. And the problem with that is that, I think it’s misaligning the incentives in the long term for, you know, the user and how they want to kind of, store their notes. Like, basically it incentivizes certain behaviors that are kind of against our principles. And so for that reason, we’re trying to build very intentionally and also work through the extensibility part of our like, principle to enable the community to customize things more. Like, we don’t feel like it’s necessarily our job to make this like, huge app that has every single feature. We like seeing how the community kind of extends Obsidian in their own ways. So I would say that growing the team, it will be more by necessity than by a desire to like, try to do everything ourselves. We’re getting to a point now where, I would guess, we don’t actually even know how many Obsidian users there are because we’re so focused on privacy, we don’t have analytics, we just like, don’t know. But we can guess based on a few different like, things like, how many people downloaded the app bundle, that there’s probably close to a million users of Obsidian and only basically five core members of the team. And eventually, from a support standpoint are things, things might start to break and we might need to hire people to help on that front. But we’re trying to stay small if we can.

Andy: Yeah. I think you’ve been very diplomatic about the VC thing. I mean, in general it’s, you know, you’ve got, in my coaching practice, and I coach a lot of design leaders who are kind of suffering in startups or scale ups because of this constant pressure to scale, because this constant pressure for just more and you know, I want a 10 X on my, you know, investors want 10 X return on their investment in some stupid amount of time, things like that. And it definitely leads to that, you know, what Cory, Dr. Al calls sort of, an end certification, you know, this thing where then there’s a choke point and we have everyone’s data on our server and they have to use app and then you just start, it becomes a sort of process of trying to extract value. And I-

Stephan: Well, I’ve touched on the thing-

Andy: Oh, go on, go on.

Stephan: To defend VC, I will say there’s some businesses where, it kind of is necessary because especially, we’re in a privileged position, building software, because software has no cost to us. But there’s some companies, you know, that have to produce a physical product in the world-

Andy: Yeah, that’s true.

Stephan:: And they have to buy the materials and put in orders and so they need to raise money somehow, and VC is one of those paths. You can get loans, like, there’s different ways. So I think it, I’m not like, I just have a kind of, like, a more zen point of view on that where like, I understand why a lot of companies go that direction and it makes sense. I think in the case of what we’re trying to build specifically, it’s a bad fit. But it’s not necessarily a bad fit for everything.

Nicole: So-

Andy: You mentioned anything just now which is, oh sorry, Nicole. What were you gonna say?

Nicole: I was gonna say I’d like to go back to, and just quickly, to what Obsidian is bad at. And you know, Stephan, I love Obsidian. It is, I’m all for it. I am possibly the biggest fan. I think one thing that Obsidian is bad at that I really would love to see improved, is sharing. Because I think that is the thing that stops most people from using it, because, you know, using it on your own in an isolated way is one thing. It excels at that. But anytime that you have other people that you wanna do that with, as an example, Andy and I play D&D. Okay, this not a work thing, right? But it is a recreational use, and honestly, it takes up a lot of, my usage of Obsidian is role playing games. And in that group, there are four of us, three and a half, who use Obsidian. We can’t share our notes. We can’t have like, one repository for all of us to collaborate on. So we have like, individual notes, and yes, we could use something like Dropbox to share those notes, but then Andy for example, can’t, or wouldn’t want to share all of his notes with us. Maybe some of them he would. So I would love to see like, a little bit more permissions around sharing.

Stephan: Yeah, I think sharing is a big, like, it’s a challenge because there’s like, three or four different use cases nested under sharing that are quite different from one another. So, we have published, so we’re doing a lot of work right now, actually, on making some publish improvements. There’s a big batch of publish improvements that just went live like, a week or two ago, and that’s more about sharing to the external world, an entire vault, and we wanna keep improving that. Then there is sync, which is like, has this concept called Shared Vaults. I don’t know if you’ve tried that out, but Sync Shared Vaults is actually what we use internally on the Obsidian team. So everyone who’s like, you know, between the five of us, are working on projects, we keep our notes in one shared vault. Then there’s also the idea of, “Hey, I’m writing this note, I just wanna send a link to someone so that they can view it.” They don’t have Obsidian or they don’t know, you know, I don’t wanna like, put them through the process of having to, you know, learn everything about Obsidian just to read this one note. And that note might be, you know, semi-private, like, it’s like, something where it’s not like, a published use case where you want the world to see it, you just want this one person to see it. And then there’s a collaboration use case where like, Google Docs or Notion makes it really easy for a few people to be like, collaboratively editing something, even if they don’t, or have Obsidian, for example. So like, those are all kind of different problems to solve in different ways, and I do think that we want to find ways to solve those problems, figuring out what the right order, that’s another challenge about being a small team is like, what do we work on now versus later? But I think all of them are problems that we would like to solve, you know, over the kind of medium to long term for sure. We’re very aware of that.

Andy: It feels like there’s a bit of a thread here, though, as well, when you’ve talked about, you know, ‘cause obviously the sharing bit brings up the privacy issue that you talked about before.

Stephan: Correct. Yeah.

Andy: And it also links to the, is there a browser-based version of Obsidian? You know, because one of the ways of obviously, easily sharing and collaborating on a document would be to have kind of a browser-based editor, even if it was just for that one document. And it’s almost like, you need a kind of, instead of a separate vault, a sort of enclave in your existing vault that you can say, “Oh this the shareable bit and all the rest of it, you know, remains encrypted,” let’s say, I don’t know if the encryption thing is an issue, but you know, at some point once you share it, you have to not do that, right.

Nicole: So I think-

Andy: And that may be at the beginning of the browser-based version.

Nicole: I think my problem is that I am able to do those use cases, but I use separate tools for each of them. I would really love to streamline in this area. Like you were talking about, being able to share a link. I use Etherpad with that, but it’s not the best. It works, though. And then when you talk about using Sync, I also subscribe to Sync, but that also requires other people to have Sync. So for those people who don’t use Obsidian enough to warrant Sync, I use Dropbox. And then at work, because we have all of our internal docs on GitHub repos, I use GitHub to bring my Obsidian notes and share them. And that brings a lot of things but also brings like, comments and being able to roll back changes, and, you know, handle merge conflicts, and that’s not something that Sync does as well for now.

Stephan: I totally agree. Yeah, I think that those are things that we have to eventually solve. And I do, going back to what feels like it should be a core thing and what feels like it should be a community thing, I think that sharing is something that belongs in core, or at least core needs to have good sharing mechanisms for all of the different use cases. Publishing, collaboration, single note sharing, is just a matter of, how do we do that? In what order do we build those features? And can we build them in a way that is consistent with our principles?

Task management in Obsidian

Nicole: Can we talk about task management? ‘Cause that was something that was on the roadmap. So is there anything you can share with us on that front?

Stephan: Our goal around that one is fairly conservative, I would say. It’s not gonna be a major, you know, complete revamp to everything. It’s more about, how do we make tasks queriable in a better way, like, and also adding better date supports? So we’ve been thinking a lot about how do due dates work with tasks? So right now, there’s ways that you can do that with community plugins, but we wanna figure out, should there be a core way of dealing with due dates? Again, thinking about the API first and how that might, you know, enable developers to come up with some new experiences on top of that. But I would say that that project’s been a little bit on the back burner for us because, we had some other ideas that we wanted to prioritize first, like Canvas, and some of the things that we’re working on right now, like metadata and publish improvements, for example.

Nicole: It does occur to me that a lot of these things, like task management, could be helped if you share a log something like DataCorp or DataView. ‘Cause the functionality is there, you just need to make it look pretty, but you’re good at that.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean the challenge there is just again, like, you know, two, three people building things. We only have so much bandwidth and kind of finding that happy medium between, we wanna make sure that we’re, you know, releasing features at a good pace. But every time we add new capabilities, we also add, you know, add to the surface area of potential bugs of potential issues that might come up or edge cases with certain plugins, we increase the number of feature requests, like, when we add something like Canvas, then we get a whole bunch of new feature requests from people who are like, “Oh, Canvas is great, but it doesn’t do X, Y or Z.” So that, I don’t know that anyone has ever solved that problem. It’s just kind of a problem of building software in the world. But, that is probably the biggest challenge that we deal with as a team is like, how to find the right balance of what to build now, how comprehensive do we want this feature to be versus, you know, starting small and kind of building on top of it. But trail locking a plugin, we tend to, we’ve done it a couple times, and when we do, we tend to rewrite it from scratch pretty much. And so that’s a pretty big effort. Like, rewriting something like DataView or Data, I haven’t looked at the code for DataCore. It’s not a small task. It tends to be a pretty big thing.

