NOTE-TAKING
Here’s an app that wants to be your second brain
Obsidian is a new app designed to help you connect ideas and notes to each other.
So in the tech productivity world there's been a new note-taking app that's been making waves - Roam Research. It's a note-taking app that takes a bit of a different approach with how it manages your notes, as it tries to emulate your brain in the sense that you build a knowledge base by linking notes to each other, creating a network of notes, emulating the way that our brains make millions of neural networks.
The issue with Roam is that costs either $8 or $15 a month, and some people aren't prepared to pay that just yet. Obsidian does a lot of the same and it has a lot going for it given that all of your notes and data are stored locally, whereas Roam restricts you to their servers.
I've been using Obsidian for the past couple of weeks, and here's what I think of the app that aims to help you build a knowledge network with backlinks.
Availability
As of the 10th of July 2020, Obsidian is still in its beta, so there will be some bugs (which we'll talk about later). To get Obsidian, you can go here to download either a .exe (Windows), .dmg (Mac), AppImage (Linux) and Snap (Linux).
They've got a great community Discord server and have a Twitter page, both of which you can find links to on their website.
Pricing
In terms of pricing, Obsidian is free for personal use, and there’s an optional 25 dollars a month cost if you want to support the development, and after that there’s the $50 a month licence for commercial use. There are also certain addons that you can pay for, with those being a sync addon for about $8 a month, which enables your Markdown files to be synced to the cloud. There’s also the ‘publish’ addon, which is $16 a month, and this addon will allow you to publish your files directly to the internet.
Features
As I mentioned earlier, Obsidian is very similar to Roam Research, especially in the way that you can link notes to each other to form a second brain.
It's got a fantastic Markdown editor, with a plethora of options for formatting such as:
- Headers
- Lists
- Hyperlinks
- Blockquotes
- Code blocks and inline code
- Task List
- Tables
- Footnotes
- Math Equations
- Highlighting
- File/Note Embeds
This means that there is a ton of flexibility when it comes to having your notes look the way you want them to, and it's really good for structuring the notes. The only issue for me personally was that I had never used Markdown before, so a lot of this formatting was quite new to me, but this is an issue I was able to get over very quickly given that Obsidian has a comprehensive help guide that comes with the app (it's actually in the screenshot above).
There's also exceptional window management in the app, with what they call the note multiplexer. It has the ability to have notes split vertically or horizontally, and it's great for having reference material open when having to type something up (I'm actually typing this post in Obsidian). It's super easy to configure windows the way that you want them, and overall is something that I think more note-taking apps should adopt.
Note Multiplexer
This was a small, but greatly helpful feature. It essentially allowed you to open multiple notes at a time, in windows arranged however you pleased, and it was great for referencing notes and previewing notes that I was working on. Overall this was a great feature, and a creative one that I haven’t seen in many other note-taking apps.
Links and tags
Obsidian wants to act like your second brain, and as such it encourages you to be actively making connections between your notes, which leaves you with a knowledge base, full of connected notes much like the millions of connections in our brain.
There's very little friction when it comes to making links, which is great as friction is the enemy of getting things done. Linking notes is done by typing double square brackets and then selecting the note that you want linked. In addition to that, Obsidian has a 'graph view' which allows you to see all your connections visually.
I've been doing this note linking as much as I can in my personal notes, and I've found that although at first it can be hard (especially if like me you're used to a conventional note taking system like the one in Notion) when you do get used to it, you'll start actively looking for connections amongst notes. This is going to be useful further down the line, as it means that you will have information and thoughts in context, which is far better than having notes that are standalone, and have no relation to each other.
Various uses of this note linking could be in order to plan out your day, do some journalling, take research notes, or making evergreen notes out of the content that you watch and listen to. And on that note (pun intended) I have started to take notes on the content that I consume, as inspired by Ali Abdaal, Shu Omi and others (both of whom have fantastic YouTube channels by the way. What this has done for me is that I am now more aware of the content that I consume, and making notes on it in my own words ensures that I am able to remember more of the content.
In terms of tags, they help you tag content in order for easier searching — for example if I tagged two notes with (#obsidian) then when I click on the hashtag, the notes with that hashtag show up. I didn’t really use tags myself, but I have seen cases where tags are being used cleverly as a sorting method.
Plug-Ins
In the settings menu of the app, there are various plug-ins that can be enabled in order to enhance the overall experience of using Obsidian.
They include:
- File explorer
- Quick Search
- Use of the Zettelkasten prefixer (more here)
- Audio recorder
- Random Note
- Slides
And many more.
My personal favourites to use were the audio recorder (self explanatory)and the random note feature (enables a button that you can click to hop to a random note), as they enabled me to be spontaneous with my notes and increase my chances of coming across serendipity in my notes.
Final Verdict
Overall, in the time that I used Obsidian as my daily note-taking app, I found that for an app in beta, it was quite well polished with a great interface and user experience. I also found that I held a greater confidence in my data as everything was stored locally.
The backlinks were a concept that were new to me, and when I was able to link notes, they worked really well, with me being able to further remember what I had just written down due to its relevance with another piece of writing.
However the flip side of this feature was that I was much more used to the Notion/Evernote style of a hierarchy to my notes, and it was something that I found even past the learning curve, I was not able to get over. I believe that this has something to do with the fact that most of my notes are school notes, so maybe I will revisit Obsidian in a few years.
So me, personally I won’t be switching over from Notion but I can see why this is a great software to those who want to build a personal knowledge database.
My video on Obsidian (go subscribe while you’re at it 😃) -
Other helpful videos on Obsidian:
