Obsidian.md, day one starter pack
Obsidian is a very helpful piece of software. In my last post on PKM, I made several references to it. While my previous post was focused on general best-practices of note-taking as illustrated through my progressive attempts at taking better notes, I thought it might be helpful to create a post that’s focused on Obsidian and how to use it, especially for those just starting out.
I caught the PKM (personal knowledge management) bug in spring of 2021. As I discussed more extensively in the previous post, creating an interconnected set of notes which would aid in the retention of information and the generation of new insight was personally a very exciting prospect. After trying out a few different pieces of software, I realized quickly that Obsidian was head and shoulders above the rest. Getting it set up was a heady time, I learned a lot quickly, and I devoured a ton of blogs and long forum discussions on what the “best” method of using the program was.
I’ve been using the program almost every day for about six months now, and I feel that I’ve made a great deal of progress. I thought it might be a good time to write down a few things that are helpful for any person starting to use the program to know on day one. I’ll start with a few guiding principles, then list 10 “best and worst” practices along with a brief explanation, and end with a “lit review” of a few sources that are great to dig into even further if you’re interested.
Best (and worst) practices
Let me start by saying that you aren’t going to use Obsidian “the wrong way”. People are different. Peoples’ brains work differently. People have different aims, different amounts of time to devote to a task, and different aptitude and inclinations to certain processes. All that to say is, you can’t start reading a blog post like this with the expectation that you’re going to learn the right way to do this. If I had to write a “how-to” guide that popped up when you first opened Obsidian, the first line would say: “Try a lot of stuff: you’ll get better at is as you go, and you’re not wrong for trying.”
That said, just because people are different doesn’t mean that information is different. Put another way, the world exists. Some things work better than other things. Just like if you play the notes C, E, and G on the piano you’ll hear a pleasant-sounding C major chord, our brains are generally wired in a certain way which interacts with the real stuff of the world outside of our brains. When we write something down (physically or digitally) we are converting a thought about the world from our brains into material which can be interacted with, both later by ourselves and by others. But, we have a certain human scale which is not fully capacious for the unlimited accumulation and integration of knowledge. In other words, we are limited, and thus even if we write everything we think down, there are limits to how we can interact with what has been written. Depending on how information is stored, linked, and utilized, we will get either more or less use out of that information.
That is the long way of saying the two following assumptions:
Some ways of doing personal knowledge management work better than others (and others have thought and practiced long and hard the best way to do things, so listen to them!) Yet,
The ways which will work best for you will take time to discover (and you may never arrive at what you truly realize is “the best” way to do something).
With these two assumptions in hand, let me lay out two guiding principles which naturally follow. These will be step one and two of every practical point of application which follows.
One: Learn about things worth trying and try them
Get your hands dirty. Or, since you’re probably writing on a keyboard, let your fingers get a bit sore from typing. Finish this blog post, go and try the things I mention. Go read / watch the numerous resources I’ll link below and try those things out as well. Take one idea from one source and mash it together with an idea from a different source and just dive in head first.
If I had my way, I would probably over-plan everything. The flip side of this, though, is that I’m not a particularly well-organized person. I just like to think of the possibilities of something and consider what something could be in great detail or in grand details or systematization before actually getting my hands dirty with what it is. I have had to work hard to develop an ethic of just… starting.
One of the most instructive axioms I’ve heard in reading about PKM systems is Gall’s Law; every functional complex system emerges out of a simpler system that worked first. Put another way, in a phrase that I’ve heard bouncing around (I’m about 80% sure it’s a Nick Milo phrase): you have to earn complexity.
This is related to so many of the specific “best practices” I’ll mention below, but I’m going to relate it here to the principle of “just start”. You are not going to design your perfect PKM system before starting, because you need to understand your system in practice, and practice only comes through the execution and use of the system. You are probably going to get your first few attempts wrong. It’s important to try. Don’t start out by trying to do it wrong, just make your best effort to put into practice what you’ve learned.
How do you determine when to make a change? That brings us to principle #2.
Two: Let fruitful processes grow and let friction do the pruning
Let’s break a few words down out of this: Fruit, growth, friction, and pruning.
