Ultimate Notetaking: My Neovim Zettelkasten Based on Obsidian - Complete Walkthrough

Hello. Today, I would like to show you my notetaking system. I recently created a video about my whole workflow on Mac OS, which is based on the terminal and Neovim. And in there, my notetaking was a part of that as well. A few of you have asked me some questions about the system and were curious about it, so I created this mind map to help me sort of structure my thoughts around this. And I invite you to come along for the journey as we explore this mind map.

So, in the middle here, we have notetaking, and I'll tell you the story of how I got into notetaking. I studied at university, and I used to take notes in written journals. I passed university just fine doing that. And this is also the time when digital formats came along, where it was becoming very established to hand in things digitally. So, I also had this sort of growing collection of things that were in a Google Drive somewhere, but there was never really a system, right? Everybody has this; everybody has these notes and files floating around without any system behind it, or without any sort of thought behind it.

Then, about three years ago, I changed my career to IT. I made a total switch. And at the same time, I got into a phenomenon called personal knowledge management. This is part of this whole productivity niche on YouTube, by the likes of Ali Abdaal and all those very interesting people. And that really inspired me to sort of build my own system around this and to be very intentional about how I create notes. It has given me so many benefits that I, yeah, my hope is that by sharing this system that I use, or the way I have used this, that it might inspire others to do this as well. Because, as I made this career change, it was a very good moment to start taking notes because I was learning so many new things, and I had to document these things and keep them as a reference.

So, yeah, that brings me to the point: why, right? And here I said the reference. It's basically because I basically have a bad memory. I don't remember things very well verbatim, and it's very useful to me to have a sort of personal database of knowledge that I can search in, or look up things that I need.

And one of the big 'whys' here is this: it's summarized beautifully by this quote by Tiago Forte. As you are watching this video, I assume you know who he is. If you don't, then I highly suggest you check him out and his book, 'Building a Second Brain,' which is a very, yeah, very big part of my whole system here. But this quote says, 'Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.'

And I totally, totally agree with this. This is so, so true, especially if you are a knowledge worker like myself. I'm a DevOps engineer; I work with infrastructure as code, cloud computing, programming, coding, all these kinds of things. And this world, that world, is constantly under development. There's constantly new technologies coming out, and it really makes such a difference to have a system established for yourself where you can efficiently store and retrieve information from.

And so, this quote has been a really, real guiding principle in my own system and how it will function in the time to come. Because, yeah, not trying to speak highly of myself, but I have managed to completely change my career, and I've been getting very good feedback on my output. And people really appreciate my presence in teams as I join them as a consultant. But also, other people who I greatly respect in the technical sense, like in terms of their technical knowledge, but also their personal skills. There are a few very senior people out there that I respect very much, and all of them have something in common: and that is a notetaking system which they use extensively. And the best ones are also willing to share the notes publicly.

And that brings me to this point of content creation. So, one of the 'whys' is content creation. I have a blog, and I'll show you. I'll just quickly pull it up here. My blog is a collection of Markdown files rendered by Yugo. But this is basically the public part of my notetaking system, of my Zcast. The notes that I take for myself are live in a system, but they are also published on the internet as well. So, my Zelc, the notes that I decide are not personal and which can be of use to others, are actually published on a blog, and I'll go into that a bit later.

So, that is one of the reasons why I... let's open the drawing again. Here we go. One of the reasons why I do it is because it helps me to create content, to write articles, to write blog posts, to create YouTube videos. And I do that by sort of thinking of a concept, then searching my database of notes, and then gathering relevant information, being inspired by the other notes that I have there. And then this linking of notes and reading things as I go through my system helps me to generate new ideas and do creative thinking, because that's all creativity is, right? It's creating links between things and coming up with new, original ideas, or links between notes or concepts.

And also, I take a lot of notes on, yeah, on my life, basically. As I write here, 'thoughts and feelings' under the 'what' section, so I keep a daily journal, and I write about my feelings, my thoughts, the things that I'm doing, and noting down everything. And I find that very therapeutic. It helps me to reflect on what's going on in my life and to understand things better. It's very often that I find that when I write something down, it helps me to process something. And I wrote a little article about that, which is called 'The Power of Writing,' on my channel here, which you can look up if you are interested in how I think writing is very powerful.

So, let's just add that straight away. Here, I'll do 'Power of Writing,' and I'll just finish cleaning that up later. I will be adding a few notes here and there, and then this entire mind map will be available for download later, just so you know.

So, what do I take notes on? Well, basically everything. I am constantly learning new things. I love learning; I love discovering new concepts and doing new things. And this happens in the form of reading books, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos. And every time I learn something new, I will usually just write it down so that I can reference it later.

And sometimes I create a new note based on the podcast, right? So, I'll go into the Zcas method a little bit later and how I have implemented that. But basically, usually a podcast will be its own note, and I just write down all sorts of the thoughts that are in there. And then, concepts that I think will be useful in other notes as well, I will create separate notes out of. But basically, any activity where I'm consuming content or learning something is accompanied by taking notes.

And, yeah, I talked about thoughts and feelings. So, this means that I keep a daily journal and a daily note and weekly notes and such. I'll go into that here in the reflection part. But it also means that whenever I have an interesting idea, I will just dump it in my system. And very often, I will find that these random notes somehow pop up somewhere else, and then, even though they're not useful at the time when I make them, they will become useful later. So, that's the whole point, right? Capturing things, and then somehow, through serendipity, you come across the notes again, and then they are of some value to you at that point.

