Transcription
There are three main things that if you care about them make picking Obsidian over other note-taking apps a great idea. First, if you want near zero friction to capture your own ideas. Second, if you value connecting those ideas using links and back links. And third, if you want to improve your thinking, learning, and writing while using an offline local first format you can take with you anywhere instead of being stuck in one app or format.
If that's you, I'm about to share the essential 80% of all those features in Obsidian and how you can use them to get the most out of Obsidian in the shortest time. Let's start with what Obsidian actually is, which is just a vault, a folder of notes on your computer. Here it is right here on my desktop. It's that simple.
Inside this folder, your notes are just individual text files. These files are in a futurep proof format called Markdown. Open those files in Obsidian and they look like this. But you can also open them in any other app that reads markdown. Here's the same note in text edit, in VS Code, Ulyses, IIA Rider. So even if Obsidian disappears, as long as there are computers, you'll have a way to open your notes because at the end of the day, Obsidian is just looking at a folder with notes on your computer. You own your data.
But if you want to sync Obsidian across devices, there are ways to sync your vaults. You just connect Obsidian with any cloud storage service like Dropbox or Obsidian Sync, which is one of Obsidian's few paid official services, allowing you endtoend encryption and version history of all your vaults. Obsidian is so secure that no one on their sevenperson team even knows how many people have installed the app. Though their CEO estimates that it's between 5 to 10 million.
So, how does Obsidian work? Once you open Obsidian and create your first vault, you'll be here. Now, over on the left, here's a list of all the notes in your vault. Create a new note here. It's called Untitled. Let's go ahead and throw it in the folder. We can go ahead and create a new folder here. If we want to sort, we can click this and sort by file name or modified time or many others. If you lose where the current open note is in the sidebar, go ahead and click this and it will autoreveal the current file. And this button expands and collapses your folders. You go a little bit higher. Here's the search button where you can search across your entire vault of notes. If you click over here, there are bookmarks where we can bookmark different files that are important to us. or click back here and we're back to the file folder structure. And then click on a note to see it in the right. You can command-click or control-click on Mac or Windows to open notes in new tabs. Once open, you can click and drag a tab and move it anywhere into different panels for your unique type of multitasking.
Obsidian has a crazy amount of plugins and themes, folders, and metadata that you can add to your notes. It can be as simple as a note like this with a couple sentences and a couple links or something as complex as this with tons of property, images, embeds, and personal details. There's a steep learning curve if you try to do everything at once. So, let's start by making the simplest possible collection of notes.
So, let's go ahead and create a new note and let's say do things the right way. Then I can tab and start typing. Now already you can see a new dot, a new node in our idea verse in the graph view on the right. Now let's add some content. Now the beauty of Obsidian is you can create and connect notes at the same time. We'll think of something this reminds us of. So do things the right way. This reminds me of believe things better than you found them. Nice. And how we link in the first place is we hit the left bracket twice and then we start typing. How about a new one? Family phrases to live by. And for me, I'll now hit the right bracket twice and then period. And over on the right, we can see in the graph view, do things the right way, connecting to the two new placeholder notes. But what's wild is these notes, even though they're not created, will still show up in any type of search that you do. But if you do want to make it a new note, let's go ahead and command-click on it on Mac. That would be a control-click on Windows. And boom, now it's its new note. If we look at the graph view now, we can see it's a darker dot. it's been created as opposed to the family phrases idea which has not been created into a note yet. By the way, if you close this graph view, which is a tab over here, right-click, hit close, you can always reopen it with a little ribbon button here. So, we can reopen the graph view and now we see it in all its glory. You can adjust all sorts of graph variables, especially as your graph grows to this. This is idea verse pro. There are links below if you want to learn more about it cuz here you can see all sorts of surprising connections. Not all those who wander are lost. We can learn from nerdy discussions on maps of content, evergreen notes or things or statements about things. And we're off to the races. Who knows where this will lead?
You can jump into any note and simply highlight some text and then hit the left bracket twice. When you do that, you'll notice the new dot has appeared on the graph view. to see all mentions of a linked note. In the bottom right, there are back links to the active note. You can go ahead and collapse linked mentions. So, you can see all those. You can expand to see exactly what it says as it links to the active note.
Speaking of links, before we go further, there's a few crucial settings that will save you massive headaches down the road. Open settings. Go to files and links and turn on automatically update internal links. Now, here's why this is important. If you rename a note to a new note name and then click away, do see that notification updated links in two files. With this setting, the links updated automatically to point to the renamed note. Without this setting, renames will break links and you might end up with a bunch of broken connections.
Let's change some other quick settings. So, if you click over here, we can now change the default folder for attachments to a new folder for attachments. This is really important to avoid cluttering up the sidebar whenever you want to add a new image or other documents to a note. While we're fiddling with settings, I want to recommend changing your theme to know how to do it. So, just click appearances, then manage under themes, and select Anapuchin. A nu. There it is. Install. Now, this is a very popular theme that acts as a base for the soft paper theme that I recommend for Obsidian. Check out this video next for all those details, which I'll speed through right now to get us all the soft papery goodness.
