Over this past week, I’ve been importing my notes into Obsidian, a notes app I’ve heard much about and have finally taken the plunge to using. If you haven’t heard, Obsidian is a notes app which uses markdown note files (ending in .md) on your computer and presents it nicely. What that means is that the notes stay on your computer, no matter what happens to Obsidian. Contrast that with my current notes app, Notion, where the notes are stored on some server somewhere, unable to be accessed if I have no internet connection or where they could disappear if Notion goes bankrupt. But the bigger reason to use Obsidian is its unique linking method — you can link to other notes, like your own personal Wikipedia. This enables you to easily see how your notes connect, and the app even includes a graph view so you can visually see the intersections of your notes.

Can I confirm that this is better? So far, even though I’ve only been using it a week, I am blown away. Here’s why. To transfer my notes over, I’ve been opening the note in Notion, then copying it over to its own note in Obsidian. Simultaneously, I’ve been cleaning up the reference file in Zotero, which I’ve started using over EndNote after a syncing scare in early January. After getting the reference, I’ve been putting the Chicago bibliography reference at the start of the note so I could quickly access it if necessary. I usually get the references online, and while this is much more time-saving than putting them in manually, there is often some missing information or extraneous information which I have only been cleaning up case-by-case, not directly in the reference manager (oops). Then, I’ve been adding more to my annotations. I used to be very good at writing annotations after reading and taking notes, but I was very lax last year. Ironically, teaching a course on research methods reminded me the importance of having annotations! While I always had small ones, I’ve been fleshing them out now to the 100-200 words I would normally aim for. Then, in the body of the notes (dot point paraphrases and quotes, each with page numbers) I scan through and see what other notes from my collection I could link to so far. Normally I think these when writing, but the benefit of Obsidian is I no longer have to remember this or re-discover them. Once I open a note in Obsidian, I can see exactly what links to it from other notes, and where it links to. For example, Hood’s article defining bi-musicality links to Becker’s 1983 critique of it, and it is referenced in articles on compositional ethnomusicology, meaning in Balinese gamelan, and the same Becker article it links to. Opening this note, I can easily see every other note which is related to this one, meaning I can follow my own rabbit hole of linking thoughts. Often, I’m not even trying to get this to happen naturally, like you would see in a Wikipedia article. I’ve been getting to the end of dot point and writing something like “for more on this, see (linked article)”. But it does the job!

This method of linking and back-linking is, I think, revolutionary, and why Obsidian is so popular. I was sceptical at first, but my first impressions are very positive, more so than I have ever experienced with Notion. While I still think there is a use-case for Notion, I think it will take a backseat in my workflow in favour of other systems like Obsidian which may integrate better with my workflow.

Which notes apps do you use in your workflows? I’d love to hear more from you about how you work, so let me know in the comments below.