This text was originaly written in Brazilian Portuguese
How do you organize your digital life? Work notes, reading, personal projects? Well, I've been using Obsidian for almost a year now and it has transformed the way I take notes and organize myself digitally, using the concept of a second brain through the PARA method.
When I first wrote about Obsidian , I was super impressed with the editor's capabilities, and the almost endless possibilities of how to organize my notes and my various projects through the content maps mechanism, knowledge management, various plugins and nice design.
It was easy to increase the complexity of my setup so much that it started to interfere with my day-to-day work, loading time, and overall performance of the tool. Now I'm doing the opposite: I only keep what's necessary. This is a very common experience for those who use Obsidian.
Well, these days, I don't really think about Obsidian, because it's pretty much become the only tool I use for everything:
- Do I need to produce an article for my master's degree? Go to Obsidian first
- Do I have a mental note during a conversation? Go to Obsidian
- Am I planning a new article? It starts and ends in obsidian
- Study notes, projects, travels? In Obsidian
- Mentoring registration? In Obsidian
Right now, I integrate my Kindle readings, the articles I read for my master's degree through Zotero, I manage day-to-day projects, I take daily notes from meetings and life, and I integrate everything in the decentralized and distributed way that is amazing, like a wiki.
Although useful, I still don't want to add the artificial intelligence tools to have my own LLM running as support for generating notes - I'm afraid of losing control at some point.
A standard vault for Obsidian as a Second Brain
I created a very basic version of my Vault for anyone who wants to try it. Despite the apparent simplification, the half benefit of the environment is having the basics. It is available on Github.
You will find here : a basic session to understand the PARA organization, a set of templates that I have been using daily in my study and work workflow, and an example ofMap of Content . I also made a basic configuration for the templater and daily notes, which can help those who are starting out.
You can use Obsidian exactly as you would use a classic note-taking tool: thousands of folders and subfolders for your subjects with files that don't interact, until you lose them one day, or until they no longer make sense. Obsidian's proposal is different.
In this year of use, almost all templates remain the same, with small adaptations. Only when I am executing an action many times, or repeating the same type of configuration a lot, do I try to automate it. If it doesn't interfere with the generation of notes, I don't change it.
The plugins I use every day
The platform's extensibility is its main benefit, and in the beginning I installed dozens of plugins to test. Over time, however, most of them end up becoming just another configuration to be loaded when Obsidian starts, greatly affecting the app's loading time. I don't recommend it!
If I were to start my vault over (which is quite possible in the future), I would start with only 3 essential plugins, plus 4 quality of life plugins. They are:
Essentials:
All of this works very well, with the maintainers being super active, and a lot of content to consume and learn how to use. My project on Github has the basic use to maintain the necessary structure, with the templates that I still use today.
I also use some quality of life plugins, which are not necessary, but help a lot and make life easier when using Obsidian:
Paste into URL
Settings Search
Git
Advanced Tables
For me, any other plugins need to be validated in your day to day. For my reality, my list grows to a few more:
Kindle Highlights
Zotero Integration
Colored Tags
Iconize
Language Tool Integration
Syntax Highlight Editor
It's interesting to see how my grades have evolved. Nowadays, it's possible to see the different clusters of knowledge I've accumulated, and how they interact with each other:
Daily notes are the most numerous
Books and notes are centered around a content map (top of image)
Master's degree begins to gain more scope (in yellow)
To ensure that all my devices have access to my notes, I use iCloud, which basically keeps the files synchronized. The Vault directory is in the iCloud Documents folder itself. It also works with Google Drive and OneDrive for Android devices.
Is this the best solution? No, because it ends up affecting the app's performance a little when it starts (iCloud deletes files that aren't being used from the device, which delays opening on a device that you don't use constantly) - but it hasn't been a big problem for me.
This way, I can easily start a note on my phone and go to my desktop to expand and maintain notes, regardless of the number of devices connected.
The best thing is Obsidian's Sync service, which is paid: https://obsidian.md/sync
Zotero & Kindle Highlights
The master's degree requires me to read several articles and manage references following the APA 7 reference model.
I remember that my wife, a university professor and researcher , always complains about how difficult it can be to manage article references for academic production, and how there are countless tools that help in this process. But I wanted to use Obsidian!
After much research, and testing some configurations using Pandoc References, there is a benefit in using a platform like Zotero to do this work, and the question was basically to integrate the results of my notes in scientific articles into Obsidian, once they are read and processed.
The setup is easy, and it's really cool to use. In the end, after reading a scientific article and taking notes, I integrate everything into Obsidian by adding all this information to a literary note (which I added to the template in the project on Github).
Kindle is my main storage mechanism for deeper reading. Some people use Readwise, but I didn't want to pay for yet another service.
On github you can find the templates I added and use to this day.
The Kindle Highlights plugin is an amazing plugin that takes your set of notes (either through the file or by connecting directly to your Amazon account), and processes this content with a template that you define. Great plugin, it has helped me a lot to keep notes and references books during my studies.
Even with physical books that I'm reading, I end up generating the same process and it has helped me keep things organized.
For each book I read, I write a short summary, and some become posts here on the blog.
My daily note-taking workflow
I feel like I'm in an IDE, programming my life. Looking back at how I did it before, it seems so amateurish that I never want to go back.
I try to follow a Proto-Zettelkasten to add and maintain my notes, and it has been working well.
The Zettelkasten method created by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist and thinker, famous for writing 70 books and almost 400 academic articles during his career, who attributed the feat to using a note-taking method created by him to organize his ideas and facilitate research and also combat procrastination.
It's a way for you to create notes and the relationship between them, as well as a review rhythm that allows you to maintain what you've written down. Many people already write and discuss the method today, so it's worth taking some time to look at it .
On a day-to-day basis, I divide my notes into daily entries, permanent notes, and literary notes.
Every general note goes into the daily note as it came into the world: Phrases from a book, thoughts, links, meeting or event record
At the end of the day or at the end of the week, I try to review my last daily notes and direct each subject to a point in my "file": Areas, Resources and Projects
Everything I read (books, articles, etc.) can become literary notes, following the templates I have already created and shared on Github
I remove from the daily notes what has already been processed, keeping only the reference, in a refactoring process. My daily notes template references the notes created on the day, which makes integration easier.
Map of Contents
The organizational concept that best engages with the Obsidian note-taking model is the idea of building Notes that centralize content by theme, which can become a Map: the Map of Contents.
So, when I want to describe a subject, like a Master's degree, I don't need a "Master's degree" folder with everything related there, I just need to create a note that centralizes and connects all the points related to that subject. A more decentralized and natural way of organizing subjects, since folders usually have many disadvantages for knowledge management (a file can never be in two folders at the same time).
I added a small MOC example to demonstrate its use on github, go check it out .
What didn't work?
Perhaps my biggest disappointment was Excalibur . An amazing note-taking and drawing plugin that integrates perfectly with the Obsidian ecosystem. The problem is that it is not good for what I like to do: Visual Note-taking. The tool is not ideal, and it suffers a lot compared to GoodNotes. I am very upset about that :(
I forced myself to try for a while, but it's so painful to do the same thing I can do with GoodNotes that after a while I gave up. Excalibur is amazing, but it just doesn't work for me.
I struggled with a tool that converted WikiLinks to Markdown links, to support the process of generating PDFs that I have to do because of my master's degree (it's still not possible to send an .md to the professors 🤦). The problem: the plugin converted ALL my links to wiki links and this literally screwed everything up - external links were affected, markdown links, attachments links.
My mistake, obviously. Since at the time I didn't use Git as a version control mechanism, relying only on iCloud for backup - I had a lot of work to restore the vault to its initial state, and this ended up affecting the references and creation dates of the files.
Lesson learned: NEVER use plugins that claim to make mass updates to notes, or use git!
Who knows, maybe in another year, this structure will be even more mature.
Where I intend to mature my setup
As the amount of notes grows, Content Maps become the best way to organize the understanding of the topics. I intend to expand the use and try to automate the integration of notes even more.
Furthermore, who knows, maybe I'll soon set up an LLM in this environment to increase my ability to connect the knowledge I have stored.
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