How take notes + my Obsidian setup
For the past year, Obsidian has been my note-taking companion. I don't care about fancy features like backlinks, canvas… I like Obsidian because it's fast, minimal (up to you!), customizable, works with Markdown files, and has a good enough mobile app.
I've slowly grown towards a more consistent way of taking and organizing notes. While I'm using Obsidian, it's a system that can easily be ported to any other tool as long as you have something that resembles a filesystem.
My first attempt at Obsidian was years ago, but didn't last long. It was a clunky Electron app that looked out of place between polished native apps. A few years later, I was consistently drawn towards Kepano's philosophy on apps and other things. Kepano is Obsidian's CEO. How could I feel so aligned with the maker but not with the tool itself? I gave it another shot, and it turned out Obsidian had come a long way.
Despite having read a lot (too much) about second brains, I'm not a second brain maximizer. I want a note taking tool to keep me on track in the moment. I don't need to remember what I ate on the second Thursday of last September. The most important takeaway from Tiago Forte's (the second brain guy) PARA organization is to keep notes organized by agency, not category. That's why I use my Now, Next, Notes setup for organization.