To get a sense of what fruitfulness means, you have to ask yourself- fruitful towards what end? You need to have at least some sense of why you’re undertaking the effort of writing down and connecting information. Because PKM is an endeavor which ought to give compounding dividends over a long time frame, you should be willing to stick with something even if it isn’t immediately life-changing. Just like you ought to start saving for retirement early, because interest compounds. Your notes will accrue value over time, but you must ask yourself- value for what?
It’s fine if you don’t have a precise answer, and perhaps there is some value in a vague answer (to avoid turning the notes into an utterly pragmatic means to a certain end). But, if you don’t have an idea of why you want these things written down, you’re going to feel aimless and overworked after a few weeks of trying.
Only you can answer this question. Perhaps you want to write books or blogs, or teach, or serve others with helpful knowledge. Perhaps you have an insatiable curiosity for how the world works and just want to be delighted with new insights on a consistent basis.
It’s important that you come up with a durable and realistic answer though, because this pile of notes is primarily for you. Some output is likely to come out of the notes- something will bubble up and be shared. But if we think about what writing notes in Obsidian is and distill the the process down to a particular essence, it may be the generation of surprising insight from the comparison of unlikely sources. The insight happens in your brain, but when you share it with others, when that insight propagates, what is that but fruit?
So as you have new insights, recognize that that is the desired product of your work. And, when you understand the goal you’re working towards being fruitful in, it will help motivate you to press onwards. As you press onwards, you’ll see new growth of fruit emerging.
I don’t think there are any plants in the world that you can simply sit and watch grow in real time. Growth happens when plants have the nutrients and conditions they need, but it happens slowly. Likewise, just as you will not immediately realize when a process is unhelpful, you probably will not realize when a process is wonderful, productive, and helpful. You simply will grow as a note-taker, and over time you may have some sense of what is actually helpful.
With some introspection, you may get a sense of what is actually high-value. Keep those processes. Think on how you might improve them. Keep reading blog posts (albeit, maybe not as many as you improve). You may realize that an author is describing a process you use in different words, or you might get a slightly new understanding on how to make marginal gains in certain areas. Reading others’ thoughts will help you put your finger on that substantial stuff that is outside of your brain; whether it is an idea or a process, there is nothing new under the sun, so personal reflection and keeping tabs on what others are doing process-wise will help you recognize what is growth, what is helpful.
The opposite of growth, friction, should be easy to understand. Anything tedious, unhelpful, painful, or useless is friction.
Once in elementary school I played a game with my friends where you or a friend would scratch the back of your hand lightly until you could come up with an animal for every letter of the alphabet (add this to list of sadistic and pointless games that children play!) At first, the task seems easy and the “pain” feels minimal, yet as you get down to X and realize that several layers of epidermis have been peeled back that you’re actually in real pain. The next day, there’s a scab there. This is friction (literal and metaphorical!) at work.
Taking notes is work. It is always harder than doing nothing, just sitting around and watching TV. Don’t think that the “perfect” process will not involve some work of thinking, writing, and grappling with ideas. Yet, some work which can be painful (such as lifting weights) makes you stronger. Some painful things (your friend scratching the back of your hand) can turn from amusement to pain very quickly. Don’t play those games!
I have had plenty of bad ideas, and I’ll mention some of them later. We don’t necessarily realize that something is a bad idea until we’ve been doing it for a bit, though. Your collection of notes is for you, and it’s a tool for your research, writing, teaching, etc. While it should involve some work, it should not involve pointless unproductive tasks. By making an honest effort to try out a systemic approach to note-taking, you will most likely realize quickly what is busywork, what is over-complicated, and simply- what is friction.
When you start feeling those rubs, prune those processes.
Pruning is not tearing up the entire plant and starting over. Unless you did something so stupid that it actually destroys your ability to use any of your notes, don’t feel like you need to “sanitize” the notes of a certain error or bad process. Just stop doing it (or start doing something you weren’t doing) and continue on from there. The irony of recognizing that something you were doing was unhelpful busywork is that, if you think the solution is to go back and correct all the errors, you have just created more busywork.
I’ll give one example here, quickly. I will talk more later about “propositional titles”, but I probably had about 200 notes before I thought it might be a good idea to have all titles phrased as propositions. I didn’t stop what I was doing and reword all my titles, I just kept making new notes with better titles. And, if I wanted to link to an old note, and I felt like it, I would update the old note with a new and better title. That’s all there is to it. I didn’t fuss about changing every note all at once, I just kept working and “pruned back” my propensity for writing vague titles.
