Visual Thinking on Nicole van der Hoeven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Zsolt’s book here!

Connecting Visual Notes with Obsidian Excalidraw

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

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

Visual Note Templates With Obsidian Excalidraw

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

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