Artificial intelligence in Obsidian

Nicole: Another question here by Imaginationscene and another one by another user called Remy, “What about AI? Or integrating something like ChatGPT?” Is that something that’s on your radar?

Stephan: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that right now, so this kind of like, goes back to the benefit of the extensibility of Obsidian. I’m pretty sure that Obsidian was the first app that had ChatGPT or like GPT-3 integrated into it, because someone in the community built a plugin for that called Text Generator. And now I think there’s three or four plug-ins out there that connect to the Open AI API. So, the cool thing for Obsidian is that because it’s so easy to build plug-ins, people tend to go really like, we both have the ability to be very fast and very slow, so, the community can go and build a plugin that solves that use case. And I think that they’re quite good, actually. I’ve used Text Generator a bunch, but we can also be patient about what’s the right way of building it for Obsidian. And I think that there’s a lot of companies right now rushing into adding GPT to everything. My personal preference when it comes to this, is I would like for it to all be local first, completely private. I don’t wanna send, you know, data that I don’t, like, I wanna have complete control over any data that is being sent. You know, there’s this concept of training and inference in, we’re getting like, right into the weeds of how AI works, but I would like, someday, to be able to have maybe a plugin, whether it’s a core plugin or a community plugin, that can do some training on your vault and kind of learn from your vault and be able to do the inference locally on your computer, so that it completely aligns with the principles of privacy and local first that Obsidian is known for. The challenge with that right now is that that’s quite intensive on the graphics card, and it’s quite complicated to set up locally for users, and we’re still kind of waiting to see whether a company like Stability, that they made stable diffusion and is an open-source platform for like, image generation, there’s been talks about them releasing a language model that would be open source. So we’re kind of waiting for all of those things to come together before we make a decision. We would, I think we would prefer to build something that kind of, is aligned with our principles, but in the meantime, there’s a bunch of plug-ins that you can use that solve that use case and I think they do quite a good job with them, actually.

Nicole: Stephan, have you heard of Napkin?

Stephan: No, I don’t know Napkin. Tell me more.

Nicole: It’s, yeah, it’s an awesome service that I recently have been using. And it uses AI in a really interesting way, because I think there’s a lot of focus on using AI for like, generating blocks of text or outlines or images. But what Napkin does is it looks at your vault, well, it’s not a vault because it doesn’t do it for Obsidian, it looks at your Readwise highlights, and it uses AI to tag them intelligently. So, it has this interface where you can determine, you can click on like, a thought or a highlight, and it shows you intelligently linked other highlights that you already have, that you may not have put together. And sometimes they’re like, they’re not even using the same keyword or they’re not tagged the same way, but somehow it still figures it out. That kind of thing would be invaluable for Obsidian because there’s a lot to be said for manually linking things, but getting some help would be nice.

Stephan: I think that sounds awesome. I’m seeing a lot of comments here in the chat of like, people who are suggesting some different ideas and some plugins that I’m not even aware of that are already doing some more local AI stuff. I think that’s a, I think what’s amazing about the Obsidian community is we have people kind of, at every level of the spectrum of nerdiness. Like, we have like, people who are some of the most advanced engineers that I’ve ever talked to are developing their own custom plugins, and then we have people who are complete beginners and novices, not engineers, people who are just learning about note taking. We have a lot of young students in the community. And so, I like that we have the ability to have those people who are like, all the way at the deepest end of like, understanding all of those principles, able to start working on, you know, potential plugins and extensions that could do something like that. And that can be kind of a breeding ground where we can learn, what do people actually want out of that type of tool? But I do think that if we want to continue to stay true to these kind of principles of being local and private, there’s gonna be some constraints that we have to deal with that are actual like, performance constraints and technical constraints, that may mean Obsidian will be a little slower to get to those features than apps that are completely cloud-based where they can upload that to a server and do that, you know, somewhere else.

Andy: Hm. Yeah.

Stephan: So I think it is a very tricky challenge for us to try to solve that right away. I think we’re gonna tend to watch what plugin developers do, and then start to think about that in a year or two. ‘Cause right now there’s, I mean, literally every month there’s something new going on with AI and the open source packages that are going on. So, we’re maybe a little less cutting edge than the plugin ecosystem can be, if that makes sense, on the core side it.

Andy: It feels like you could get dependent on something very quickly there as well, and just kind get really kind of bogged down. And then, you know, a couple of people have said keep that as a plugin, it’s much better that way.

Accessibility in Obsidian

Andy: There was a question, it was from Daniel Gartmann further up yeah, I don’t use a screen reader, but I think, you know, something that would need to be much more sort of, core fundamentals as obviously accessibility. I don’t know, maybe Daniel can say how, I don’t know how accessible Obsidian is to use with screen read, but read is-

Stephan: We’ve done a lot of work in that area with, yeah, I would be curious to hear a little bit more detail from Daniel about what they’re looking for, but yeah, Obsidian is already compatible with screen readers. We have done a lot of work on that side, but if there’s things that are missing in that respect, I would say let us know in the community, on the forum or on Discord. We’re definitely, I agree that building that into core is a must. I think that’s super important. We’ve added a lot of new customization features over the past year, so I’m actually kind of curious to see if there are themes that get developed that are focused on different use cases. It’s much easier today to design themes than it was a year ago in my, one of my, that was one of my biggest contributions over the past year from a code standpoint, was rewriting the way that themes can be built. And so that means that you can very easily now create like, very high-contrast themes. Themes with different font sizes, different fonts that might help people who have, you know, who need help on the vision side. But then there’s other things like, ARIA labels and other kind of web technologies that we’re able to incorporate that make it easier with screen readers for sure.

Tags vs Links

Nicole: Okay, we have a question that is a little bit controversial. It’s from Germ Germain, whom I actually, by chance, met a few weeks ago in person. He says, “What is his opinion (Well, I’m gonna ask both of you) about tags versus links?”.

Stephan: In my personal use? Or, how do you wanna clarify that?

Nicole: Yeah, in your personal use. Which one do you use more?

Stephan: So I tend to use links more than tags, personally. So, I do have quite a few tags, but I tend to use links because I like to see everything in the, all the relationships in my backlinks, I guess, is how I would say it. And I like that links, for example, like, I’ll have a top-level categories for books that I’ve read. And so I just have a category called books. And I link to it. In my template, I still use tags. I don’t actually really know why. I just feel like I should have it there for future need.

Andy: Future proofing.

Stephan: Yeah, for future proofing. Like, if I ever create a note about a book, it has both a tag for book and a link to the category books. So that redundancy helps sometimes if I’m creating like a DataView list or something I have access to both of those different ways of filtering down. But I tend to prefer links. I think links have a lot, are more powerful and cross over more different things. I think tags, where I use them the most, is for kind of very narrow meta segmentation of a very specific thing, where there’s only like, a very narrow subset of notes that needs to be grouped in a way that a link wouldn’t make sense, or I don’t really wanna have a page for that concept. Am I making sense?

Andy: Mm hm. I’m still here.

Stephan: But also, it’s not-

Andy: I’m still a fan of the folders, you know.

Stephan: Oh, I hear you.

Nicole: No. Do you really?

Andy: Oh, half the people have gone, “Oh god!”

Stephan: Yeah. I’m very-

Nicole: What are you even doing here?

Stephan: In my personal organization-

Nicole: No, I’m joking, I’m joking.

Andy: I can explain.

Stephan: This is why I feel like Obsidian being not dogmatic about this is great, because people think in different ways. Like, I love that people can use folders or tags or links or all of them. Do whatever works for you. If it works for you, that’s great.

