To each their own.
Perhaps PKM as a cottage industry is overdone, and the author's point that everybody's system is highly personal and should not be replicated is valid. That said, Obsidian has allowed me to organize all of my reading, learning, writing, and thinking into a format that allows me to recall knowledge and make connections that I wouldn't have otherwise found. Seeing in what other contexts you have read about a concept or a historical figure or an essay, etc. is so valuable for life-long learning that I can't imagine going back to disconnected or separated note-taking.
Jamie Rubin's blog series[4] is pretty good, too.
I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes, with tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a folder structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal System[3]. I store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept summaries, cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-MM.markdown file.
I don't have any comment on the blog post in the article, because this system works really well for me. Obsidian is extensible at hell, but I'm not spending all day looking for new tweaks, I'm just writing notes. Also, since notes are just files stored in directories, I have all sorts of shell/Python-scripted automations and shell aliases to quickly do stuff.
1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/vid...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88
4. https://jamierubin.net/blog-series/practically-paperless-wit...
You must be a very organised person, any sort of Zettelkasten or knowledge-based linking system for me is too complex, I'd rather just take a simple note, maybe with the date in the filename, to each their own I guess.
I rarely write TODO lists.
As a quick example, I used to do daily notes, one markdown note per day but that was too much mental overhead, so I switched to one markdown note per month with an <HR> tag between each day.
But, what works for me won’t work for everyone else.
Zettelkasten seems like inhuman, nightmarish garbage to me.
If simple notes are working for you, then stick with that!
I’ll add a ## header if needed to separate a topic here and there too.
If I remember an earlier note that was similar I’ll [[ to create an internal link.
Copying and pasting PDFs, images or other reference material is easy since by Obsidian can just copy those files into a local attachments folder.
If there’s a good reference video on YouTube or something, you can just embed it.
If my sidebar of notes gets longer than the screen I’ll take a few minutes and sort them into folders.
Honestly, there’s no fancy or organized workflow here. I just keep it open and write as it makes sense, then clean up every now and then when needed. Whatever is most comfortable for you is the right way. It’s your notes.
- I create a "Work" folder. Inside it are folders for Weekly Notes, Tasks and Information.
- At the beginning of each week I make a new Weekly Notes page. I have a subheading for each day, and a subheading in each day for a todo list. After the todo list, I put down a heading for each of my meetings/activities that I want to take notes for and fill them in accordingly.
- When I begin work on a non-trivial ticket or project, I make it a note in my Tasks folder named with it's Jira tag. That makes it easy to link to from my weekly notes, and gives me a loose idea of when I was working on which tickets through backlinking. I then use these notes to plan out the problems, store personal research and organize code snippets.
- The Information folder serves as a kind of "Misc." folder. I have sections for travel, guidelines, best practices, and I even store some PDFs relating to my job in there.
A few other general tips for Obsidian:
- Create a group in your graph view for "Work" and it will highlight all of the notes in your work folder with a specified color. Pretty handy.
- Make heavy use of linking, both internal and external. Tags are also nice, but don't be afraid to break out your notes when things get too heavy; that's what it's made for.
- Liberal use of the keyboard shortcuts is a gamechanger. Ctrl+O to open notes, Ctrl+P to open the command palette (which I mostly use to split panes), and hold Alt+Arrows to quick-switch to adjacent panes.
- Plugins are nice, but it's easy to get carried away. Mind Map, Tasks, and Admonition are the only ones I keep enabled.
Hope you get as much out of it as I do. It sounds like a lot, but it feels like second-nature to me now. Feel free to adapt this to your own needs or skip it all together, this is just my personal workflow and what made me fall in love with Obsidian.
It just saves the URL for me.
But I wrote a raycast script that automatically appends the current page with the title and time into my scratch page
https://discuss.logseq.com/t/three-choices-new-users-need-to...
Sometimes you don't even need to take notes. Just the act of pasting in a link or a snippet from an article you read is enough to reference it in the future.
If you insist on making things clean, then you can use some sort of version control and review all the notes that you've taken once a week and organize them better. The most important thing is to take the note.
You would've "gotten" how to create a workflow that fits you by now if this is what you really wanted.
I use todoist for basic task management, but it's ability to view history is virtually non existent so I don't bother attaching documents or anything related to a project there. But I use the API to compile task history, so I could integrate them as markdown files into this so I don't have to start from scratch in building things up.
It’s one of the main reasons I went with it.
Now I don’t actually see the code…so my mistake. At least with markdown files you don’t have to worry about accessing your notes if anything ever happened to them though.