So, bringing it all together in summary: Understand what fruitfulness looks like when using your vault, and continue working at it such that that fruit can actually grow. Over time, you will experience the friction of unproductive processes. Where there is the most friction, simply prune those processes out of your workflow and continue working.
Voila- that is my one paragraph summary of how to develop a good workflow in Obsidian.
Let these two principles inform everything we talk about from here on- try these things, and let fruitful growth remain while pruning away unhelpful processes.
OK, but what should I do?
You have downloaded Obsidian. You’ve read my pep talk. You have an empty, blank vault and your head is full of the promises of long-term value, amazing insights, and a beautiful graph from your thoughts alone. What is the very first note you make?
I’ll start with several key “best practices” I’ve found in my time using Obsidian.
I’ll end with several “avoid this” notes which are corollary to the first five points:
Do #1:
Write one-idea notes with propositional titles.
To modify the hat above into a propositional title, you might say "Loving your neighbor is vital for a well-functioning society". It have not fit on the hat very well, though.
I am shamelessly making this note from Andy Matuschak my first bit of advice. I’ll talk up his blog a bit more later in the resources section, but for now, let’s talk about propositional titles.
The “ideal” that I’ve found most helpful to strive for in writing notes is that each note should contain roughly one idea, and it should be titled as a claim or a noun which will be defined. This allows you to think of ideas as discrete building-blocks to larger systems or theories. When the blocks bump into each other in interesting ways, or when you use one block in multiple structures of thoughts, that’s where ideas start to emerge in interesting ways.
At the risk of glossing over what exactly a propositional title is, here’s a few examples (italics) of how I was writing note titles, and how I’ve been trying to write them recently (bold)
Relationship between art and truth becomes Art is a means of disclosing reliable, true knowledge.
Literacy of Puritans in late 18th century America becomes American Puritans of the late 18th century were highly literate.
Learning through linking becomes Linking ideas together helps us remember ideas and use them.
You get the idea. By distilling down a note into a single claim, it will help you focus the writing, and when scanning a list of titles or trying to write a link, you’ll be able to retrieve a claim from memory much faster than a vague suggestive title.
As far as what “one idea” means, I’ll elaborate further on this in “Don’t #1”, because I think it’s better defined in the negative sense!
Do #2:
Let Structure Emerge
Up front planning is important for many things, but I don't really think that PKM is one of them.
If you’re starting your PKM with propositionally titled notes on a single topic, you have set yourself up well for this next step. If you try to plan out every folder, topic, tag, front-matter metadata field, and a grand system of how everything fits together, well, by all means, see if that works! I certainly tried to work that way for a month or two in Obsidian, and it didn’t go very well.
Let me try to elaborate on this point by describing the sensation of what a PKM system not going well is. A description of everything I did would be one way of approaching this, but let me try to make this point by describing what it felt like to over-plan:
I had a few notes that were extremely long and formatted in many pretty ways, yet I was not really able to generate new insight or organically understand two ideas in relationship to one another.
I was never sure where to put a new note, and when I finally did decide to make a new note,
I felt like I was doing too much busywork.
I could never remember where I wrote something down, and had to navigate in and out of Obsidian folders or search to find the note I had just worked on.
I was only navigating using the file-browser or search-based functions of Obsidian- if there were links in files, they served little purpose other than “I think this is how I’m supposed to use the program.”
Letting structure emerge naturally can be daunting. If you’re anything like me, you may be skeptical that meaningful organization and connection can take place in an unplanned manner, and would much rather come up with some schema on the front end that will give everything a proper place to be. The only problem is that this is not how new discoveries, insights, and ideas emerge! The feeling like I was doing so much busywork was good proof of this.
To create an Obsidian vault that’s enjoyable to work with, you need to let it get a bit out of control. This doesn’t mean that there ought to be no organization whatsoever, it just means you can feel free to add more and more atomic, propositional notes and then get a feel for how things ought to be organized from there. The structures that ought to emerge are what we turn our attention to in point #3
Do #3:
Let notes (ideas) bump into each other
Okay, let's get into the weeds a little bit: your brain may be a mess, and the best way to organize it is maps of maps of maps of content.