Andy: I think partly goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning, which is, you know, where the file format is the thing, right? And so I use several other things on that group of files that I have there. And whilst, you know, it’s great if you can search the tags or you can do whatever you want with the tags or links in Obsidian when you are trying to find a file, to kind of pull into something. I use Marked, Brett Terpstra’s Marked quite a lot for Output. It’s a massive pain in the ass. Well, I mean, I use search a lot anyway on the Finder, but, you know, I much prefer to have some organization that works across other things that aren’t gonna handle tags. So that’s why.

Stephan: Well, to be fair, in our team vault, we do use folders for our like, internal grouping. But I think that that use case is very different than my personal notes.

Andy: Yeah, yeah.

Nicole: We have an answer from Daniel, actually. He says he has issues both for Windows and iOS screen reader support.

Stephan: Okay, well let’s-

Nicole: “I love the potential that Obsidian has for me as a blind person who’s already using notes in a text-based format.”

Stephan: Jump into Discord and let’s talk about it.

Andy: I don’t know how accessible Discord is, by the way.

Stephan: That’s a great question.

Andy: Because we might be saying jump into something that’s really terrible for you to use on Discord. So, yeah, on the forum, I’m guessing the forum-

Nicole: The forum.

Andy: It runs on Discourse, doesn’t it, of the forum?

Stephan: Correct, yeah.

Andy: I would imagine it’s kinda more accessible.

Stephan: If you go to obsidian.md/community, you’ll see the links there and send us your feedback. Or if you wanna just email support@obsidian.md we’ll take a look. But the best is definitely through the community and we’ll definitely take a look, yeah.

Andy: Tell us who does that email go to? Of the three of you?

Stephan: Well, right now it’s like, a kind of a shared thing where you kind of look in there, but I think that most people who use the support inbox are for kind of like, our enterprise users. We prefer to use the community as the main place because there’s more transparency around that and like, other people can jump in and add their own kind of experiences with whatever the feature request or bug might be. So in general, that’s why we kind of direct people towards the community if they wanna provide some feature requests or bug fix requests.

Andy: I was kind of hoping it triggered like, a kind of a bat signal that projected us an Obsidian sort of into the sky, the Obsidian crystal into the sky, and you all kinda come running.

Stephan: Yeah, unfortunately, it’s just one of those other things that, as we scale up, we have to find good ways of parsing what the community is looking for and how we can fit it into our roadmap.

Message to the community

Nicole: Well, I don’t, I would love to have you stay, both of you, stay on for longer. You’re both welcome back, but I also wanna be mindful of your time. So thank you for coming on to talk about the future of Obsidian, Stephan, and for helping me interview him, Andy. Stephan, is there anything that you’d like to say to the community before we end?

Stephan: Wow. Thank you. I just, I’m so thankful. I think that the thing that I love about Obsidian is, so many smart people and kind and like, kind people are part of the community. I love, you know, watching your videos, Nicole. You do such a great job of kind of making Obsidian feel more accessible. And I think that, in a way, like, beyond what we’re working on in terms of features and so on, like, the fact that we have such a friendly and collaborative and helpful community, is one of my favorite things. And so, I’m extremely thankful for that. You know, continue to be, continue doing an amazing job, being nice and helpful. Like, I think we’re still at the very beginning of people adopting these tools. Like, anyone who’s watching this is probably in the like, top 0.01% of people who knows anything about these, whatever you wanna call ’em, tools for thought, how you like, some people have been calling it integrated thinking environment. Like, we’re creating a new generation of tools that help people unlock the way that they think. And anyone who’s watching this right now is kind of, pretty much on the cutting edge of that concept. And I’m really curious what happens if that idea becomes more pervasive in society. I’m very hopeful that it can help us solve a lot of big problems. And so, if you’re one of the, you know, nerds, I say that lovingly. Geeks, dorks, that are part of this conversation, I consider myself one of those, introducing people to Obsidian and being part of, you know, helping them learn how to kind of, make their thought process more reliable is just an amazing gift. Like, I just think that’s like, and you’re doing that every day with your videos, Nicole. And so, I wanna thank you for that. So that, it’s not a specific ask, but that’s just kind of the way that I feel and I hope we can continue that for a really long time.

Nicole: Awesome. Thank you. I’ll talk to you both in a second, but we’ll say goodbye to everybody else. Thank you for joining us on this weekend, and see you next week.

Andy: Thanks. Bye.

Nicole: Bye!

Stephan: Thank you.

Writing a book in Obsidian

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 16:51:30 +0100

I’m writing a book in Obsidian– about Obsidian! And I want to share it all with you. This is the beginning of that journey: what I’m starting with, my idea, and the plugins I’m using to get it done. This is all a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions about what I should do, I’d love to hear them!

You can follow along with my progress by signing up for my Patreon.

My setup in Obsidian for TTRPGs in 2023

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 16:41:58 +0100

I heavily use Obsidian for TTRPGs: playing them, running them, and learning new systems. Here’s an update of my entire TTRPG setup in Obsidian, including how I create new worlds, sessions, NPCs, places, maps, statblocks, a GM dashboard, and encounter tracking.

AI tools for PKM and Obsidian

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 16:39:00 +0100

Here are some AI tools for learning and taking notes that I’ve incorporated into my processes. AI is a controversial topic, but it’s important to remember it’s just like any other technology: it’s only as good as the people that wield it. In this video, I show some ways I use artificial intelligence to improve my learning and note-taking rather than to replace them.

Top 10 Core Plugins for Obsidian in 2023

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 16:37:32 +0100

In this video, I talk about my top 10 core plugins in Obsidian: the built-in options that improve your productivity without adding clutter and complexity to your notes. Unlike community plugins, core plugins are a lower security risk, yet provide a lot of extra value– but they’re also easy to overlook. Here are my favourite underappreciated core plugins.

Overview of Obsidian - Obsidian for Everyone course

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 16:32:30 +0100

Here’s an overview of Obsidian: what it is, why everyone’s using it, and how to get started with Obsidian for beginners with a brand new course called Obsidian for Everyone. I’m extremely proud of the course and I can’t wait to share it with you after working on it for what seems like forever. It contains everything you need to know to use Obsidian – but without installing any third-party community plugins.

My Time Management Setup in Obsidian

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 16:09:54 +0100

My time management setup in Obsidian consists of a way to set goals, a daily note for rapid logging the present, and a review/retrospective system to evaluate past performance. In this video, I talk about all the plugins and apps I use to get all my responsibilities done– without me feeling like I’m overwhelmed.

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!

Reading and Taking Notes on Kindle and Obsidian

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 16:28:29 +0000

Reading on a Kindle can be more convenient than reading paperbacks because you can import your Kindle highlights and notes into Obsidian or your note-taking app of choice. Here are some tips for making the most out of every book you read.

Obsidian Canvas Core Plugin (new in v1.0.0)

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:23:10 +0000

The new Obsidian Canvas core plugin was introduced recently in v1.1.0, currently available only to Insiders but soon available to everyone. Canvas is an optional plugin that gives Obsidian an infinitely scrolling space to arrange notes, media, and other cards (potentially including external websites). If you’ve heard of Scrintal, this core plugin brings some of the same visual thinking workflows to Obsidian, which I think is a very smart step.

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! :)

Notion-like Content Calendar in Obsidian Projects

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 15:38:33 +0000

If you’re looking to create a content calendar in Obsidian just like in Notion, the new Obsidian Projects plugin presents new options for managing content using multiple views: Table, Board, Calendar, and Gallery to start with, but hopefully more in the future. Projects is a framework for creating new views for the same data and aims to play well with other plugins.

How Many Obsidian Vaults Should You Have?

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 14:08:39 +0100

The more notes you have, the more you might wonder if you should have multiple vaults in Obsidian. There is no definitive answer, but in this video, I talk about reasons you should have only one vault as well as good reasons to have several vaults, based on my own experience. Like with anything I say, take what’s useful and do what makes sense!

Notion Database Views in Obsidian (Live)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:06:02 +0100

Have you ever wanted rotating Notion database views in Obsidian? Marcus Olsson’s Obsidian Projects plugin does exactly that, letting you create Table, Board, Calendar, and Gallery views for the same notes in Obsidian, just like in Notion! Join us as Marcus shows us how this awesome new plugin works and how it can be used to display the same data in different ways.

