Table of Contents
On December 26th, 2023, I started my new and current vault in Obsidian, and was one of the best decisions that I could bring to my 2023. Now I’m doing the review around this beautiful tool that follows me in my entire year.
In the last years of my life, I turned more and more of a heavy user of note-taking tools, even those “rudimentar” ones like a pen and paper, I already tried a lot of tools around this subject, like Logseq, Notion, Bear, Apple Notes, Evernote, and finally Emacs with org-mode, when I thought that would be the state of the art of note-taking tools for me, and yes, I think that Emacs with org-mode is one of the best tools that I’ve used in my entire life. And I used it for about two years, and was good.
Although I like to use org-mode, I always felt that having a tool fits my workflow more easily. I’d like to just put words into a file and push it to a place where I could find it easier in the future. And well, I think that I finally found it.
Obsidian and My Workflow
The powerful philosophy around Obsidian is the concept of File over App that Steph Ango writes about. By the fact that it’s just a tool that handles Markdown files in a better way and you can enhance this experience with some community plugins, you can have infinite ways to manage your workflow.
It’s one of the core arguments that shows why I think that Obsidian was the best tool for me at that moment, and fit it until now. If I want to move it to another app or build my solution, I just need to handle a bunch of Markdown files and everything will work great, it’s a future-proof solution.
My workflow is simple despite the range of community plugins and what you can do inside a vault, I just have six plugins, being them plugins that help me automatize some jobs, such as the Commander, QuickAdd, Templater, and Dataview, a query language plugin, allows me to do some specific tooling in my notes, but avoid it as much as possible.
I try to maintain each note as raw as possible, just with what we can find in Markdown by default because I want to help me to migrate to another software if I need to in the future.
Obsidian and My Learnings
I would say that was an awesome year for my note-taking habits in general. I could develop more about this habit and I can found what are the exact ways that work for me. I don’t know everything yet, and every day I try to improve some aspect of this habit, but I saw a lot of improvements in my entire life just by taking some notes during my day.
Some statistics about what I did in my 2023 year with Obsdian:
- I wrote a total of 512 notes.
- 227 of them are daily journaling, which is ~44.33% of my entire vault.
- 251 of them are related to my Zettelkasten, which is ~49% of my entire vault.
- 30 of them are drafts of blog posts that I hope someday will be the light, which is ~5.85% of my vault.
- I added 107 tags between the files, being the #computer-science the most used tag, with 130 files.
These are some statistics related to my work on my vault in this year, I believe that 2024 will be greater than that.
The major learning related to my adventure with Obsidian was: that note-taking isn’t about the tools that you use but about your process. A great process allows you to arrange your notes in a creative, better way that fits your expectations. Regardless of being Notion, Obsidian or just using your pen and a notebook. What matters is your process.
By the way, this is the graph of my Obsidian on the day that I wrote this post, let’s see how it will be in the next year:
