Hacking your brain with Obsidian.md
Added 2023-07-06 17:59:43 +0000 UTCI have used many note-taking tools over the years, simple-note, notion, and extensively emacs org-mode, none have improved my thinking in the way that Obsidian has.
Today is a deep-dive into my second brain, and if you take my advice, YOUR second brain.
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I wasn't supposed to do this video this fortnight - I had planned to do a video extolling the virtues of using the vim keybindings everywhere (in browsers, non-vim editors, spotify clients etc etc). But I realised that I finally HAD to do my long-promised Obsidian video!
If you have space in your life for a digital note-taker, or a second brain, you owe it to yourself to try it!
Thank you all for your support, talk to you next time! <3
Comments
Extremely lucky. It's the most important job in the world, and I'm pleased that other highly qualified people are doing it :-)
No Boilerplate
2024-06-24 19:20:02 +0000 UTCApologies for the delay in my response, rsi has caused challenges! The feature for all this extra metadata Obsidian calls 'properties', which you might know as 'yaml frontmatter' in other markdown systems (such as static site generators). It's fantastic, and allows you to turn your obsidian vault into a queryable database using the dataview plugin. Try the Projects plugin too! Here's nicolevdh's intro to properties https://youtu.be/RrxqkIhh9L8?t=107 My wife and I also use an external system - todoist - for collaborating on household tasks. Obsidian is not for collaboration, it's your brain! I put everything into obsidian, tasks, notes, my writing - the network effect means the more you use it, the more useful it becomes. But understand the border of the system - it's not an inbox, use paper or apple notes, and it's not for collaboration, use other systems.
No Boilerplate
2024-06-24 19:19:13 +0000 UTCAlso, if you've planned to become a father. (you possibly decided not to, sorry to bring that up in that case.). It's a shock! I'm new father in mid 40s, recently diagnosed still trying to figure out what's different about me is tied to what. You've been lucky to have had parents doing what they did.
Renoir Boulanger
2024-06-24 18:11:14 +0000 UTCI see you mentioned you use tasks stored in some way. Something I've heard you say about context. Because otherwise you'd get too many items and get lost (I do!). Do you also use Obsidian for the purpose of things to do? What about all the other info you might (optionally) want to add: - required by ... - due date - URL Because a task that doesn't describe the "definition of done" can remain unfinished. If a task is about "getting medication refills", but you'd need to know how many days of doses you have left of the ones you have plenty of, which ones really are getting lower. (etc.) and the phone number. You may have the phone number of the pharmacy, already know the medications. What's your take here about tasks and metadata? I see that Apple Reminders is good for things shared with partner, and recurring things like Internet, Electricity, city tax bills. Grocery, so that wife can add them and when I go to grocery I can tick them off. Things that doesn't need much planning and deep thought time. Like programming and sysadmin stuff. I've been using Apple Reminder. Because that's what my wife and I own, and we have a shared list "Grocery" where she can write it down instead of making sound wave resonating into the walls and lost for the rest of eternity. Like I was saying, what of the metadata of context. Tasks that you know you're going into focus mode for X domain, say sysadmin. For example, you have tasks for home network IP address topology, other tasks for container servers to setup, services to migrate how they're composed, a list of programming ideas to improve such and such, things to do for gardening at a specific time, wife’s email service spam filter and mine, house tasks, baby tasks. It's a swarm of tasks. I'm still struggling with that one. I have Brazilon of notes, things to do on my LAN, on my NAS, on my Switch, on my DNS, on my public VM, Home Assistant, (...) and I just get overwhelmed with all of them and never do them.
Renoir Boulanger
2024-06-14 04:24:17 +0000 UTCMy pleasure! The plugins are WILD aren't they? Every time I go searching I find 5 that could revolutionise my workflow XD
No Boilerplate
2023-07-16 10:25:28 +0000 UTCThank you for this video and bringing obsidian to our attention. Started using obsidian and did a lot of cleanup of my Google Drive. Like it so far and damn these plugins are awesome!
Iton
2023-07-15 22:37:44 +0000 UTCorg-mode, and roam and babel and request.el are SO good for developers, and if you never want those features on mobile, org has you covered. I make up for those features with simple external tools (see my repo for my literate programming watcher) and I'm able to do that because my whole brain is plain text, so parsing of rust blocks is easy. Most features of org-mode are available, and then some, but if you don't need mobile sync, I'd stick with emacs :-)
No Boilerplate
2023-07-12 08:00:09 +0000 UTCYeah! There's been many of requests for my own plugin setup and workflow - my workflow is in such flux that I'll have to do that when it's settled down!
No Boilerplate
2023-07-12 07:59:26 +0000 UTCOther than that, do you plan to make a video about obsidian plugins for developers? In org-mode it's extremely easy to link to code files and also using babel you can actually run code, is there anything like this in obsidian aside from jupyter integration?
Jakub
2023-07-10 13:09:44 +0000 UTCGreat video! Do you consider followups? I'm using org-roam and the only features I feel missing compared to obsidian are sync (not a big problem) and canvas.
Jakub
2023-07-10 13:08:20 +0000 UTCYeah, Logseq looks promising, but it's no way more powerful, the features are very immature compared to obsidian, especially the community and plugins. Mobile sync is only in alpha, and that's a hard requirement for me too. I imagine if logseq continues to mature, I'll switch to it - I'm super relaxed about switching because my obsidian data is in standard markdown ☺️
No Boilerplate
2023-07-07 07:48:16 +0000 UTCA lot of people switched from Obisidian to Logseq , as more powerful, and easier to adopt to personal needs and "own your data" privacy, as Opensource. Logseq data model seems like took lessons from obisidian and proposed improved way of storing, quering, retriving. They rethink concept so there are some differences in paradigm, but once one invests a bit of time of embrace Logseq paradigm, I see that considersnit worthwile time spend. ( btw. Here I described my setup , I used syncthing and git for more powerful syncing instead of buildin sycn feature: https://twitter.com/GWierzowiecki/status/1675135208385806336 and https://www.reddit.com/r/logseq/comments/re0iay/comment/jq98v0a/ )
Grzegorz Wierzowiecki
2023-07-07 07:26:27 +0000 UTC