One of the biggest paradigm shifts I experienced when using Obsidian was a shift in thinking away from thinking of it as a personal wiki or references software to a research and insight tool.
When I first started using it, I felt like it was important to assimilate bare facts into Obsidian. I’m interested in war and political histories, so I would try to write down things like dates of battles, biographic points on certain historical figures, and the like. What I realized over time is that I was basically writing a worse version of Wikipedia. All that information is quite accessible to me.
Now, before going forward, I’ll make a small caveat here for rather interesting facts you’ve never come across before. I think there’s value in writing down bare, interesting facts and mixing that in with your Obsidian vault. You may also write in that note or a note to go with it on why you found that interesting. If you write down why it’s interesting and link it to an existing concept, you’re starting to let interesting facts and ideas bump into each other.
I listened to a biography of president George HW Bush recently and found out that early in his political career, a Democratic political boss in Texas suggested that he switch his party affiliation, become a Democrat, and run for Senate in Texas in the early 1960s. Although you can find this fact on his Wikipedia page, it fits into a topic I find particularly interesting, the shifting party identities and political landscape of the United States. So, I make a note on this topic and note that this is why I find it interesting. I make a note about “shifting party identities” or something to that effect, and link out to this fact about George HW Bush.
Here’s the thing- if I treat that “shifting party identities” note as a “map”, I can link any other examples of shifting party affiliations to that note. I can link the idea of shifting party affiliations to political expediency or pragmatism more broadly. Now, I’m beginning to have a rabbit trail of thought to follow. Whenever I add more links to that note, it will accrue more value, and I don’t have to memorize or commit to heart that particular fact about George HW Bush- I just have a way of contextually getting back to that information if I were ever looking for it (e.g., searching for a good illustration, example, etc.)
If I had added this information to a page about George HW bush, then I would’ve been hard pressed to find this particular bit of minutiae among all the biographic points of George HW Bush.
The important caveat, though, is that it would also be helpful to connect this idea to George HW Bush as a person. So, I can make another “map” note about his life, and string together all notes in one place which are merely a summary of his life consisting of links to notes of atomic facts.
Without further belaboring this point, I will say that the goal after making atomic notes is to formulate creative ways for these ideas to bump into other ideas. When you discover (in your mind) that something you never would have thought was related to George HW Bush’s party affiliation actually might have some relevance, you’re making serious progress in generating new thoughts and insight.
These maps are called Maps Of Content (MOCs). You can create as many as you want. They will gain value over time and with the more (seemingly) disconnected ideas you can add to them. Don’t force connections where there aren’t any, but trust that with gradual work they will slowly become more interesting.
Which leads us to #4:
#4:
Break tasks into discrete steps
I love Rubik's Cubes as an illustration for this point. They are a task that seem to be impossibly complex, but when they're broken down into discrete steps, the only challenge of solving them becomes time.
Before I knew how to solve one myself, I used to take my friend’s cube and really try to mix it up good. I turned it so that no two colors were touching, as if that would make the challenge harder. It did not. He could always solve it in about the same amount of time, because he knew the individual steps to take.
He even got into solving more complicated puzzles, like the “Megaminx” pictured above, because he understood that once you understand the actual complexity presented, you could add on the marginal additional skill needed and apply earlier skills to the task at hand.
It is the same thing on Obsidian. As you write individual notes with propositional titles, let the structure of your vault emerge over time, and begin creating maps for notes to bump into one another, you’ll quickly reach a point where the complexity becomes daunting, and you won’t know what to do next.
The best advice I’ve found for how to push through this point is to understand what the steps you’re trying to accomplish are, and to separate every process into discrete steps that you can focus on doing one at a time. A “lifecycle” for a note for me currently looks like this:
Read a book
Find an interesting point, fact, or idea in a book. Make a “fleeting note” on paper with the page number, tuck it into the book.
When I’m not reading, set aside time to pull those notes out and turn them into notes in Obsidian. I make any links that are on the top of my head (such as a preceding point from the same source, or an association that sprung to mind naturally while reading). I add the tag “#obsidian/needsTags”
After some time, and when many of these “needsTags” tags have piled up, I attack that pile and starting adding tags to those notes. Since these are fresh notes, I may have also had some new thoughts after these thoughts. It becomes another opportunity to read the note, associate it with other notes, and add some tags.
