Obsidian is for building my body of work
Obsidian is a new-to-market knowledge management tool that runs on locally-stored markdown files. No cloud or web servers involved.
Tools for managing information overload and improving how we think are on the rise, and Obsidian is one of these tools.
Obsidian helps build and improve ideas over time by linking your thinking
The tool is designed for networked thinking and automatically connects notes with one another to help you build out your web of thinking by writing similarly to how we think: non-linearly.
Non-linear writing’s ability to jump from sentence to sentence, idea to idea, changes the way the mind thinks through ideas. Obsidian helps you ride the waves of your thoughts, clicking from one idea to the next, writing a bit here and a bit there, while encouraging you to connect you notes with one another to help build out ideas. It’s a wonderful tool for practicing zoom-in-zoom-out thinking.
This note is part of a small series highlighting my digital ecosystem. If you want to setup your own, here is a walkthrough on how to setup this system: Obsidian Jekyll workflow
Ideas improve by writing about them not by thinking about them, and Obsidian is here to help you refine ideas over time, stack the bricks, andbuild a body of work. Who knows what comes from caring for the ideas in this digital garden.
That said, It’s not a writing system, it’s a thinking system whose byproduct is writing, and Obsidian makes it easy to iterate on ideas and publish them to this site through a git workflow and Jekyll website, which also runs on markdown files.
While these notes are written for myself, it’s important to Share ideas before they’re ready, and Obsidian helps advance many ideas simultaneously by making it easy to build on any thought at any time.
With the app being focused on text and text only, it removes the distractions of visuals, file management, structure and hierarchy needs and more.
This became important to me after a few months of using Craft. I love that app, and it is currently my go-to app for daily notes and writing, but I feel myself coming back towards Obsidian because of that bold line above: it’s text only, and I think the style and ingenuity of Craft is needed with a certain layer of work, but it’s more of a workspace and less of a thinking space, if that makes any sense. It’s become where my daily work gets done, and it includes files, links, resources, public pages, visuals and more. The simplicity of Obsidian is unrivaled, and even in this moment I’m finding myself doing more writing and thinking than I do with Craft. I don’t think I knew how much I meant it when I said Notion is my workspace. Obsidian might become my thinking space.
And yes, they can—and do—work together.