Resources

How to Organize Your Notes in Obsidian

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 13:57:35 +0100

Wondering how to organize your notes in Obsidian? In this video, I talk about some methods in Obsidian for imposing structure and organization, the LATCH method for adding data to your data, and which methods I would use in Obsidian for each part of LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy). This is not meant to be a definitive or prescriptive guide for how YOU should organize your notes. Instead, take this as a look into how I prefer to do it, in the hopes that you may find inspiration for how you’d like to do it as well.

Taking Better Notes From Books: Shortform-Readwise-Obsidian

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 16:00:34 +0200

I’ve been using Shortform for over a year. I’ve written some code for it and I’ve also written a blog post about it. It’s an essential part of my workflow for taking better notes from books, particularly in conjunction with Readwise and my current note-taking tool of choice, Obsidian. Here’s what you need to know!

What is Shortform?

Shortform is a service that creates book summaries out of popular books, but it’s also so much more than that! They’re like Netflix but for books, if you can imagine that. The summaries that Shortform gives you are not just your typical high school level summaries of a book report that we used to do when we were younger.

Sound familiar?

What makes Shortform different?

Here are things that differentiate Shortform from other book summary services.

Researched commentary

Shortform has really thoughtful and nuanced commentary that place it firmly head and shoulders above other services.

Here’s a screenshot of some Shortform commentary from the book Why We Sleep, taken on the Shortform mobile app.

The highlighted section is a Shortform note– additional commentary that the Shortform team added. In this case, they are fact-checking the author, citing sources that prove a statement the author made to be false.

When I was reading this book, I didn’t really think about questioning those claims. But Shortform thoroughly goes over every claim that Walker, the author, made in thsi book.

Reading with Shortform is like having somebody else read a book with you– a more critical and more well-informed someone who has the time to fact-check statements. It’s a bit like having your own personal book club.

Shortform vs. Blinkist

Another service in this vein that I’ve used is Blinkist. Let’s look at the same book in Shortform and Blinkist to figure out why I like Shortform so much better.

This is what the Blinkist summary for the book Indistractable looks like.

Blinkist is based on the idea that every book can be distilled into these blinks: very short summaries of every idea. For this book it has eight. Each of these blinks is a few paragraphs long. Here’s what the first looks like.

A blink is a straight summary. There’s no commentary. There’s no research or anything like that. It seems like the whole focus of this is to be able to distill exactly what the author has said and let other people do the work of trying to figure out for themselves whether something is true or not. There’s really not much more than just these blinks.

In contrast, if we look at the one on Shortform, this is the same book and it also has like a one page summary like Blinkist did.

But then it also has a full book guide, which goes through every single chapter or part and adds more detail into it.

As you can see, Shortform takes a different approach: instead of just summarizing the book, they’re truly trying to explain it in their own unique way, providing examples and making it more readable using bullet points.

Action-oriented exercises

Shortform also has these exercises based on the things that the author has said in the book. These exercises are peppered throughout and between these chapters, and they really force you to put things into practice right away as soon as you learn them, which is another element of learning.

Critical thinking: comparisons to other ideas

Shortform tries to examine ideas in the context of other books they’ve made summaries for. Here’s an example of a Shortform note where Shortform suggests the summary of the book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

Fans of the Zettelkasten method will be happy to see this, because Shortform often prompts me to consider the differences or similarities between ideas from different authors. It helps me see connections I might not have considered. Incidentally, I’ve also found many good books this way!

How to use Shortform with Obsidian

The other thing that really sells it for me is the integration. Because I don’t want that learning to stop in the Shortform app. You know me, and I want everything in Obsidian. And Shortform has an integration that Blinkist does not.

I actually tried to solve this problem myself a year ago, because no integration existed. I wrote a Python script that would take the Shortform highlights, because it has an API, and then call the Readwise API and kind of string them together. Now, that still works as far as I know, but that’s not what I recommend anymore. I talked to the Readwise founders and suggested to them that Shortform was a great company to partner with. Not too long after that, they came out with an awesome integration!

First, sign up to both Shortform and Readwise. They both have free trials, so you don’t have to commit to anything just yet.
Then, click on this link to connect your Readwise account to Shortform.
(optional) If you use Obsidian like I do, follow these instructions to install the Readwise Official plugin for Obsidian.

That’s pretty much it!

From now on, here’s how things will work:

You make highlights on books on Shortform.
Those highlights are sent to Readwise automatically.
Through the Readwise official plugin, those highlights get synced into your Obsidian vault.

The result: Shortform highlights in Obsidian

Here’s what my Shortform highlights look like in Obsidian. Note that after setting this up, all I had to do was make highlights on Shortform– it’s quite low-touch after that.

I tweaked the export settings in Readwise to set the format I want the note to have in Obsidian. You don’t have to do this, but if you want to, you can change those settings here.

My Shortform workflow for taking notes on books

This is pretty much how a lot of my book-buying and -reading goes:

I start by browsing books on Shortform and read the one-page summaries.
If I find one I like, I buy the book on Kindle.
I make highlights on the Kindle version. (Those are synced to Obsidian too!)
If I really like the book, I flip back to the Shortform detailed chapter summaries as I finish each chapter, because they provide more context. I make highlights and notes from Shortform here sometimes.
Sometimes I do the Shortform exercises too.
After I finish the book, I go back to the Shortform summary and make more highlights/notes.
After I’ve read my fill of both the Shortform summary and the book itself, I go back to Obsidian and write my own notes that combine what I’ve learned.

If that sounds like a lot, it is! But keep in mind that I don’t do this for every book. At every step of the way, Shortform helps me filter out books that I don’t want to read, or don’t want to finish.

Shortform definitely saves me money: it costs less than a book a month and it stops me from reading more than one book a month. From that perspective, it’s already worth it.

But more than that, the thoughtfulness of the summaries and the research that goes into those commentaries save me more than just money: they save me time. And that’s really what I keep coming back for.

Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. Click here to check out my ethics statement and see how I decide what to promote in this way.

Real Use Case for Obsidian with Dataview

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 18:23:05 +0200

In this real use case for Obsidian, I use plugins like Dataview, Database Folder, QuickAdd, Templater, and Buttons to create a database in Obsidian to track Kickstarter projects I’ve backed. I show two approaches to creating a database and demonstrate a relatively new plugin, Database Folder, which shows a lot of promise.

How I Learn Languages in Obsidian

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 12:14:58 +0200

In this video, I demonstrate how I learn Swedish in 30 days using Obsidian and other apps. Learning foreign languages is never easy, but having a system in place definitely makes the process easier. The Obsidian Spaced Repetition plugin in particular helps create flashcards that I can use on my laptop or mobile devices.

Visit Brilliant (affiliate link) to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Check out my Ethics page to see how I decide on products to promote.

I can finally tell you about Readwise Reader

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:01:12 +0200

Readwise Reader is the latest read-it-later app, except not just for books. Reader brings in your highlights from books, articles, tweets, PDFs, epubs, emails, and even newsletters! While it’s not yet officially launched, it’s now in public beta and you can sign up to be put on a wait list to try out this awesome product that’s been so essential to my workflows.

Note: I do have an affiliate link of Readwise, but this video was not sponsored. They know I’m making this video, because I had to reach out to get permission to post the screenshot of a private email, but they did not review this video and had no idea what I was going to say. :)

How to Take Notes from a book with Obsidian (The Culture Map)

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:58:52 +0200

I demonstrate how to take notes from a book (The Culture Map) using Obsidian. In the process of taking notes, I also create learning exhaust in the form of notes, an atomic essay to go on Twitter, a visual that summarises a concept, and a video presentation. Taking notes from books is more than just understanding what the author wanted to say; it should also involve consolidation and interrogation of the book’s ideas into our personal knowledge management systems.

How I Study Using Obsidian

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 17:53:49 +0200

Visit https://brilliant.org/nicolevdh/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. I also talk about how I study in Obsidian: the courses, platforms, and apps I use– and how I make sense of it all using Obsidian. Studying isn’t just for students. as a professional, I am also constantly learning. To make sure I make the most of the costs of education, I’ve made a deal with myself to commit to processing everything in Obsidian.

This video was sponsored by Brilliant! (affiliate link)

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.

