Obsidian rabbit hole

If you know, you know.

Image by vecstock on Freepik

After a colleague showed me Obsidian, I immediately caught the bug. A piece of software that lets you create notes in a personal, locally stored wiki? And it’s free?

At first it looked like it might not be free, and that subscribing to Obsidian Sync would be needed for me because I use two devices. Not true! So about one week after declaring that Obsidian ‘looked great, but is not for me right now’ I stopped resisting and started setting up my first Vault.

Back story

Understanding that I had already encountered difficulty working across two different work desks and that this only recently felt resolved, may give insight to why I felt trepidation about asking my computers to play nicely together with a new toy. My PC is my home desk machine and my laptop is my work desk and mobile machine. A lot of my storage, sharing and syncing issues have been triaged for years with solutions in Dropbox and Google Drive.

Does this sound like you?

A recent writing scare had already alerted me that my system needed a change. When a colleague and I lost a paper draft in Google Drive (deleted somehow?) we were gutted. Fortunately we had a saved version that was not too old so we didn’t loose too much work (hooray!) but the motivation to stop relying on those clouds to store original writing was sewn.

Another source of frustration lately is having to re-read papers that I had read and taken notes about ‘somewhere’… but I had lost track of where. Hence I had lost track of the notes, hence the re-reading. I needed a place to keep my reading notes and was looking again at my (dusty) Mendeley library to be that place. I know I’ve tried using Mendeley (and previously, EndNote) for making notes on readings before, and I never stick with it. Using their note making systems feels boring, and the notes seem too buried and tied to their papers to be useful.

Obsidian phase

None of my problems are very new or unique to me. I have been through phases of trying to collect notes and writing with digital tools (e.g. Evernote, Onenote) and with tools that feature tags and linking (e.g. blogs, wikis). I’m reluctant to call my Wordpress blog phase ‘over’, but the stats don’t lie and I have not written regularly there since 2020. It used to be a great place for writing scraps of thought that I could come back to later, so where have the scraps been going since then? (Possibly…nowhere safe? Oh dear.)

I can see how these phases have started and ended for various personal or technical reasons. I stopped using Evernote when it stopped being free. I stopped using Onenote when I stopped being able to sync it across my machines. I think I slowed down using my blog as my pensieve around 2018 when a textbook writing project took over my writing time, and I had certainly stopped by the end of 2020.

Public writing feels different in the pandemic/post-truth era. It’s a less nourishing and encouraging space, and more risky. But I definitely miss the linked writing that came with blogging.

Downloading and plugging in

Downloading Obsidian is super easy.

Working out what to do with it, for me, has meant finding a range of holes in my workflow. And resetting a lot of passwords. Assume that almost every step I took required a password reset.

Digital clean up tasks that setting up Obsidian has prompted me to tackle:

• Make OneDrive work on my home PC. It has been causing me grief for 6 months and honestly I had stopped trying and was just using my OneDrive off the web. But I need OneDrive working as directory or I can’t keep my Obsidian vaults synced across my PC and laptop for free.

• An Evernote clear out. Without collecting my old notes from EverNote I would not be addressing my problem of having lost track of notes made in 2013-2016.

• A Onenote clear out. As above, but for notes made from 2016-2019. This required the extra step of uni admin approval for Obsidian to collect notes from my Onenote notebooks.

• Reconnect with Mendeley reference manager (after not maintaining it last year). This will let me make use of the potential for linking reading notes in Obsidian to a bibliographic record and copy of the paper. The alternative is making bibliographic notes in Obsidian and that sounds awfully labourious. Apparently Obsidian integration for a reference manager is easier with Zotero...still working out how to connect Mendeley to Obsidian but in the meantime I am using a reference manager again, which is important too.

Those are the major steps I remember. It has been a month of organising and clarifying and I still have A LOT of tabs open on my browser.

Next week university teaching starts for me and I will see if this new tool is everything it’s cracked up to be by the end of semester.

Reflection on note-making

Looking back over my note-making habits has been a revelatory aspect of this process, and I see that I used EverNote and OneNote effectively for about three years each. If it’s novelty that I need in my motivation cycle, I expect to get three years of productive use out of Obsidian, until around 2027. But I hope I will get more out of this investment, as the promise of having a true second brain with all of my own notes in one place is something I dearly want to enjoy.