And how I do it is, yeah, mostly digitally. Like I said, in my university years, I did most things on paper. And I have also kept a written personal journal for years and years. I actually have a pretty nice handwriting, and I thought it was a very nice, mindful activity to sort of try to write neatly and slowly. And there are many studies about how handwriting has benefits in remembering things.

That being said, having notebooks has a big disadvantage in the sense that you can't look up information quickly. So, it's nice to sort of read through a paper notebook and see what you were up to in that year. But if I have 20 notebooks, and somewhere there is a note about a certain concept in Go programming, it takes me a lot of time to reach that note, right, if I don't have some sort of system to help me do that.

And that's the whole... it's a huge advantage of taking digital notes is that you're able to search them, and that they're also stored safely. So, if my apartment somehow caught fire, all of the notebooks that are behind me, they will be gone. I do have a project in mind to sort of scan everything and store everything digitally. I should really get going on that. But for now, if a fire breaks out, it's gone, right? And my digital stuff, if you are meticulous about your backup strategy, it will be stored forever. It's there forever. And the main advantage is that you can search it.

I think that's everything on the notetaking part in general. And then I would like to go into the tools that I use to take notes. My system is unique in the sense that I use both Neovim and Obsidian. There are many, many, many tools out there and many, many strategies, but these are the ones that I use consistently. And I have found that I can't use them... I can't exclude any of either of them. I need both, and that's probably going to stay like that forever.

But I started using Notion when I started my personal knowledge management journey. I started using Notion, and it's a great tool. It's accessible in the browser; you can create relational databases with your stuff, and it's super useful. And it was a great start on my personal knowledge management journey. But the main disadvantage to me is that it's stored with an external part that can have access to your notes. And I'm not that concerned that anybody is going to snoop through my daily thoughts, but it is something that was bugging me. And secondly, you don't have your text files. Your notes live in the cloud, but you are not able to manipulate these files. And that is why I completely fell in love with Obsidian when I discovered it.

So, Obsidian... if you're watching this video, I assume you already know what Obsidian is. But very, very quickly, Obsidian is the tool that I use now. Here, I'm actually using Excalidraw in Obsidian; I'll get into that later. But Obsidian basically has this concept of a vault, which is a set of folders on your local hard drive. And in each folder, there are Markdown files in which you keep your notes. And that is why, that is how I really got into Markdown and Obsidian as a tool. Because the thing is that I can have my notes on my drive, but I can run scripts on those notes. I can do other interesting things with those files if I want to. I can manipulate them exactly the way I want. They are mine. I can store them wherever I want. I can copy them. I can back them up the way I like. So, that is the main selling point for Obsidian for me: that it uses local Markdown files. And I love Markdown; I've completely fallen in love with that way of writing, and I'm never going back.

So, I started in Notion, then went to Obsidian, and then I used Obsidian for a long time. I still do. But in my daily work as a DevOps engineer, this is where I spend my time: right in the terminal. So, let me... I forgot to start my screen keys here. So, let me start casting my keys for those who like to see what I'm doing. And I'm also going to run the script that will increase the font size a bit so it's easier for you to see.

But this is where I work most of my time. I do coding. I am... let's see. I can go and log into my Kubernetes cluster here. So, I'm now logging into my Kubernetes cluster that's at home, and I'll be working and writing and checking out the logs and checking out how things are going here. And then in here, I need to access my notes, right? So, all of my coding, all of my work... let's bring up some code. Everything that I do happens in Neovim.

So, what you see me doing here is Neovim. This is a text editor, and the editor runs in the terminal here. And this is also why I like it so much. But this is an editor that runs in the terminal where you mainly use your keyboard for navigation; you don't use the mouse. And when I got into DevOps and changed my career to IT, I started out in Linux administration. These days, I work mostly with Kubernetes and cloud-native technology, Microsoft Azure. But then I learned about Vim and the power of editing files in the terminal right there, because you can log into servers, and Vim is usually always installed everywhere. So, you can edit text files locally on those servers. So, I got the advice to learn Vim, learn it well, and I fell completely in love with it. And that is what I use for my coding, for working with other files that are related to my work.

So, then it made a lot of sense to also start using Vim on my Markdown files, right? So, Obsidian has this... like, I'm now in my 'second brain' directory. And if I just open Vim here, you will see the directory structure that I have here. And this is created by Obsidian, right? This is what I created initially with Obsidian. But I found, well, I can also just query my notes in Neovim or from the terminal.

So, let's say I want to find all of the files related to Kubernetes. I do `FD cuber`, and then here I see 'Kubernetes change,' 'DevOps automation project,' 'Kubernetes Network debugging.' So, here I see all of the notes that have the word 'kuber' in the file name. Or if I would go and `grep` for 'function,' here I see all of the files that have the word 'function' in them. So, it's very powerful for me to have these files local on my PC so I can work with them from the terminal, and Vim is my tool of choice there.