How to Do D&D Prep in Obsidian

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 15:57:47 +0100

In this video, I show you in detail how I do D&D prep in Obsidian as I prepare for my D&D 5e game. I also show my setup using plugins like Obsidian Templater, Callouts, Leaflet, QuickAdd, Buttons, Initiative Tracker, and more.

Introducing Popout Windows for Obsidian

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:00:52 +0100

Obsidian Desktop v0.15.6 has just released, and with it is a new feature: popout windows for Obsidian! This gives us the functionality to open multiple windows of the same Obsidian vault– great for anyone who’s been running out of visible space while working on their personal knowledge management system.

June 2022 Patreon Q&A

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 16:00:39 +0100

So you’re using Obsidian Templater, but what do you do when your template changes? What is YNAB? How do you use daily notes in workspaces? How do you process emails? These questions were sourced from the awesome Patreons that support these videos. Thanks to you all!

Regular Reviews With Obsidian Periodic Notes

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 16:09:40 +0100

The Obsidian Periodic Notes plugin is the best way to do regular reviews. It allows you to create daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly note templates to automate the process of doing personal retrospectives.

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.

Use It or Lose It - Linking Your Thinking Conference

Thu, 19 May 2022 14:03:13 +0200

Today I spoke at the Linking Your Thinking conference about what I do with notes I take, and how I manage to use them to actually create stuff.

If you’d like to see the result for yourself, here are the slides!

How Real People Process Notes

Thu, 12 May 2022 17:00:49 +0200

There’s a glaring gap in most productivity systems: time. How do REAL people, with real jobs and obligations, find the time to process notes? Is Inbox Zero an achievable and sustainable goal? I think the answer is no. In this video, I talk about what to do instead, and what is a healthier way to look at productivity.

Using the Obsidian Templater Plugin

Fri, 06 May 2022 16:00:22 +0200

What IS the Obsidian Templater plugin and more importantly, how do you use it? I outline the three main use cases for it, from the simplest to the most complex, to show off its capabilities and usefulness in a personal knowledge management system.

Actually Getting Things Done With Obsidian - Checklist plugin

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:00:31 +0200

The Getting Things Done methodology is showing its age now, but there are still some parts of it that can be updated and used in the digital age. In this video, I talk about how to actually get things done with Obsidian using the Obsidian community plugin called Checklist.

Obsidian task management with Dataviewjs, Templates, Daily Notes

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 17:00:25 +0200

Ever wanted to use Obsidian for managing your tasks? In this video, I demonstrate one way to consolidate tasks from all your notes and show them on the date they’re due, using DataviewJS. Obsidian Dataview is a community plugin that can be used to show a task list.

How to Use the Obsidian Dataview Plugin

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 17:00:06 +0200

What even IS Obsidian Dataview? Dataview has quickly become one of the most popular plugins for Obsidian, but how do you actually use it? Whether you’re a non-programmer or an expert coder, here’s how to use the Obsidian Dataview plugin and some common use cases for it.

Notion vs Obsidian - Databases vs Dataview

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 17:00:26 +0200

Notion and Obsidian are similar in many ways, but they have a fundamental difference in philosophy and the way they structure notes. In this video, I talk about structure as well as Notion databases vs. Obsidian’s Dataview plugin, and tell you why I ultimately ended up with Obsidian.

New in Obsidian: Obsidian Callouts (available now)

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 17:36:20 +0200

Transcript:

One thing I’ve learned from writing technical documentation in the last few years is that good writing is skimmable, at least in the digital age. So since I look at my notes in Obsidian the same way as I do a sort of personal documentation, I think that a lot of the same principles apply.

Today I wanna talk about an early access feature that the Obsidian team rolled out two weeks ago, and it’s called Callouts. So before I demonstrate this, I want to say that this is only available right now in the Insider Build version 0.14, but that build always gets pushed to the public, it’s just a little bit ahead of the public release. So think of this as a bit of a sneak preview. (Note: Obsidian callouts is out now!)

What about Obsidian Admonition?

Now, before Obsidian Callouts was released, I was using something called Obsidian Admonition. So if we go here, I can bring up my Obsidian Admonition page, and it looked something like this.

You would do three backticks. That’s kind of the code block syntax. And you would do something like add note. Maybe you’d have a title here, like reminder, and then you’d have your note here. And because I have Live Preview turned on, if I enter out of this, it’s going to look like this. So this is what Obsidian Admonition always looked like.

So in general, the idea here is that to make your writing more skimmable, you have these kind of, well, callout boxes that highlight sections of your text and make sure that they address something that is about the notes that you’re writing, kind of like meta notes, they’re notes about your notes, but because they’re visually distinguished from the rest of the text, it’s a lot easier for you or for your readers to easily figure out whether something is important to read or only in specific situations.

Admonition/callout example

And that happens a lot in technical documentation, so it’s no secret that I have used it a lot in sort of programming kind of notes. So if we go back to my vault here, let’s look at my note on g. g is a package manager for Go, the language.

And here’s a type of callout or admonition that I used. And this is kind of like this page tells you how to use, what g is and how to use it. But this note, this particular callout, is kind of like an aside. It’s like, hey, just in case you get this error, here’s how to troubleshoot it. And it’s really cool that it’s hidden by, it’s collapsed by default. And you can just click on that, and then it says, oh, if you get the error, g not found, hey, maybe restart your shell session after installation.

So that sort of callout really helps when you’re trying to quickly skim a page. So programming is certainly one use for it, and another one is tutorials in general. You know, I have this a lot for my Obsidian stuff in case I need to say that this only works for Mac or this only works for windows or something like that.

And I also use it a lot in my D&D games. As a Dungeon Master, I have different scenarios that I may not even need to go into depending on what my players decide to do. That is the perfect task for callouts or for admonitions.

Enter Obsidian Callouts

So I was using this admonitions format with a code block for, basically, since I learned about it. It is made by a TTRPG plugin developer called Jeremy Valentine, and he’s made a lot of very popular ones, like the Dice Roller and the Initiative Tracker and Leaflet, and it just goes on and on. But I’m digressing.

This plugin was apparently so good that even the Obsidian team realized that it really should be part of Obsidian, because a key part of Obsidian’s functionality is documentation.

So the big release is that they’ve now incorporated Admonitions-like functionality into core Obsidian, not a core plugin, so it’s not something that you even have to install or enable, it just ships by default with Obsidian, which is really awesome.

How to use Obsidian Callouts

So let’s look into how to use it. I’m going to go to my Obsidian Callouts page here. And the syntax is a little bit different from the admonitions one. Instead of the code blocks with the three backticks, this callouts functionality now uses blockquotes.

> [!info] Your title
> The contents of your note here

So you do a single blockquote like an arrow, and then you do brackets, and then an exclamation point. And then there are a bunch of different types, which we’ll get into, but the most common one, I guess, is note. Then you would put your title here, and then you can put the rest of the note here. So this is now doing it as a blockquote. And if I exit out of that, you’ll see that it has a nice icon of a kinda pencil or pen there, and it is visually distinguished from the rest of the note.

Types of Callouts

note

Now, let’s go into the types, ‘cause there are a few of them.

The first one I already showed you, this is a note. I put this within code blocks just to show you the syntax. And then this is what it looks like. Basically, this is the standard format of callouts, you just change whatever’s here. And then you always put the title outside of the brackets, and then the content of the note below it. So this is what a note looks like. That’s probably the most common.

abstract, summary, tldr

And then another one is abstract, summary, or TLDR.

Now, all of these are the same, so like this is a TLDR, so I can actually edit it here as well. So here in this case, I was using TLDR, but if I do abstract, it’s going to look, actually, it looks a little bit different now that I think about it I thought it was going to look the same, but it’s also dependent on the theme that you’re using.

Yeah, so these three are actually different, even though they’re semantically the same. Well, that’s interesting. I just literally found that out right now as well.

info, todo

And there’s info and todo. So this I believe is the todo. And if I go to info, it looks slightly different, just has a little eye here.

This is what I use for descriptions. What we call it in TTRPG is what we call box text, when players enter a new scene and there’s a part that you read out word for word, rather than improvising it. This is what I use for it.

tip, hint, important

Then you have tips, hint, tip, hint, or important. This one is a tip.

Let’s see what important looks like. All right. Yeah, all right. So there’s some highlighting going on there as well, and it’s marked by an asterisk.

success, check, done

There’s success, check, done. I particularly like, I think it was done. It’s kind of like the todo had a checkbox. This one actually has the check.

questions, help, faq

There’s questions, help, or faq.

warning, caution, attention

There’s warning, caution, or attention, which is what I use for errors or gotchas when you’re programming or something things that you might fall into that I want to call out, because I did fall into it.

fail, failure, missing

And there’s also fail, failure, and missing. So this is all bad stuff, essentially.

danger, error

There’s danger, error. It looks like this with a little lightning symbol.

bug

There’s bug, which I use quite a bit when I’m reporting bugs or documenting bugs, anyway. This example, which kind of looks like abstract, actually.

quote, cite

Quote, and cite, which is kind of a blockquote, except a little bit fancier.

Collapsing and expanding callouts

So as you can see, there are a lot of different types of callouts. And aside from all of those, you can also choose whether it’s collapsed or expanded, and that’s kind of the folding behavior that I showed you earlier. So let’s just do that now as well.

I’m going to say bug, and I’ll say bug detected, let’s say. And this time though, where just before the title, right outside of the parenthesis for the type that I’m using, I’m going to type a minus. And I’ll put, this is a bug. And I get out of that. This is what it looks like.

So it is very different from this one where it’s just expanded by default, that’s a default behavior, but if you add the minus there, that means that you’re saying that this must be minimized or collapsed by default. So then you can always click on that, and look, you see what was in the text there. You can also specify that it’s always expanded by default, but it already is always expanded by default, so you don’t really have to set that, unless you’ve changed the settings.

Benefits of Obsidian Callouts

Better documentation

So this is a really cool and easy way of having these different colors. I know a lot of people that have come from Notion are kind of missing some of that in Obsidian. Well, this is an easy way to do that.

Ability to modify callouts

And you can also change how it looks by modifying either the CSS of the theme or by selecting themes that just really use it and display it to its advantages.

This theme here that I’m using is, let me check that, because I’m sure that people will ask. This is one of the gems of the year, one of the themes that won, it’s called Primary. Yeah, it’s really cool, and it’s on the light setting. This is a test vault.

Callouts are native on Obsidian Publish

And one of the coolest things about this new callouts feature is that it now works natively on Obsidian Publish. So I use Obsidian Publish for my public Obsidian vault, that’s notes.nicolevanderhoeven.com. There’ll be a link in the description if you want to see what that looks like. It’s basically my way of learning in public. And I select different notes to publish on there for people to see, for anybody to see.

Now, for a long time, admonitions, because it’s a plugin, wouldn’t show up up there. And then there was a way to do it where you can change the CSS and then kind of do it that way, but now that callouts is in core Obsidian, you don’t even have to do that. It’s just going to work right out of the box. So all of your notes that have the Obsidian callout syntax on them will show up the same way in your Obsidian Publish site, which is really awesome.

Why did the format change from Admonition to callouts?

So you might think, this is really just a format change, right? From admonition to callout, and part of it is that. I asked about why they changed the format, and the answer was that having the blockquote format falls back to blockquotes in unsupported Markdown renderer.

New format works better even if callouts aren’t supported

So for example, if you’re reading this note in an ID and IDE that doesn’t support that syntax, it’s at least still just going to look like a blockquote, which does make more sense than it looking like a code block, because you might not have code there. This is not just for code, this is for any sort of like sticky note that you wanna put on your notes.

Markdown inside blockquotes gets parsed

And also because it just uses blockquotes, this means that all of the Markdown inside it also gets parsed, including links and embeds and even Dataview queries apparently.

And that also means that spellcheck can check it. Because if you put something in a code block, that’s kind of a signal for spellchecks not to have a look at the contents of that code block.

Does this completely replace Obsidian Admonition?

So, what happens with admonition? Because it’s been around for a while, it’s actually still up. And in fact, admonition-style code blocks will continue to work. They’re now supporting, Obsidian is now supporting both the callouts and admonition if you have admonition plugin still enabled, then you’re still going to be able to use both. So it’s not like it’s going away, but you should probably use the callout syntax going forward, just because that’s what everyone’s going to be developing based off of.

Admonition can convert between formats

So there is also another thing that admonition is going to do is it does conversion. So if you have existing code block admonitions, then those can be converted to callouts. Actually, I want to show where you can find that.

So if you go to settings here and look at admonition, there are a bunch of settings here, but let’s look at, yeah, the conversions. You convert MSDoc admonitions to callouts, and you can convert code block admonitions to callouts as well. Now, this will modify your notes, so just be a little bit careful with it. Save a backup or do a push to Git if you save it in a Git repo like I do. But that’s what admonition is going to be doing.

Admonition lets you change callout appearance

And in addition to that, it’s also shifted to being able to let you change the appearance of those callouts.

So it has a bunch of functionality like, do you wanna add drop shadows? And do you want it to be collapsible by default? Because I said that it’s expanded by default, but you could change that behavior and toggle it. And then, you could still just expand it on a case-by-case basis. But if you don’t specify anything, then it’ll just say that it should be collapsed.

There’s also the add copy button, which is actually really interesting because a lot of times that is something that I just want to copy and paste to like my players or something if I wanna paste a description or if it actually is a code block or some sort of troubleshooting thing, so I enable that. And you can set admonition colors.

You can also change the icons that are loaded there. So right now, admonition uses the Font Awesome icons. So I was showing you all of these different types of callouts, right? But those are the default ones. And admonition adds the Font Awesome ones as well. And you can even add your own types of icons. So you can load additional icons. There’s Octicons and RPG-Awesome, which sounds really interesting, actually.

And a cool effect of that is we need to do this in admonition syntax, so it’s code blocks. Let’s say, let’s just go with question. This is a question. A cool thing that you can do with admonition is you can do icon, and then choose an icon that isn’t already in there. So as an example, I happen to know that there is a Font Awesome icon that’s a cloud, so I’m just going to put cloud there and then I’m going to put, here’s the answer. If I go out there, look, now it looks like a little green cloud, so I can change everything about how it looks. This is still in the admonition syntax, though, but it functions the same way as callouts, just extended.

I really like this for being able to give instructions and then say, you know, this is Apple-only and not for Windows. So that’s really cool.

Should you keep using Obsidian Admonition?

So I guess the question is, and this was my question when I learned about these changes, is it still worthwhile to use admonitions because of all these quality-of-life improvements?

I think it is, because, don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that callouts is part of Obsidian now, that just made sense for an app that is so focused on notes and note-taking and documentation. You really need these different ways to take notes on your notes.

Custom icons and admonition types

But I do think think that admonition is still worthwhile installing and using if you want to delve down into the specifics of this feature. So if you want different icons that make sense to you, but maybe not to other people, this is still the best way to do it.

User interface for inserting callouts OR admonitions

Another cool thing that I didn’t show, let me show that now, is maybe you don’t want to remember the syntax with either with the blockquotes or with the code blocks.

So with admonition turned on and enable, installed and enabled, you can bring up your command pane, which for me is Command + P, and I’m gonna type in admonition, and then you can just either a callout or an admonition and a bunch of other things as well, but I’m just going to insert a callout. And if you didn’t remember what the types were, they’re all here. And this is what they’re going to look like.

Now, as I mentioned, I think these, the ones that I grouped, are actually supposed to look the same without the admonition plugin, it’s just that either the admonition plugin or my theme is making them look a little bit different, but these are the standard ones.

So then you can choose which one you want. You can have the title there. You can choose whether or not it is collapsible. It even shows you a preview. So let’s insert that. And look, I didn’t have to type out any of that and I didn’t have to remember any of that syntax. So that’s just a nice little upgrade that you can only get with admonitions.

Obsidian callouts is available now

Note: Obsidian callouts is available for all users for free now!

Again, Obsidian callouts, at the time of this recording, is only available in Insider Build version 0.14, which means you can only get it right now, if you need to get it right now, you’d have to pay for the Catalyst plan, which is a one-off $25 fee. I’ve paid that just because I wanted to give back to the Obsidian developers for this amazing tool that they just give for free.