If there’s a note that seems fruitful for further work or linking to something else I’ve read before (but doesn’t have a note), I’ll add “#obsidian/developing” or “#obsidian/futureLink”
Reading and generating notes are the two important steps, but steps 4 and 5 are two tasks that add additional value to these notes. Periodically looking through the lists of notes that seem fruitful for further thought are a great way to break things up into small tasks that can slowly add additional value to the vault. Don’t expect everything to come together all at once: in the same way that links create opportunities for dissimilar notes to “bump into” each other, I have found it helpful to create means to return to notes for further work.
Do #5:
Take Small Bites Every Day
An aqueduct moves water to where it wasn't before. It takes a lot of work to make, but once it's made you have water where you didn't have it before.
This may seem like an obvious point, but here are two additional things it has been helpful for me to remember as I build my Obsidian vault:
It takes time to build good things
When something has been made, there is value that didn’t exist before.
It is easy to look at the things people have built in Obsidian and feel a bit envious. Furthermore, in our modern era, it is very tempting to look at anything like “productivity hacking” or some LPT to boost productivity and expect that you can accomplish remarkable things in a short span of time. You may be able to, but I believe that productivity (even in 2021) is a bit more like an aqueduct than we generally think. It takes months or years to add stone on stone, it takes expertise, diligence, and for a long time we won’t see any returns. But, after we’ve finished, there will be water flowing across a valley and closer to where we need it. And, assuming it’s built well, it will flow for many years to come.
To that end, I think it’s important to remember our human proportions and scale and remember that it takes time to grow and build good things. I may have a day where I create twenty notes, I may have a day where I create one. But, if I am diligent towards working at the vault as many days in a row as I can, every day I will have a bit more in place than I did before.
You wouldn’t expect to go into a gym and immediately be able to bench 300 pounds or go out and run a 5 minute mile. Furthermore, you would not expect that any human being could ever lift a city bus entirely off the ground under their own strength, or run a mile in thirty seconds. Yet, we often don’t have a good sense of scale when it comes to tackling intellectual problems- some impressive things take time to achieve, and some things are just not possible for finite human beings. Yet, we still want to get good things done: the solution to this is to have high hopes, low expectations, and take little bites every day.
Remember, if something exists, it takes work. Yet it is qualitatively different than it not existing.
Humor me just a bit longer if this all seems quite obvious. It is easier to consume than to produce, and production sometimes feels quite painful or difficult. Yet, when we have produced something, there is value in that thing. Creating notes, one idea at a time, with a structure that is fitting to your interests, with connections that you did not anticipate, and that have been built up over time will be of immense value to you in your future intellectual endeavors.
I have books on my shelf that I read five years ago that I could not tell you one thing of substance about. I have notes in my vault from books I’ve read that I may be bumping into for years to come. I may forget the exact details of any given book I read, but if I have good notes pertaining to the ideas that came out of it, I will be able to bump into those ideas and use them at any point in the time to come. A vague memory of a book or a point made may be useful to you as a person, but it will be of little use in a writing or academic context other than surface-level summary.
So, take your discrete tasks and chip away at them a bit every day. The value of your vault compounds over time, so there’s no reason not to get to work today.
What shouldn’t I be doing?
Now that we have a good sense of “best practices” to guide your early work in Obsidian, let’s define those points in the negative sense. I’ll say it again- it will take time for you to figure out the processes and structures that work well for you. While it’s important to have ideals to strive for, I also think it’s important and helpful to look at some “negative examples” which are less than helpful. Here’s some of the negative principles, or things to avoid, that I’ve found.
Don’t #1:
Write overstuffed notes
For a better idea of what overstuffed or generally unhelpful notes look like, check out my post on writing progressively less stupid notes.
I’ll come at it a different way here, though. Hopefully you now understand the value of writing a note that is a value of a good propositional title and some elaboration in the note body. What is the harm of doing it differently, though?
I took notes on books in several ways on Obsidian, and one of the worst ways I did it (not already summarized in the post above) was basically listening to audiobooks and then making a quick summary of what I was listening to every five minutes of listening time or so. I often did this with Siri, simply dictating back a summary of the last several minutes in a sentence. When it was finished, I basically had a CliffsNotes version of the book in my own words. Seems helpful, right?