So, I'll come back to Obsidian and how I use it, but let's go into the pros of Vim. So, yeah, like I said, I'm a terminal-focused DevOps engineer. And to sort of prove my point, let's say I am debugging something in a Kubernetes cluster, right? And then I am writing some code in this window, and then I think, 'Oh, I should write a Go program for this kind of thing.' So, let me review my notes on Go functions.

So, I'm in this directory here. I will create a new directory, let's say, call it 'go test' here. And I'm in this directory. Then I switch to a new window. I open Vim, search my files, and do 'go.' And then here I see, 'Oh, Go Loops,' that was what I needed. Or maybe I want 'Go functions,' and here I have my notes on variadic functions in Go. So, I'm reading through this note, and then, let's see, is there any code example here? Yeah, here's a code example. Here, I yank it. I switch back to my file here. I add a new file, `test.go`, and I paste it in. Tada!

So, this is why it's so powerful to have these notes. I don't have to bring my hand to my mouse and switch window, open up Obsidian, and sort of start clicking around and something like that. So, let's say I am now finished with this file, and then I'm going to go into another directory and create a 'bicep test' directory. I'm just improvising here. But let's say I want to create a Bicep file, and I remember, 'Oh, I had this Bicep course the other day.' And then I go to my Vim, I do 'bicep,' and here I have 'Advanced Bicep,' and here I see a `Target scope subscription`, a snippet that I like. I go back to my file, and I open the file `bicep.test`, and here I open it and paste, and boom, I have my code in here.

So, this is why it's so powerful, and I didn't lift my hands. I was doing everything from the keyboard here. And that is why I need Vim in my notetaking system. It is so incredibly efficient to learn this well, to be able to learn this well, and to access your information quickly, being able to do this from the command line like this, switching between windows, copying and pasting, and without any lag.

Let's say I'm debugging these logs. I see these logs. I want to copy this, and now I'll just use the mouse to select this. And then I go back to my notes, and then I can write, 'Noticed these mistakes in the logs,' and then here I paste them in. And you see how useful this is. Or if I'm noting or writing something here, and I open up my K9s again, I can have my thing here, and then I can describe my pod. And then I can write about what I see here, like, 'The IP IP is this and that,' 'The labels labels are configured this way.' And having this information so easily accessible without having to use the mouse is just incredibly useful, and it has increased my productivity a thousandfold.

So, enough about that. I think I brought the point across how efficient it is to learn how to do this well.

So, and here I also got into the Tmux thing that I was... I already showed that. So, this is what I was doing: switching between these windows. And if you are interested in this, look up the video about my workflow on Mac OS. But I can switch between windows, I can create new windows, I can have information available in several windows. I can split this one. And this is why this is all done by Tmux. So, Tmux is a terminal multiplexer which helps me to create screens or windows or panes that I can switch between and copy information between if I need to.

Next, I have Telescope. So, what you saw me doing in Vim here, I have a shortcut: I do `space FF`, and now I'm able to search the file names for things. So, I have some file name conventions, but usually my file names are representative of the contents. So, let's say I want to do something about running. Well, here I have a note about 'Running my first 10K.' I have notes about 'running form.'

And this is why Telescope is so powerful, because I can see these notes. First of all, it's a fuzzy finder. So, if I do 'Ry,' then it will find 'running.' See, if I do 'fun function,' then without the 'u,' it will still search 'functions.' So, it is a fuzzy finder. So, let's go back to the running example. Well, now I'm scrolling through these, and I have this preview window on the right. So, here I have a longer note, and I can scroll the preview here as well by pressing Control+D and Control+U. So, this is so incredibly powerful to quickly look up information because this is based on file names. But you can also base it on the contents of the note, which uses `grep`. So, `space SG`, and now I can start looking for 'function,' and here I see 'function.' I see all of the notes that contain the word 'function' in it. Or let's do another search for 'base training,' right? So, here I have all the notes that have the word 'Bas training' in it. And if I find this note, I can scroll up and down in it.

So, this is why it's so incredibly, incredibly useful to have Telescope in my workflow. Because searching in Obsidian is fine. So, let's say what it would look like if I'm in Obsidian here. I can search based on file names, so that would work, right? That's also a fuzzy finder. But you can also search based on the contents. So, 'base training,' this also works well. But I have to use my mouse, right? I'm clicking around; it's this very small screen. It's not very efficient. I have to sort of look into, move my head. And even though it would get the job done, it is much, much, much, much more efficient to do it this way: just opening up 'running' and then checking this out and scrolling up and down. So, it's incredibly... it's like magnitudes of... it's an order of magnitudes that it's more efficient. So, that's why I use Vim, basically, and specifically Telescope.

Another thing that I can use in Vim is Unix filters and scripts. So, a Unix filter is a command that takes input and outputs something. One example that I have is, let's do a `temp video test.markdown`. Here, I am writing a new Markdown file: 'Hello world.' And let's say I have written some stuff here, and now I want to have a title. So, this is going to be a very long title. I can type it like this: I can do `bang bang` and pipe it to the program `title`, and it converts it to title case.

So, the `title` command, if I do `which title`, is a Go program that I wrote, a very simple Go program. Can I find that very quickly? Can I just... Go? No, GitHub. Misha. Yeah, here we go. So, `title.go` here is a very, very simple Go program. It has a function; it takes a string, and then it takes the string and does the `title` built-in function on that string, and then it prints it out again. So, this is very, very useful to sort of basically be able to pipe what's called... you take the words that are on this line, and then with the Vim command, you can pipe it to the `title` command, and then it will return the values that you want. So, you can write all these programs, and they can act as standalone programs as you're working on the terminal, but you can also use them from within Vim.

