14 Reasons to Love Obsidian as a Note-Taking Tool for my PhD

Just a small collection of the reasons why I love Obsidian for research and maybe why you will too.

In many ways, Obsidian has become my happy place. It’s somewhere central I can collect my thoughts. I don’t have to worry whether they are isolated ideas or whether they are an expansion of something which already exists. They don’t even have to make sense at the time.

In the line of George Orwell; all thoughts are created equal, it’s just some are more interesting than others…

… but only at any one time.

Random thoughts might be useful and help connect something together several years down the line; I just don’t know. Or they might never surface again. All that matters is they are written down and made findable, ready for when I need them. I find it shocking how many ideas and little thoughts I completely forget.

“The meaning of a thought, insight, or memory often isn’t immediately clear. We need to write them down, revisit them, and view them from a different perspective in order to digest what they mean to us,” said Tiago Forte in his book ‘Building a Second Brain.

Many we need to leave a while to simmer.

Obsidian came at a time of overwhelm in my PhD. I’ve never been particularly organised when it comes to digital information; ‘Word is the Way’ and ‘Excel is Everything’ was how it always came across to me. Imagine my eyes when I realised digitally recorded knowledge did not have to be in a linear form!

Obsidian forms one of the nine key applications I use in my PhD.

This article started off as being 10 things I love about Obsidian, but because I love it so much as a note-taking tool, 10 became 14 and then I had to force myself to stop. You might start to think I am obsessed …

14 Reasons To Love Obsidian as a Note-Taking Tool

1. I love Obsidian because I own my data; it’s stored locally but syncs across devices. It works nicely for quick notes on my phone, writing notes on my laptop and full on project mode on my 4k desktop monitor. It works across all scales seamlessly.
2. I love Obsidian because when my internet doesn’t work, I can still work.
3. I love Obsidian because it is as simple or as powerful as I need it to be. I can spend hours creating the perfect personal system or it can be so basic that no plugins are required for it to function. (Although, there are three plugins my PhD work could not do without.)
4. I love Obsidian because it is user friendly. I like the way it looks and how easily I can navigate round it. I like how I can customise hotkeys. And how easy it is to access settings and ‘not mess anything up’.
5. I love Obsidian because the learning curve grows as I do. It’s easy to get started with very basic markdown and software skills. If I want to get complicated then there is plenty of scope for me to do that as early or as late as I want.
6. I love Obsidian because it works seamlessly with Zotero, my reference manager.
7. I love Obsidian because it allows me to treat my own knowledge and writing as a personalised encyclopaedia I can dip in and out of at any time. I can add to ideas over time, include new concepts and eventually link up related ones together. It prevents me from entering the Google wormhole … where sometimes I don’t return from for a longer than planned amount of time.
8. I love Obsidian because it helped me create ‘knowledge’ momentum. I can finally remember quotes, books I’ve read, interesting papers and just generally visualise how different things fit together. I can leave my brain to do the thinking and use Obsidian to capture things as I go.
9. I love Obsidian because my knowledge becomes cumulative and feeds on itself, becoming bigger and more powerful with time.
10. I love Obsidian because it allows me to play with my knowledge. It can be linear, 3D and even 4D as I see concepts evolve over time.
11. I love Obsidian because I can publish my thoughts. But only if I want.
12. I love Obsidian because the community seems nice. It’s not driven by self-help gurus who think they have all the answers. It just people who are trying to get the system to work for themselves. So many people have contributed plugins and themes, for free. They do it out of love for the system and love for the community and a love for learning.
13. I love Obsidian because it isn’t perfect and it doesn’t try to be. There are glitches in plugins now and again and weird quirks with some themes. But it is a work in progress everyone is very open and strives to do better.
14. I love Obsidian, because to some degree at least, it is future proof. I feel like I could move my files elsewhere and it would take minimal effort to organise everything again.

The future is bright, the future is Obsidian (and probably other tools like it…)

There are other apps out there that will likely do everything I need them to do. Obsidian just happened to be the first one I tried that I really liked. There has been nothing so far that has disappointed me; Obsidian does everything it says on the tin and more.

Here’s how I use it as part of my 6-step writing process.

And how I use Canvas to create mini insight posts for LinkedIn.

I’m super excited for the future of Obsidian. According to a recent estimate by kepano, CEO of Obsidian, there are 1,000,000 users of Obsidian; pretty epic when you consider it’s maintained and supported by a team of 4–5 people.

I don’t expect it to go on forever. However, I feel we still have a long way to go.