The problem is that there was no way for this information to mingle. Setting aside the problem of looking up the source material again in an audiobook, I had headings for each chapter and a summary of each chapter. What next?
To access any bit of information out of that book’s note, I would have to remember:
What the information was in the first place (“I think James Monroe had served in the Continental Army, but I’m not sure… I think I read a biography about him a few years ago?)
Where the information is located (“Was that in my ‘Books’ folder, or did I put that in a note about James Monroe himself?”)
Where in the source the information is located (“Ah, what chapter was that… let me scroll through this document.”)
Now, imagine that I had a note titled (with a proposition, a statement of fact) “James Monroe served in the Continental Army”. Even if I have 10,000 notes, and it’s not linked to anything, that note will show up in a search for either “James Monroe” or “Continental Army”. But, there should be other ways of accessing it, like:
Tags (#history/US/wars/revolutionaryWar, #people/monroeJames, #history/US/military, #presidents/monroe, etc. are all tags I might use on this file. And think! If I’m writing good propositional titles, even searching tags might give me some unexpected results that are worth looking at.)
Links (If I have been studying these topics for a while, I may have an MOC link from US History to Revolutionary War to Monroe, & etc. There may even be, for example, an MOC on military service of presidents that I could make.)
Search (Hopefully the last resort! But, if I see my note about James Monroe serving in the Continental Army as a search result, that’s far better than just a note coming up that’s titled “James Monroe” or “Continental Army”. Neither tells me much without reading it further.)
There may be other ways of accessing this information, but when a note is a single fact or statement, it becomes easier to find or integrate into other contexts. When there are large volumes of information in one note (like all of the biographical details from a person in one single note), it becomes hard to use the discrete facts in useful ways. For example, what happens if you read another biography about Monroe? Do you try to write a research paper in Obsidian comparing and contrasting the two sources? Do you write a separate lit review note for the second biography and just hope that you don’t overlap information too much?
The better alternative is condensing ideas into one note and then mingling them together in different ways.
Don’t #2:
Box yourself in with rigid structures
Even if you feel as though you've started working without a top-down structure, you can still over-plan and end up in a rigid structure. Rigid structures are anything which create friction when deciding where to put or how to use a note.
There are two “case studies” I’ll look at here: tags and “folgezettel”
Tags may be one of the more controversial features of Obsidian. It’s tempting to add a ton of tags, and it’s tempting to come up with a schema of tags that will allow everything to be in it’s “right place”. The outcome of this mindset is that you spend a ton of time trying to come up with a tag that adequately describes the note, or spend no time and end up with hundreds of tags that are only attached to one note.
I try to keep my usage of tags loose with the following assumptions built in:
Tags are a means of loosely associating notes. If links are directly related notes, then a link like “pragmatism” or “epistemology” might loosely link two notes. To me, it’s a speculative connection- the effect I want is “if I search this tag, what kind of notes do I want to bump into?” Furthermore,
It should be possible to narrow down relevant searches by adding more tags to the search term. If you search my vault, you are likely to get more notes than are helpful if you search “#art”. However, if you add some qualification (such as a sub-tag like “#art/institutions” or another tag like “#entertainment) the notes that come up should be reduced in number and closer to what I’m trying to read about.
All that’s to say, I don’t treat tags as the first means of finding a note, so I don’t stress about making sure I have a perfect taxonomy of the note described in the tags. While this allows me to be loose with the types of tags I add, I don’t try to think of every association or thought that might come from that note. I generally add 2-6 and then move on. Trying to over-fit tags to the note is a type of over-rigid structure.
One more comment on tags: Don’t be afraid to periodically review your list of tags and “clean up” and strange tags. Perhaps you don’t need “#process” and “#processes”. Maybe you had “#art/religion” and “#religion/art” when you really only need one. Cleaning up old and scattered tags can be a good way of reviewing old notes and thinking about distinctions between similar concepts, and can add value to the tags that remain.
Folgezettel, literally, “ordered notes” is a system that comes up in Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes. It is the use of prefixes of alternating numbers and letters to create implicit hierarchy between notes. 23a14ab3 would be the third note related to the 27th note related to the 14th note related to the first note related to the 23rd note of your vault. If this sounds like too much work to keep track of, you’re more or less right. It was the technique used by the grandfather of the Zettelkasten / PKM sytem, Niklas Luhmann when he was using physical notecards, and it has been superseded by better digital methods.