Another thing that I have is the `space d` command that inserts the date in a certain format. Now, Obsidian has 10 pler, and it has all sorts of hotkeys that you can do those things with. But here, I can just use things like Go and Bash, and things that I use for work. I have this dotfiles repo with tons of scripts in them. These are all scripts that I regularly use, and these scripts I can either run them here from the command line, or I can call them from within Vim to help me with my text editing. So, that's another very useful functionality that you can use with Vim.

And, yeah, finally, something that I didn't put here, which I maybe should, or 'scripts,' maybe 'scripts' should be its own text field here: 'scripts.' Because I'll show you, I spoke about that. I keep daily notes. Well, when you open... I have Obsidian configured that when I open Obsidian, it will open up the daily note. So, if I... but I also have a hotkey that's Command+T, where it opens up the daily note. So, this is the place where I will be writing down, 'Today I had a pretty good day at work.' So, this is how a typical Obsidian user would use daily notes, and it works fine.

However, sometimes I am working in the command line, and I just want to quickly write something down. So, then I have a script that's called `day`. And here we have the same file opened up in Vim, right? 'Today I had a pretty good day at work.' You see, that's what I just wrote. So, let's add some text, 'and gone,' and I can go back to my work. So, sometimes I will have a thought that I want to do, or like, 'Remember to take out the laundry.' And then later, when I sit down to write my diary, then I will see that file again. I think, 'Oh, yeah, wait, I noted down I need to take out the take out the laundry.'

So, this `day` command that you see me using, that's actually just a script in my scripts library. It looks like this. And here I format the 'A,' and it just opens a file with a sort of template that I created, and it opens the file in Vim. So, it's ready for me to edit. If it's not there, it will create a new one. But this is how you can sort of extend your notetaking system and build custom commands and make it do things the way you want.

I have this other command that's called `blog Z`, and then it enters a file name, 'test for video.' And here it creates a Markdown file in my blog repo, and now it's ready for me to write a blog post. So, let's see, 'A test title for my blog post.' And then I can pipe this to `title` because I want it as a title, right? So, that's what I showed you here. Tags: 'hello.' And then this is my blog post. Then I can write it down. I do `blog reset`, and it will build my new blog, and it will show it here as 'Local Host.' And here you can see the blog that I just wrote, right?

So, you can build these scripts for yourself and build a workflow around your notetaking system. This is how I'm sort of merging those two together. And this is something that I think you can most efficiently do when you first of all know the command line and know these kinds of things, know Bash scripting, but also if you're used to editing text files with Vim. Because, maybe it's possible, but to write a Bash script that creates a file somewhere and has you ready to edit it as quickly as I did, and then have it open in Obsidian, I don't know if it can be done. And if it can be done, I don't think it will be as efficient as this. So, I think that's enough of why Vim is hugely efficient in my notetaking.

Now, let's go back to Obsidian here, and let's talk about why I still use Obsidian. Because if my Vim system is so damn efficient, why do I need Obsidian for, right? Well, Obsidian has some functionality which is so incredibly useful and powerful that I will probably never, never leave Obsidian ever again. Even so, that's the thing about my notes system: I keep them compatible with each other. I want to always make sure I can use them, but I also want to make sure that my system is always compatible with Obsidian. And the main reason for that is the visual aspect of Obsidian.

So, one thing I cannot do in my Vim notes... if I'm editing my daily note, oh, oops, here. If I'm editing my daily note, I cannot just paste in an image here. Image. This is the terminal; you can't work with images here. That's just simple as that. However, if I am going back to my daily note and I'm writing something here, and let's say I come across a very interesting thing on the internet or a nice picture, and I want to save this, I can just take a screenshot here, go back to Obsidian, and paste it in. That's not ever going to work in Vim. And now this image is here, but if I go back to Vim and open my daily note, I won't see the image. I see the reference to the image, but I won't see the image. So, Obsidian has the ability to be able to render images like this, but also just to paste them in, which is really handy if you are creating, if you're writing notes on something and you want to capture visual information from tutorials and things like that, then you can just paste them in right there.

Another, let's see, another very important part of the visual side of things in Obsidian is the graph. So, here you have the graph view. Every dot on this graph represents a note in my notetaking system. And I think it's very powerful to see that sometimes you get this sort of cluster of notes, right? Like, some of them I intentionally color yellow by using a tag, because I know that it's an important thing. But sometimes I'm in my view here, and then I see, 'Well, what is this here?' This is something that doesn't have the color, but apparently it's something that I am connecting a lot of notes to, right?

So, here is the one called 'writing.' Well, because it shows up as a thicker dot here, it means that I'm creating a lot of links to these notes. And these notes, apparently, 'writing' is a very important thing in my life, and yes, it is. Well, let's check out the connections to 'writing.' Well, it is connected to these big dots here. Here's a note on my 'Ikigai and Flow.' I'm not going to open that because it contains a few very personal things; that's the danger of making videos on your second brain or your notetaking system. But here's another one, like 'coding,' right? This is a very important part of my notetaking system which contains all sorts of notes.

