How I use Obsidian to keep track of personal notes and actions

For years I used Evernote to store my notes and Trello to track my actions. For the past 2 years, I have been using Obsidian for both. This post summarises how and why I am using Obsidian. Credits again go to Henry Franks for putting me on to this!

Why I like Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking tool based on Markdown, an open document format that creates formatted text. It has a huge community who have built a wide range of awesome open-source plugins and themes. After the pain I went through migrating away from proprietary tools like Trello and Evernote a few years ago, I like that Obsidian is based on an open format. It makes it easy to migrate all my content to a similar tool if I so wish, which should keep them competitive. I also like that I can have all my actions and notes in one place. This minimises the need to duplicate information in different places.

My Obsidian process

Warning to any Obsidian power users reading this: I have opted for a much simpler Obsidian process than most of the ones I have read about online!

Inbox

Every time I think of something new (idea, reflection, action, etc) I usually add it to my Inbox note. This is easily accessible from my mobile phone’s home screen with just one tap. I do my reviews every week, so my inbox gets processed at least that often. My weekly note is where I keep track of notes, lessones learned, habits, and actions. I also store my quarterly review notes in Obsidian. Read more about my process for weekly and quarterly reviews.

Brain

For longer-form writing or notes about specific topics, I add a new note directly to my Obsidian “Brain” folder. All new notes go here by default unless I manually move them elsewhere. Each note can be given tags and linked with other notes to form a visual graph of notes. I haven’t made use of either of these features enough to see real value from them so far, but I link to all the main notes I’ve used in each weekly note so that I can avoid making the note itself too detailed.

Actions

Typing “- [ ]” before a line of text creates a checkbox item. A checkbox item is an action, and it can be added to any note. Actions can be assigned tags and due dates, which make them easy to track. They can also be viewed in different places, which reduces the need for duplication. I have a view of all of my outstanding actions at the bottom of my weekly note template.

Multiple tabs

Obsidian allows you to open an unlimited number of tabs, and to arrange them into custom layouts. I usually have at least two tabs open at a time – one for reading and one for writing.

My favourite extensions

Obsidian sync

Obsidian is free to use and open source, but Obsidian Sync is available for about £80 per year. It keeps Obsidian in sync across all my devices. I initially tried to be cheap and avoid paying this, instead relying on Google Drive to sync my Obsidian vault. But after losing 8 hours worth of notes from a long plane journey, I decided to cough up the money and haven’t looked back since.

Omnisearch

Omnisearch is more powerful and easier to use than the default Obsidian search. Omnisearch’s algorithm gives increased weight on the words in your search phrase appearing together and/or in the title, which leads to more relevant results. The screenshots below illustrate the difference. The only time I use the default Obsidian search is when I know roughly when a note was written or edited. In those cases I used the default search with files ordered by date modified.

Periodic notes

I use the periodic notes plugin to generate my weekly notes (though it can also be used to generate daily, monthly or quarterly notes). All of these regular notes belong in a specific “weekly notes” folder and use a consistent template/naming convention. Clicking the “Open this week” button in my sidebar allows me to quickly access this week’s note, or create this week’s note if it doesn’t already exist.

Excalidraw

Sometimes I need to draw diagrams or sketch out ideas. If at work I might use Miro or Whimsical to do this, but I don’t have a personal license for those tools. So I tend to fall back on tools like Paint or PowerPoint. Excalidraw is a drawing app built into Obsidian that is basic but impressive. I like that it has a sketch mode which makes all the drawings look slightly lower fidelity. There are also lots of freely available extensions to make Excalidraw more powerful

Minimal theme

Technically not an extension, but Minimal is my favorite Obsidian theme. As one of the most downloaded themes, it loads fast and strips out a lot of the noise that exists in some of the alternatives.

Mobile app – room for improvement

Obsidian only recently launched a mobile app. It is a bit frustrating as it doesn’t include any widgets and it takes a few seconds to load each time I try to open up a note. I have got around these slow loading times by using a third-party app called Markor to add content to my inbox and create Markdown files in my Obsidian vault. Leaving the Obsidian app always open helps too! It would be great to see the Obsidian app developed to load faster and be able to do some of these things natively.