In the interest of full disclosure, I use this system (though, if I had to drop one layer of organization, it would probably be this). I find this to be a helpful “first stop” way of browsing my vault and immediately adding proximity to what I see as related ideas straight away, but I also had to write a rather complicated script to generate a hierarchical list so that it made sense to browse. The argument against this system which I actually sympathize with is that it is an over-rigid system which creates the question of “where does this note belong” when you should not have to answer that question immediately.
I would probably say if you’re just starting out, avoid this system unless it seems important to you to try. It is an over-rigid system which will likely create more friction than it’s worth.
Don’t #3
Write bad links
Just like my first point was basically an adaptation of someone else's advice, I think it's important here to highlight this blog post as it was extremely helpful in how I thought about links.
If you’re writing propositional titles, then the process of generating links between files is really the process of combining multiple propositions into new ideas. For example, if “running is good for your health” + “cardio exercise can help idea generation” + “establishing consistent routines help us enter flow state”, it might follow that “starting a habit of going for a run before writing can help us generate insight and add other health benefits”. This note, then, is a summary of three things you’ve read and might be a new insight.
You can never be sure when you’ll have an original idea. You can never be sure which thread of thought will eventually be spun into a more interesting tapestry. What you can do is make sure that as you’re writing links from files to files, you’re adding value to the note by explaining how one idea relates to another.
The blog post above should banish the simple “see also:” list from your vault. Instead, you should have a “How does this relate to Y? This reminds me of X because… Also, I think that Z may be a major contributing factor” list at the end of notes. Use link aliases in Obsidian to create a link which reframes the content of the note under a new title. You should not have to follow and read a link to understand if it’s worth, well, following and reading it.
All of this adds up when you’re navigating through your vault and trying to generate original thoughts: it makes the process as frictionless as possible if you understand why a link is there before you follow it.
Don’t #4:
Expect to finish everything
Doing good work slowly is better than doing shoddy work quickly. Furthermore, for as much as I’m a proponent of breaking things down into tasks which can be done later, sometimes it’s better to just do one thing right now and let some other things go.
Following up on references is a good example of this. I once made reference to a concept that I had remembered reading from an earlier book, but didn’t have a note for this. I ended up re-reading the relevant section of that book several times and making notes which were essentially foundational to the thing that I had remembered. I got around to the thing I was trying to reference, but while I had the book in front of me, it made sense to chip away at that reference while I had the material in front of me. The original point I was trying to make was left for a later date, and I added some value to my vault by tackling an old source.
As you work, you are going to end up creating open-ended to-do lists that may compound faster than you can truly process them. Don’t be afraid to just let some things go un-done. One thing you learn about Niklas Luhmann in How to Take Smart Notes is that he never forced himself to work in a particular area- he found ways of entering a flow-state by working at the things that seemed most interesting at a time. I have some books that are hanging with a hundred or more note “seeds”, or poorly formed ideas of something I could write a note about. I may finish it at some point, I may not. The unformed notes don’t have much value in my slipbox, but they’re better than nothing. I may go back there at some point and realize I need to add several notes urgently, or it may be perpetually unfinished. Either way is fine.
This is a tool for your research, and you are not likely to chase down every possibly interesting lead in a finite lifetime. That’s okay! Just work at what you can accomplish and seems most interesting on a given day, and you’ll be making progress.
Before moving on to the next point, I think there’s an important additional “bonus don’t” to look at before moving on:
Don’t #4a: try to integrate everything into Obsidian
When I first started using Obsidian, I had recently read several high-value books. I knew notes from these books would be helpful, and I wanted them in my vault. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, but the rub becomes- do you stop what you’re doing and add these books in? Do you just call them a lost cause and press forward in adding new books? The answer may be, a bit of both. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you have a limited time to add things in to your vault, so choose well what to add.
With the book mentioned above, I knew I wanted to link to that concept, so it took additional work of re-reading that section of the book and generating new notes. That’s totally fine to do. If you can give a summary of a book off-hand, chances are you understand the overall argument of the author well enough to faithfully capture small snippets of the text into notes. If it’s been five years and you can’t remember any details of the argument or the book, it may be worth re-reading in its entirety. But, as always, consider the time cost of actually re-reading things you’ve already read and decide how badly you need those notes in your slipbox.