Then, when I open the 'coding,' I can do 'open local graph,' and here I see all of the notes that are related to my coding, right? So, I have a note on 'Lua,' 'Learn Go functions,' 'Bicep SDK.' And if I go to 'Bicep,' then 'Bicep' is linked to all sorts of other notes. I can go 'Bicep random strings,' so here's an article that I wrote about Bicep strings. I go back to 'coding,' and I see, 'Oh, function. Oh, wait, here's that note on Go reading standing from Reading from a standard input output,' right?

So, this graph view is very useful in the sense of discovering new links, and it's just so cool to see your whole collection of notes living like a visual representation like this. It also shows me notes that are orphans that don't have links yet. So, sometimes I'll go through and just check out, 'Oh, this note that doesn't have any links, maybe I should link it to something.' Here's another one about 'Pod Disruption Budget.' Well, maybe this note should have a link to 'Kubernetes' because it's related to Kubernetes, right? And now it won't show up as an orphan anymore. So, it's a very nice thing to sort of interact with your notes like this and your Vault.

So, that's the other... oh, let's see, where is the drawing here? Back to the drawing. So, that's another very important thing of the visual part. And there's Excalidraw. So, that's what I'm using right now. Here, it's so powerful that this is now integrated into Obsidian. Because, like I'm doing here, you can create notes, you can create links to the notes, and they live in the drawing like this. I can embed notes. So, I have this... let's embed... do I have something about Zettelkasten? No, I don't have any topic notes on that. 'Writing.' Well, let's embed this 'Writing' note here, right? So, here we see, I have this other note living in my vault somewhere, but now I've embedded it here in Excalidraw.

So, Excalidraw itself is a separate tool, but now it's integrated into Obsidian. I'm able to sort of combine things and represent them in a visual way, and that is something I'm exploring more and more recently. And it's, yeah, this whole mind map is an example of this, right? A few years ago, I came across the book by Tony buan buzan buzan about mind mapping and how coloring and drawing things is very beneficial to thinking processes. And then I also learned how to draw. I'm a horrible, horrible drawer, as you see here, but it still helps with the creative process, right? So, I worked through this book, 'Drawing with the Left on the Left Side of the Brain.' It goes into how drawing lights up certain parts of your brain, how they are helpful in the thinking process. And even when I prepared this video, I just start with this concept, and I add pretty colors, and you sort of organically start to create these things that help. They really help me to think. So, I'm going to be exploring this more in my notetaking setup, and as I'm also becoming more established as a creator, I'm thinking this can be a very useful tool for me to create new things and to help me in my thinking process.

Obsidian also has a lot of plugins. So, one of the plugins that I use a lot is the Kindle plugin, the K Obsidian Kindle. You can just add your 'my clippings' file, and now I have all of my... let's do 'Sumo' here. Now I have all of the highlights that I made in my Kindle book about... this is a book, 'aan Sumo,' it's a Buddhist teacher. The book is called 'Direct Realization.' And at some point, I made the highlight: 'Letting go is therefore being able to bear with something unpleasant and not be caught up in anger and aversion. Dispassion is not depression.' It's a very beautiful quote.

And the power of having this in my second brain is that if I'm searching for things... so, here is 'depression.' So, say this might be a very risky thing to search for, but if I search for 'depression,' then here I get all of the notes that are 'depression,' but also the highlights that I made in the books. You see here, you see the directory name, it's called 'Kindle highlights,' and here you have all of the highlights that I made about depression. So, you see how this all starts to come together to have all of the information in one place. Well, that's why I used the Kindle plugin to sync in all of the highlights from my Kindle.

Another one is Anki. Anki is a program to create flashcards and to do, what's it called, space repetition for when I'm studying for exams and certifications and things like that. But then from here, I'm able to create flashcards from my notes. I think if I can quickly... is there an example here? Is there a quick example? '104 networking.' Yeah, here, these are this notation: `Nic` double quote, double quote, `network interface controller`. This means the front of the flashcard is 'NI,' and the back is 'network interface controller.' So, this creates flashcards from text, and it's very useful because you just run the plugin, and then it creates flashcards which you can use in unty and then use space repetition for study. So, that's a very useful thing.

And, yeah, the thing with Obsidian is it basically has infinite possibilities with all the plugins that you can make. Some people have created these hugely intricate things with Dataview, and I've used that a little bit myself too. But, yeah, there's just so much extensibility to Obsidian, so many things you can do, and that's a very big plus in Obsidian.

One other reason that I always will keep using Obsidian, probably, is the mobile access. So, it's great that I can work very efficiently from the terminal like this, but in order to do that, I need to be sitting behind the computer that is able to pull in these files and to run a terminal like this. I don't have that when I'm in the mountains and walking around, and I want to create a note or I want to share something that I meet.

Then, here, we always carry these things around these days. I can open up Obsidian on my phone, and it's loading now, but I open up Obsidian, and I have my entire note collection available to me from my phone. If I'm sitting on the bus and I want to look up something as I'm writing in a journal or something, then I have it all here. I can write notes, I can continue working on a document that I'm writing. I have my entire collection sitting in my pocket at all times, and that's incredibly powerful. And that's something that's not very easily achieved if you only use Vim or not use a tool like Obsidian.