Next, some quick gotchas and mistakes that trip people up with Obsidian. The first gotcha, don't import everything from your old notes app. I see people do this all the time. They dump thousands of other old notes into Obsidian and then they wonder why they can't find anything. Start fresh. Link your own thoughts. Don't drown in old clutter. Second, keep it simple with plugins. Avoid starting with things like advanced tables, canban boards, data view dashboards, and a lot more. I know it's incredibly tempting, but don't chase plugins on day one. I'll link a video on essential plugins below if you want to peak, but focus on linking first. Third, don't overfolder your ideas or knowledge notes. Structure must be earned. We'll get into all that in a second and the level of structure that I do recommend, but when you're dealing with ideas and knowledge, categories get so fuzzy and ambiguous that standard hierarchies become brittle. Keep things in big buckets until patterns naturally show up. Finally, don't put off learning hotkeys. The faster you can do work in Obsidian, the more you'll enjoy it.
Speaking of, let's talk about how to make our notemaking faster. First, you can do everything with your mouse if you want by right-clicking and selecting formatting. But trust me, you want to learn to use hotkeys. Here are a few essentials. Now, I'm going to be saying command and option for Mac. So, think control and alt if you're on Windows. Command-B to bold. Command-I to it italicize. Add the pound symbols at the beginning of a line to create headings of different sizes. Surround text with two tildas to strike through and two equal signs to highlight. A greater than sign will create a quote block. A dash will create a bullet list. Numbers create numbered lists. Dashes plus brackets start a checklist and three lines on an empty line will create a divider. One back tick for inline code and three ticks for a code block. Again, link to notes with double brackets or you can link to an external site. To do that, put the link text here and the link in parenthesis. Command-option left or right keys will navigate back or forward instead of clicking the icons here. Command-F to find text on the page. Command-T will open a new tab. Command-W closes it. And if you add an exclamation point before a link to another note, you can embed that entire note inside another. And adding an exclamation point before an external link will display an image if it is one. Finally, command-P will open the command pallet where you'll find reminders of these shortcuts as well as many more advanced shortcuts. Combine these tips and you can create beautiful notes in Obsidian.
So, can we get around Obsidian and organize these beautiful notes effectively? Yes. Command-O opens the quick switcher to find or open a note fast. But the standard way to navigate is through your sidebar. As you make notes, they'll populate here. So, if you want to organize things more, create folders in the left sidebar and put your notes into them. Don't just do this making folders with random topics because if you do this long enough, you'll realize it's pretty hard to find your notes or remember where they are. That's because a lot of notes can exist in five or 10 different folders. So, there's all sorts of decision fatigue just to place a single note. So, what I suggest is building a folder structure only as it deserves it and making the biggest picture folder categories possible. You can then use your quick switcher links between notes and even the graph view to get a better sense of where notes live. Over time, you can create a more sophisticated structure.
Now, I've built a free template called Ideverse, which you can get by scanning here that can get you started building a solid foundation. But hey, right now, let's walk through the basics. Ace AC atlas is for your timeless ideas and knowledge. Calendar is for your timebased notes like a journal or a daily note. Efforts are for timebound things, things you're working on, projects, tasks, anything productivity oriented. This is a great simple way to organize your vault and then create subfolders under each as necessary.
Some other ways to organize your notes include bookmarking by hitting the three buttons and seeing it in the drop down or hit command-P and pull up the bookmark command. You can tag notes by using the pound key to bundle and filter by types of notes wherever they are in Obsidian. More often than not, I recommend instead of tags, creating maps of content. These are notes that organize and link other notes together by topic or theme and create really strong connective hubs in your graph view. And if you're capturing quick thoughts in Obsidian, creating a daily note structure in the calendar section of your folders is a great way to capture daily thoughts on the fly and then link out to the rest of your idea verse as needed.
Okay, let's talk Obsidian's different note formats. Standard notes in Obsidian are textbased markdown files, but you can add in all sorts of things. First, you can embed images directly into your notes. Just drag and drop an image file right there. You can attach PDFs, audio recordings, and a bunch of other documents. You can turn on the audio recorder core plugin for quick voice memos or embed YouTube videos and even tweets. Tables are easy to build by hitting command-P, typing table, which will give you insert table, then hit enter. or try the templates core plug-in which lets you create and repurpose notes in reusable formats. To get even more sophisticated organizing and filtering notes in your idea verse, you can add properties to notes like created date, checkboxes, links, text, numbers, all this to your notes without cluttering the content. Just hit command-semicolon to add a new property. Then set up as many as you like. Air properties with Obsidian's basis feature to create really cool organizational formats that can be sorted and updated by note type or visualize your notes with Obsidian's canvas, a virtual whiteboard to drag in notes, images, or new cards for brainstorming. By the way, more details on setting up bases or canvas in the links below.
Finally, let's talk about how Obsidian does AI, which is easy enough since Obsidian doesn't have AI. Instead, you get to decide how much AI and what ways it integrates. Pick based on how private you need your data to be and how much you're willing to do to preserve that privacy. Right now, I'm using Claude, an AI that allows me to do things like ask questions, and talk to my notes, do deep research, and instantly populate properties in Obsidian. I always back up my notes first before trying anything new with AI. And I create a separation between my idea verse, my original thinking and any AI generated notes so that Obsidian stays a sacred space for my notemaking.
If you want to set up my note-taking system, try my free idea verse by scanning here. Once you do, you can get a step-by-step guide to set up your own vault in Obsidian in minutes. And check out this video next for how to install my favorite Obsidian theme, the one you've seen throughout most of this video. Thanks for watching and happy notemaking in Obsidian.