Today I want to share my experience using Obsidian for personal productivity.
I'm really conservative person when it comes to the tools, so for many years I've been using hand-written notes and Notepad++ . But when I got more responsibilities and teams, I realized it difficult to keep the contexts, plans and agreements in the head or in the pile of files.
So I made one more attempt to find a better approach. My criteria is simple: if I can use an app within 10 minutes and it doesn't annoy me, it's a winner 😃. Obsidian became my love from the first screen.
At first glance, it's really simple: just a tree of files and folders, markdown and tags. That's enough to start. Of course, the real power of Obsidian is in its plugins. Obsidian has a great community with hundreds of plugins for different use cases.
Finally I came up with the following configuration:
✏️ 2 Obsidian Vaults:
1) Personal: my personal knowledge base. I use it with paid sync across all devices.
2) Work: everything is related to work. This vault stores data on work notebook only (you know, NDA, security 😉)
✏️ Folders. I organize data by domains to group projects or huge topics.
✏️ Tags. It's very convenient to mark all information and tasks to easily search them in the future.
✏️ Tasks. It's a separate plugin. It allows to create tasks, specify due dates and priorities. But the best part is that it gives you an ability to query and group tasks from different files into a single view. For example, I have a file
Today with the following query:```tasks
not done
due before tomorrow
sort by due
short mode
group by tags
````
✏️ Escalidraw. Plugin to draw simple Escalidraw diagrams.
✏️ Diagrams. The plugin integrates draw.io diagrams directly into Obsidian (Important! there is a bug, you need to disable Sketch style in settings to make it work). Edit view is not so convenient as drawio app, so to prepare diagrams I still use native app but for preview purposes, I use this plugin.
If IDE is a working place for your code, Obsidian is a working place for your thoughts. My knowledge base is growing, and now I don't understand how I survive without that before 🙂.
#softskills #productivity