And in order to achieve that, I use iCloud Sync. So, I'm very heavily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. I use a MacBook, I have an iPad, I have an iPhone. And before, I was running mostly on Linux and Windows, and that's one of the problems that I had: that it was becoming quite difficult to share my entire notetaking system in between systems.

I have since discovered the plugin Obsidian Git. So, my entire system is synchronized to a gate repository. It is currently in GitHub, but that's something that I am not very happy with. Like, I trust Microsoft, but in a way, it's not a very nice feeling to know that everything is there. So, I'm now considering having my own self-hosted Git instance in my home lab, and then create compressed, encrypted files that I will then back up to Git or somewhere else. But Obsidian Git is a way of synchronizing your notetaking system in between operating systems if you don't want to use iCloud Sync. But with iCloud Sync, I'm able to do that.

And of course, there is the Obsidian Sync service, which costs money. And I had that for about a year, mostly because I was using Linux and Windows and had to sync across these things, but also because I wanted to support the Obsidian project, because it just adds so much value to my life. Isn't it amazing that this tool is just entirely free? So, yeah, Obsidian Sync, it works great. It's all encrypted end-to-end, so give that a shot if you are not into the Apple ecosystem.

So, talked about visual, right? The thing is, I recently bought an iPad, and it comes with this pencil, and then you can draw. So, I have this open sometimes, and then I will draw or write, and I'm just having a lot of fun with it these days. So, I just had this little funny drawing where I'm sort of trying to symbolize a guy thinking very hard, and the gears are running, moving around, right? I drew this by hand, and then I do a bit of writing, and it makes everything become very alive, and it activates other parts of the brain. And I think this is helping me to think in new, creative ways.

So, on the bottom side of my mind map here is Zcast and reflection. Well, reflection is basically one of the functions of my notetaking system. So, yes, I take a lot of technical notes and technical topics when I'm learning something. I will create a note. But also, there is this part: reflection journaling, like I showed you on the daily notes, but also periodic notes. I have a template of weekly notes here, and here there are goals, and I will set intentions for the week. And then when the week is over, then I will go through and, 'How did it go with my intentions?' 'What are the most significant things that happened in my week?' And then I will note things down: 'How am I going with my goals?' 'Are there any tasks lingering?' 'Did I make any purchases that I regret?' So, this is a very useful tool for reflection.

And I have done this very consistently for about a year, and there was this point where I started seeing notes from last year in my searches, and that was a very powerful thing to see these notes from a year ago and what I was doing then. Now, recently, I've had a period where I wasn't doing it, and filling out these weekly notes started to feel like a chore. So, then I had a break from it. But then I started noticing, 'No, I kind of want this again.' I... it's a very nice way of checking in with yourself. Same for daily journaling. I had a phase recently of about a couple of months where I wasn't doing it, and I started really missing it. So, now I'm really back in the habit, and I'm doing it a lot. And that's the great thing about it, right? A notetaking system is something that evolves with you as a person and your needs, and you can try things out. And then you'll think, 'Well, I don't actually... maybe I did this and I found out that I don't really need that in my life anymore.' But in my case, I found out, 'Well, I do need it, and I like to do it.' So, that is a thing of reflection that I have in my notetaking system.

And there is project management. So, I'll get into it in the next section. That will go into the... I've talked a lot about the tools and the 'why' and how I take notes, what I take notes on. But now let's go into how I organize my notes and how I organize my notetaking system.

So, like many of you in this space, I have read the book 'How to Take Smart Notes' by sunka Ain, which introduced me to the Zcas method. And that changed my life, basically. Reading about him was such an experience, about Nicholas Lumen. And I wrote an article about my Neovim Zelc here; it's on my website, which will go into more depth into, yeah, why I take notes, what I take notes on, but how I've implemented this specifically with all the tech. You can read about it too. So, I will paste that in my thing here as well, and then it should be on the drawing as I export it later.

But this... a Zcas is just a place where you collect the notes and then you link them with unique identifiers. So, I currently have this approach to my notes as well. I have this one large... let's show it in Obsidian. I have a few folders. I do have a few folders still, but most of my notes live like here. You see how often I use Obsidian in the graphical sense, which is not very often. Here, here, here, I have this Zcast folder or directory, and that contains the majority of my notes here on the left. So, if you don't know what a Zel Casten is, look into it. It's a system of collecting notes and linking them, and the main thing is that you don't have a lot of folder structures where you keep these notes. They just live in this one big thing, and then you bring them together as you need them.

And the structure that I have chosen for my notetaking system, apart from the Zcas, is the PARA structure by Tiago Forte. And this... he advocates a... well, let's open it up in Vim because I think that will be a bit easier to see. So, here I have my 'second brain.'

Open and Thiago Forte has this PARA structure so Projects Areas Resources and Archive. And I adopted this structure. And even though I have a Zettelkasten that contains most of my notes, I still find quite a bit of value in this directory structure. So my my system is basically a mixture between Obsidian and Vim. And then mixing Zettelkasten with the PARA method.

So the Projects contain projects that I'm doing. So now I I have a project of revising my personal knowledge system. I'll get into that later. But I have a project of the Home Lab, which contains all of the notes that were related to my Home Lab. And then when I am finished with a project, then I will either move it somewhere else and or move it to the Archive. So most of my notes are being put into the Zettelkasten, but I find it quite useful to have them like when I'm doing a project to put my notes in a separate project folder.