It’s totally fine to just read a chapter or a section and capture a few relevant ideas out of it. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because everything you read, watch, or listen to might someday be relevant, everything must be taken down into Obsidian. You’ll get a feel of what will probably be helpful over time, though the temptation will almost certainly be to capture everything. Which leads us well to point #5:
Don’t #5:
Expect a day when you’ll be completely caught up
I think many people in the PKM world are folks who like tasks, goals, and pushing themselves.
I’m that way. I love to give myself things to do every day which are an effort to push myself and make incremental progress towards big goals. Yet, my aspirations can sometimes bloat beyond the scale my schedule allows. With this comes a perennial longing to just get “caught up”, and then I’ll be in much better shape. It’s not even limited to Obsidian and PKM. I’ve thought:
If only I had a day or two free to just look at some old photos and get together a new series, I’m sure I could get so much done
If I had an entire week to just make new work, I would make so many great photos
If I had like six hours of uninterrupted reading, I’d catch up on so many books I’ve been meaning to read
And so on, and so on.
It’s extremely easy to idolize a hypothetical span of hours, days, or weeks when we could really make huge dent in our growing “to-do” list and really just “catch up”.
Setting aside the question of “what does that mean, ‘caught up’?”, this is a bad way of thinking about your work.
Just like the artist cannot rely on “inspiration” to make work, but must be diligent in her or his studio practice to consistently produce work, so too does anyone attempting to do anything which takes a long time to work at need to work at it a bit every day. Once again, this is basically a restatement of “do #5”, but I think this is so important to generating something of lasting value.
Your PKM will take a huge amount of time to get into a state where it will surprise you with unexpected connections between previously unrelated thoughts. It’s hard to quantify when this will happen. It’s easy to think that if you could just get caught up on everything then it would happen; there’s no to know this for sure, though.
Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Reflect on what you’ve learned through taking the notes, as well as what you’ve learned about taking notes, and if you need to make a change then make it. But don’t expect it to happen quickly, and don’t expect a day when you’ll be “caught up” or “finished”! Such a day would mean you’re done being curious or done pressing into the things you don’t know, and I don’t think any of us want that day to come.
Resources
All the good stuff to get you going and keep you going.
This insight didn't drop out of the sky. Everything I've written so far comes from trying stuff other people wrote and putting my own spin on it after trying it for a bit.
So, it only makes sense to end by trying to make a good list of everything and everyone that helped along the way.
Nick Milo and Linking Your Thinking. Starting out, I frequently browsed his LYT Kit and his YouTube channel. Between those two things, there is a ton of free value to get you started. However, if you’re interested in his philosophy of note-taking and believe that Obsidian and PKM are worthwhile place to invest your time to create long-term thinking value, I can highly and personally recommend participating in the workshop. Having worked through it myself, I’ve found that having a community of learners around you along with more structured and specified time to lean into learning these principles in practice is a great aid to clarifying thought and practice.
Andy Matuschak’s Working Notes. This is a “working blog” and an example of his vault in action. Besides there being a great number of valuable insights here, it’s also a good example of a mature PKM. He’s put in a load of work to interrelated notes, propositional titles with context, and well-written links so that you can wander along his various trains of thought. It’s an inspiration both in form and content.
The Obsidian Discord is a great place to ask questions, get helpful feedback, and jump in on random discussions. It’s an extremely friendly and helpful place!
Zettelkasten.de is a great blog. Though they use tools other than Obsidian for their work, it’s a great blog to help you understand the process of reading, researching, and note-writing.
Bryan Jenks’ YouTube channel. Bryan does a wonderful job of breaking down his processes in extreme granularity, and can be a great jumping-off point to get you started. His introductions to Templater and Dataview were wonderful introductions to these very powerful plugins.
Eleanor Konik’s Obsidian Roundup is awesome for getting the latest news on Obsidian. She covers basically everything that happens in the Obsidian community, from app news, to plugin updates, to interesting workflow discussions- virtually anything of note that happens in the Obsidian world gets compiled and sent out weekly by her.
How to Take Smart Notes by Söhnke Ahrens is one of the “can’t miss” books about PKM. If you love reading some of the why behind the techniques listed here (especially as it pertains to linking discrete bits of information together) you will enjoy and get great benefit from this book.