But if you’re willing to wait, this feature, like all features, will soon be publicly available, Insiders just get it a little bit earlier. And when that happens, I’ll pin a comment in the comments below for this video so that you know when it’s available.

And if you’d like to learn about other Obsidian plugins, I do have a video on the top 10 Obsidian plugins, so maybe check that out.

Thank you for watching!

How to Process Notes in Obsidian // Readwise Official Obsidian plugin

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:00:28 +0100

How do you process notes in Obsidian? I demonstrate how to use the Readwise Official Obsidian plugin to go from raw content to notes in a Zettelkasten-like Obsidian vault. Sign up for Readwise using my link and get double the trial period.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link for Readwise. Clicking on that link will give you a two-month trial of Readwise, double the usual amount, and they give me a small percentage if you sign up for a plan. Check out My Ethics Statement to see my standards for promotions.

Obsidian Dataview, building a second brain, and more about me // Q&A Livestream

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 17:42:54 +0100

In celebration of reaching 1000 subscribers on my personal channel, I did a live Q&A where I demonstrated how to use Obsidian Dataview, my personal philosophy about building a second brain, and how I stay organized.

Why I Chose Obsidian Over Roam Research (as a Roam investor)

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 10:03:41 +0100

I was a Roam Research power user, a Believer, and investor before I discovered Obsidian. Here’s why I still ended up choosing Obsidian over Roam as my personal knowledge management tool of choice. My goal with this video is to share with you my reasons for making the choice that I did, not to judge you or anyone else who disagrees. In the end, we all have to decide for ourselves what tool fits best in our lives.

Top 10 Obsidian Plugins I Can't Do Without

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 17:00:08 +0100

In this video, I talk about my experience in getting started with Obsidian, and how I went from thinking it wouldn’t meet my needs at all to not being able to shut up about how awesome it is.

Transcript

The first time I tried to use Obsidian, I didn’t like it. It didn’t seem intuitive to use. I couldn’t quite get it to do what I wanted. And frankly, I just didn’t get all of the hype.

Today, I have over 10,000 notes over multiple vaults in Obsidian.

So what changed? Well, it turns out that there’s a pretty crucial element of the experience that I was missing the first time around and that’s plugins. Here are my top 10 community plugins for Obsidian so that you don’t make the same mistake. \

Obsidian already comes with some core plugins, some of which are enabled by default. Today, I’m talking about community plugins, which are extensions to Obsidian that are created by other Obsidian users. The security of your notes is still on you though so think about what you’re comfortable with before installing anything. \

Obsidian Calendar and Fantasy Calendar

These 10 plugins are arranged alphabetically and the first one is Calendar.

Calendar is the most popular Obsidian plugin and for a reason. I don’t know at this point why you would ever install Obsidian without the Calendar plugin because Obsidian doesn’t have a native implementation of a calendar. The Calendar plugin doesn’t just show the calendar. It also lets you create daily notes and see those daily notes over the entire month. And it also lets you create weekly reviews if you have that option enabled, which I do.

Recently, I’ve been using Calendar and this other plugin, Fantasy Calendar. Even though Fantasy Calendar definitely was made for use in a tabletop role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons, you don’t have use it as that. I’ve used Fantasy Calendar as my content calendar in Obsidian. It just provides a little bit more customization than the Calendar plugin can but I install and use both heavily.

Obsidian Dataview

Number two is Dataview.

Dataview has changed the way I use Obsidian. It’s changed the way I format my notes. It essentially allows you to define parameters and values in the YAML front matter or the metadata of your notes and then it lets you search for them. So it essentially lets you create your own database in Obsidian with custom fields for anything that you want.

You could use it for meetings or people or tools or books that you’ve read. The possibilities are endless. By the way, in addition to the very SQL-like query language that they have, you can also use JavaScript in Dataview. There’s just so much to do with this plugin. And I really haven’t even scratched the surface of it.

Obsidian Editor Syntax Highlight

Number three is so small but so useful that I had to include it in the list. It is Editor Syntax Highlight.

If you’ve ever copied over any code into Obsidian, you may find that it lacks a little bit in readability. Editors Syntax Highlight dramatically improves readability by changing the syntax highlighting depending on the programming language that you select. It isn’t going to replace VS Code anytime soon, but if you’re like me and you use it sort of as a dev log while you’re trying figure something out and you include your final solution or the code into your note, then I think that this is a must-have.

Obsidian Kanban

Number four is Kanban which is funny because I don’t even usually like the Kanban approach. I never understood Trello and I never liked Post-it Notes. I don’t use Kanban for task management.

I’ve discovered what it’s really good for is a content calendar. I create a card in Kanban for every bit of content that I’d like to work on, whether that’s code or a section in a workshop, a blog post, a video, or really basically anything. I really like being able to create my own columns and spicing it up by embedding photos within the card itself. It just makes the whole process a lot more visual.

Obsidian Outliner

Number five is Outliner. Before Obsidian, I was using Roam and it definitely shows. While I’ve moved on philosophically from Roam Research, I still love the very task-oriented bulletin format that it had.

Well, Outliner brings the same thing to Obsidian. So you can have your keyboard shortcuts for quickly moving something up and down a list or indenting and unindenting as well. It has made my transition from Roam Research significantly easier.

Obsidian Periodic Notes

Number six is Periodic Notes.

I think one of the most fundamental philosophical differences between Obsidian and tools like Evernote is that Obsidian doesn’t want you to just capture it all. Obsidian is about bringing those notes to the forefront, processing them, analyzing them, really learning them, and then changing them as your knowledge changes and Periodic Notes really helps with that.

It is particularly useful for OKR or objective setting because it provides a system for reviewing notes daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. You don’t have to use all of those, but I find that using some of them is really useful in helping me step back and think about what I actually want to accomplish.

Obsidian Publish

Number seven probably would be my number one if I were ranking these, but since it’s alphabetical, number seven is Obsidian Publish.

Obsidian Publish is a premium add-on to Obsidian that lets you instantly publish all of your notes or at least the notes that you select to be published to a certain domain. Now I have it going to a custom domain and yes, it’s not free. And yes, I do know that there are other ways that you could do this with markdown files. I have my personal blog using Hugo as a static generator for instance, but there’s just something about Publish and just it taking just a few clicks between writing something and putting it out there that really reduces the inertia for me to learn in public.

Learning in public and growing a digital garden that is constantly changing is really important to me and it has been essential to my professional and personal development. So Obsidian Publish has to be, hands-down, my favorite plugin for Obsidian.

Obsidian Readwise Official

Number eight is the Readwise Official plugin and this is a plugin that I’ve been wanting for a very long time. In fact, before the official plugin came out, I created my own Python script that I was running regularly just to be able to move my things from Readwise to Obsidian.

Readwise, if you don’t know, is a way to collect all of the things that you’re doing on the internet. It’s an easy way to collect eBooks, web articles, audiobooks, tweets, and even PDFs. And it all brings your highlights of those into your Obsidian vault.

It is a really essential part to my learning process because it ensures that everything I’ve learned from a variety of different sources ends up in my Obsidian vault for me to process and analyze.

Obsidian Sync

Number nine is Obsidian Sync and it is also a premium add-on, kind of like Obsidian Publish, but it’s also totally optional.

You don’t really need Obsidian Sync. I already use Dropbox, but unfortunately, one of the problems with Dropbox is that you can’t yet use it to sync between different devices. I use Obsidian on my laptop, on my iPad, and on my Samsung mobile. So I have three different devices that I need all of my notes on.

There are currently two options for this. It’s either iCloud or Obsidian Sync. I don’t like iCloud, and so, Obsidian Sync is my service of choice.

Obsidian Templater

Number 10 is the most recent plugin of this 10 and it is Templater.

Now don’t get it confused with Templates which is an Obsidian core plugin. TemplateR is a community plugin that’s like Templates on steroids. It extends templating functionality by letting you run JavaScript in your vault. This blows the functionality of Obsidian wide open as now I can run JavaScript in my vault to do certain things for me.

I was already a fan of the core plugin Templates, so having Templater and all of the customization options that are possible is just amazing. Definitely recommend it.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far and you’re wondering what the heck is Obsidian, well maybe take a step back and watch this video on how to get started with Obsidian. And if you want to know about my usage of any of the particular plugins that I mentioned, leave me a comment below so that I know that I should make a video on that next.