Areas are the things that you are responsible for in the long on the long term. So here I have a few areas of interest and responsibility like my tech blog and my YouTube channel. Forte is my current customer. So I'll keep all of the notes that are for my customer there. Food is a large interest that I and health. So here are all the notes related to my health. And yeah, let's it's just rings, reps, and hypertrophy notes on sugar, uh, vegan protein, right? I just uh like when I'm when I am categorizing my notes, then sometimes I think it's useful to put it in here, even though I I most I hardly ever sort of go into the health folder and and look and what what notes do I have in my health folder. But I think somehow it will help someday to have them collected like this. And there's just this mental thing of having it having it in a folder like that.

Next, there's Resources. These are just, you know, areas of interest that you just put in notes like that and collect them this way. And the Archive contains the archive of all of your notes. So when I'm done with a project, I generally will move it to Resources or uh, the Archive. Or now my Home Lab is actually turning into a long-term responsibility. So that will very likely be moved to Areas.

I also have the Inbox folder. And that is a very useful thing. So when I I have this command that's called Zett, then it will ask me for a file name. And then I'll do video demo hello. And it creates this note. And it will be located. If I do PWD, I am now in my users Misha second brain inbox directory. So it will create a note in the Inbox. And then hello for the video video hello world. So you have this this note here now. And if I then open a new window and go to my inbox, there will be a video demo hello. And here is the VD the note here.

So as I'm going along in during the day, I will make a lot of these Zett entries. So every time I have an interesting thought or an interesting thing that I want to capture, I'll just do Z my random thought. And then random thought. And today I was thinking that it will will be very nice to get go out camping in the spring again. I don't know. I won't generally capture thoughts like this, but I might, you know. So I I capture them like this. And they are all collected in the Inbox folder. Uh, here there will be here my random thought. And then in Obsidian, usually once a week, I will go through my Inbox folder like this. And I have a few uh keyboard commands using a plugin. So command Y and then I open the Inbox. And then I will go Untitled or this can be deleted. So I will do delete file. Then I open the Inbox again. And go to uh, video demo hello. And I think, okay, this is a one for my YouTube channel folder. So then I'll move it in there. And that's that's a nice process because it go I go through the inbox like that. And then when I do I sort of have to look at my notes and evaluate if I still want to keep them in my system. So sometimes I keep some notes and then I I I write them on the fly. And then I think, well, I don't really need that in my in my system at all anymore.

There's this very good quote. Well, let's do a demonstration of my do I have a curator here? We go. Um, this is another showcase of how effective my system is, right? I I knew there was a quote that contained the word curator. I do a quick search. And here I have the the quote. We need to adopt the perspective of a curator, stepping back from the raging river and starting to make intentional decisions about information we want to fill our minds. Well, this is not exactly the one that I want. But here is um, like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab. Our goal should be to capture only the ideas and insights we think are truly not worthy. So not surprisingly, this is from the book Building a Second Brain by Thiago Forte. But this was actually a really nice example of why my system is so efficient. And that I can quickly search up things if I want to. Um, but the point I wanted to make is that I have this inbox. I once a week I go through it. And then it forces me to think about these notes like, do I really want them in there or not? And then I will either usually they go to straight to the Zettelkasten directory. And now it's moved. I press Ctrl M Z and it's in my Zettelkasten directory. Or I will delete the file by typing it. And now it's gone. So there is this uh that's the uh element of my um folder structure with the Inbox. The Zettelkasten that contains most of the notes. And then there are a few folders that are still helping me to have some sort of structure.

I am now revising this. I am I don't really want to use PARA anymore. But I do think that this Projects folder is going to stay because it really helps me um not to take on too many projects at the same time. I I should pray be I should usually limit myself to three projects at the most. And if I have certainly six uh folders in my Projects folder, then I know that I'm getting a bit too ambitious. And maybe I should few put a few things on hold. So it does help me reflect in that way. And I like the fact to have sort of separate things where I can store things that are related to my interests um that are longer term. Even though I don't usually go in and and look at the notes in that folder, it does help me somehow to yeah, have an organized feeling about things.

[Music]

Um, I have talked about the directory structure, PARA, Atomic notes. So I I was into this a little bit briefly. I I take small notes on with that contain topics. Sometimes I take longer notes like this bicep Advan. This is like a course that I did, which is a sort of longer notes that will contain all of the things that are based from that module. But if there is an interesting concept in here that is useful, that I think I will use in other notes or that can be useful to be linked to other notes, then I will create a more atomic note. For example, um, what did I did one on persistent volume, persistent storage here? Uh, PVC here. Here I created a note that has some thoughts about persistent volumes and reclaim policies. And I think this can be useful to embed somewhere, for example, or to when I'm writing an article about Kubernetes storage, then I I can link this to that storage. And then it will come up as I'm right. And in a creative process. So mostly I try to create small notes like on sugar or on vegan protein. And I there are smaller notes that I can link together. But sometimes I have bigger notes as well. So I'm not a Zettelkasten purist in that sense that I I do keep longer notes as well.