Thank you for watching. Happy note taking!

How to get started with Obsidian in 2022 - from scratch

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 17:00:28 +0100

In this video, I talk about how to ignore all the complicated methodologies for note-taking and just get started with the good old-fashioned art of taking notes - with Obsidian, of course!

Reclaim.ai Review - Smart calendar blocking for the productive engineer

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:56:13 +0100

For the last few months, I’ve been trying out an app called Reclaim that has been changing my mind about the feasibility of calendar blocking for time management in general.

Here’s my (rave) review of the app!

Creating a D&D DM's Brain Attic With Obsidian

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 10:46:56 +0100

I started using Obsidian for professional reasons. I use it daily as my main task management and personal knowledge management system for my main job as a software developer advocate at k6.io. However, a surprising use case of mine for Obsidian is playing Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop roleplaying game.

Here’s a video of me walking through my setup for how to use Obsidian to create my own “DM’s Brain Attic”.

Other Resources

Realistic Calendar Blocking for the Agile Knowledge Worker

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 16:07:31 +0100

Calendar blocking is the only way to identify and avoid distraction.

In a world that tempts us with “a little bit of everything, all of the time,” resisting distraction is the most valuable skill. Yet distraction isn’t always easy to recognize, especially when it comes in the guise of other things we need to do.

Here’s how to use calendar blocking to gain control over your schedule.

Set realistic schedules.

Setting an overly ambitious schedule inevitably leads to disappointment.

The hard part is figuring out what’s infeasible, and that has to come with time. In the meantime, expect to change your schedule.

Use digital tools.

Calendar Tetris isn’t fun– but there are tools that can help.

If you expect to change your schedule, choose tools that make that easier. I use Reclaim.ai to change my calendar in response to changing priorities.

Do a weekly review.

Review how well you stuck to your schedule and adjust it accordingly.

A good schedule, like a good budget, changes over time. Set aside a time every week to assess the previous week and set priorities for the next week.

Relate your schedule to your core principles.

Your calendar should be the reflection of the values you hold.

But what are those values? Keep a list of the principles you live by (or want to live by). Look at your calendar as a way to keep yourself on track.

Reframe restriction as freedom.

When you don’t set your calendar, others set it for you.

Restriction isn’t following a schedule you set. Restriction is being subject to the passing whims of bugs and meetings that demand your attention.

Calendar blocking defends your time.

It frees you to do things you decide are important.

5 Things the Obsidian Templater Plugin Can Do That Templates Can't

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 22:46:52 +0100

The Templater plugin is what the core Templates plugin should have been.

The name is unfortunate, as it implies that the two plugins are similar. Turns out they’re only similar in that one is a limited version of the other.

Here’s what you can do with Templater– and not with Templates.

Add dynamic variables to your notes

You’re probably thinking, but Templates can already add dates.

Templater can do that, and more. You can use it to fetch values in YAML frontmatter, random quotes from the interwebs, and even clipboard contents.

Make your notes context-sensitive

Templater can create notes with different templates depending on context.

For example, you could set up Obsidian to create a new note using the Person template in the People folder but a Weekly Review note on Sunday nights.

Increment your notes automatically

Templater can automatically increment new instances of a series.

You can set it up to create a session log for your 100th D&D session, a review note for your 12th monthly review, or your 10th book review.

Interact with other plugins

Templater leverages all the best parts of Obsidian’s ecosystem.

You can read from and write to YAML frontmatter using Dataview, or run commands that create notes based on text input with Buttons.

Write and run your own scripts

Templater lets you write and call user scripts within an Obsidian note.

This is the ultimate in extensibility. The ability to run custom JavaScript means you’re limited only by your imagination (and skill).

Templater lets you turn Obsidian into exactly what you want.

And isn’t that what a PKM should do?

10 Mandatory Obsidian Plugins for Every Software Engineer

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 23:58:12 +0100

If you haven’t installed any Obsidian plugins, you’re missing out.

Many other mainstream PKM apps seem to have been built with the intention of hand-holding users through every step using a pretty interface. On the other hand, Obsidian is perfectly suited to power users who want to change the tool to meet their needs exactly. But you can only do that with plugins.

Here are 10 Obsidian plugins you should install if you work in tech:

Enable these Core Plugins.

Core plugins are shipped with Obsidian but are disabled by default.

Daily notes: Creates a new Markdown page according to a specified template that serves as a scratchpad and springboard for every new day.
Templates: Lets you define predetermined formats that can be inserted into notes. Some template examples: Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly notes, meeting notes with agendas, person notes to create your own CRM.
Backlinks: When you have a note open, this shows you all the other notes that have referred to it, explicitly (via [[links]]) or implicitly (unlinked).
Quick switcher: Lets you find any note by hitting CMD+O and showing search results as you type. With this enabled, I never bother with folders.
Workspaces: Lets you save the exact arrangement of notes and sidebar options you have selected, and then load it quickly later. I have workspaces for writing, processing content, playing D&D, and making videos.

Install these Community Plugins.

Community plugins are created by users and open-sourced on GitHub.

Calendar: Adds a real-world calendar to your side panel that shows daily and weekly notes. Use Fantasy Calendar for even more customization.
Editor Syntax Highlight: Formats text in code blocks according to the programming language set. Drastically improves readability of any code.
Readwise Official: Regularly imports your highlights from ebooks, web articles, audiobooks, tweets, and PDFs into your Obsidian vault.
Templater: Extends templating functionality by letting you run JAVASCRIPT. In your vault! This blows the functionality of Obsidian wide open.
Dataview: Turns your Obsidian vault into a database using custom parameters in YAML frontmatter. There’s even a way to write queries in js!

Pkm on Nicole van der Hoeven

obsidian-okrs

The templates

What you need

Try it

obsidian-grafana

How it works

What it’s useful for

Try it

My reMarkable Obsidian workflow

The setup: a lot of E Ink

Step 1 — Sync the PDF into Obsidian

Step 2 — OCR the handwriting into real text

The accessible alternative: Claude Cowork / Claude Desktop

Why this matters

Resources

My AI note-taking workflows

The framing: note-taking vs. note-making

Tier 1 — Free

Tier 2 — Paid

Tier 3 — Overkill

Why three tiers, not one

Resources

Do Androids Dream of Second Brains?

What I cover

🐑 Why “second brain” is the wrong framing

📊 Observability for PKM

👁️ Meet Iris

🌙 Dreaming

Resources

Related reading

Do Androids Dream of Second Brains?

Abstract

Slides

Nicole van der Hoeven: A Polymath with Obsidian as a Modern Zibaldone

My Year in PKM: 2024 in Numbers

Doing It in Public: Observability for PKM

How to publish your notes for free with Quartz

Links

Learning new things in Obsidian: in defense of remembering

Links

Links vs Tags vs Folders: knowledge gardening with Jorge Arango

How I Refactor Notes in Obsidian

Resources

Taking notes on podcasts with Snipd, Readwise, and Obsidian

RESOURCES

When Productivity Gets Toxic, with Andy Polaine

Every Single Plugin I Use (Obsidian Tour 2023)

How I Structure My Obsidian Vault (Obsidian Tour 2023)

Do Appearances Matter in Tech (Adobo & Avocados #05)

Taking Notes for Work With Obsidian

The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes (EuroSTAR 2023)

Text Expansion in Obsidian With Espanso

10 tips for starting (or progressing) a career in tech (Adobo & Avocados #04)

More Than Just Taking Notes: Learning Exhaust

Tagging and Linking With AI: Napkin

Resources

Emergent Note Taking

Resources Mentioned

Obsidian Bookmarks (new in Obsidian v1.2)

Resources mentioned

Organizing PDFs in Obsidian

Resources

Tools

Zotero plugins mentioned

Thanks

Taking Notes on People in Obsidian

Taking Notes for Research with Bianca Pereira

Introductions

Research isn’t just for academics

Taking notes for topic research

AI for research and note-taking

Obsidian Canvas vs. Scrintal

How important is visual thinking in PKM?

Note-taking in multiple languages

Demo of Scrintal

Taking notes on source material

On the usefulness of highlights

The one-pass reading strategy

Nicole showing her process