And as I went into a bit earlier, a large part of my Zettelkasten is actually published as a blog. Um, here you have this directory. I have my Zettelkasten directory with my my personal Zettelkasten. But in the Zettelkasten, there is a Zett directory. And that is actually the part that is published on my website as a um uh public Zettelkasten. But the great thing is that here we have this note Newsboat in Zen mode, for example. This is a note or yeah, a note on my public Zettelkasten. But if I am in my daily note and I want to link to my Newsboat in Zen mode, it I can still link to that, right? I can even embed it uh if I want to. And now my note is embedded in my daily note if I somehow wanted that. So this is stuff that is published on my blog, but I can still reference it in my personal Zettelkasten as well.

[Music]

Um, all right, we're getting close to the end now. I have spoken about blog, Atomic notes, and yeah, one last thing. The the Zettelkasten has this very um, the original method has this way of of identifying notes and with unique identifiers. I do use unique identifiers because if we look here, you will have this link section that has this number. So every note is that I create has automatic generated this um, this identifier, which I can use to link somehow reference it later if I want to. But my main identifiers are my file names. And if you look at the for example, the Zettelkasten of rwx Rob, you will see that all of his file names are actually numbers. And then if he want if he references other Zettel, then he will reference that that number. Well, I think it's much easier to much more user friendly to have my file names my files with an actual file name that I can recognize. The only thing is that it has to be unique. But I find that it's actually very easy to just come up with unique file names. And I rarely run into file names that are duplicates. If not, I will just add a number or another word. And it's not a problem for me to sort of have unique file names all the time. So I I I I use file names as identifiers in my current setup. And I don't use tags um in my my Zettelkasten. I I do use them on my blog. So here on my blog, I have tags. And if I go to Celium, then if you go to the post here, then you will see tag Celium. And actually because I do that, and because this is embedded in my Zettelkasten, then in my Obsidian repo, then in my vault uh, if I go here, and I will actually see the Celium tag here. Yeah, here here it shows up as Celium, right? So here I will see all the notes that are related to the Celium tag. So even though I don't actively use them, I do use them on my website. And I did use them in the beginning a bit. But I in terms of retrieving information or linking information, I don't currently use tags in my uh, in my workflow. But that might be subject to change. And that is about it on on the Zettelkasten um part of things. So that means we have gone through the entire mind map now. I've spoken about why I take notes and what I take notes on. I've spoken about the pros of Obsidian, the pros of Vim, and how I use those. And what I use my notes taking system for. And um, it is not a coincidence that I'm making this video now. Um, I'm about to start make taking more visual notes in Obsidian, like I was talking about. And this mind map is also a testimony to that. And I want to uh, I wanted to with this video capture way I've been doing things so far. So the way I have uh, I've been doing it like this for I would say well over a year that I started implementing PARA and and use that as a methodology for my my note taking system. Thiago Forte's method is extremely useful. It has really helped me to uh think about my note taking system more intentionally. Al and having this directory structure still helps me. So I might not get rid of it at all. We'll see what happens. But I am at this point where it's starting to itch and that I'm uh um discovering new things. I I'm now using Excalibrain more. I discovered Z's Personal Knowledge Management channel on YouTube. He has this amazing content about visual note taking and and implementing more visual things in your in your note taking. And I feel that I'm at a point of change in my my note taking system. So that's why I wanted to capture it here because I had been wanting to make this video for a very long time. And now that I have my good audio setup here, I feel that the time had come and that I felt ready to do it. And yeah, my conclusion is uh, I will probably always keep using both Vim and Obsidian. Each has their strength strengths and they both have great functionality. And they are uh both super super important to me. I interact with them for hours hours a day, every single day. And I I don't think I will use any other tools than Vim and Obsidian. But you never know. But I do as uh, even though my workflow has been mostly text based for up until now, mostly just markdown files and and noting things down in text form, I'm now going to explore um having more visual things. And also the the Excalibrain plugin. If I open my Kubernetes note here, and then there is this Excalibrain Excalibrain here. And here you will see all of these um relations in Excalibrain. And and then you can start you can start giving names to these links. And yeah, check out Z's Personal Knowledge Management channel because it's he he has gone really deep into it. He's actually developer of this plugin and the the Excalidraw plugin. So I'm very excited to enter this new era of my note taking system and employing or uh, or utilizing visual note taking more in my system as well. And and um, yeah, I'm curious to see what that is going to bring me. So to finish off, let's uh take a look at some stats down in the bottom right corner, which you cannot now you could maybe see it. Uh, it says here my my entire system is 167 megabytes large. It contains 1860 notes and 347 attachments, 2,27 files, and 3,833 links. And in total 563,000 words. So with those stats, I think I uh will close this video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this was uh useful to you. Maybe it will inspire you to set up your own note taking system. If you have any questions about how I did anything, please just ask them in the comment. I tend to reply to any comments on my on my tech related content. And um, it's nice for me to interact and to see interest in my system if anybody wants to know more about it. And um, yeah, if you are looking into this, just start. Don't try to don't watch thousands of videos and then get going. Download Obsidian, create a folder, and start taking notes. That's the most important thing. And then the organization will come later, as it did for me. And remember remember that this is a continuously evolving process. It it it will always um, like me, I I'm now revising things again. And it will always be subject to change. But um, get going as soon as possible because my note taking system is one of the most important assets that I have in my both my professional but also my personal life. All right, thank you so much for watching. Have a good day. And uh, see you in the next video.