How to start with Obsidian

Obsidian is one of my favorite apps of all time. I use it to take notes, journal and connect my thoughts.

Before Obsidian, I used other note-taking apps, mainly Apple Notes. The reason I switched to Obsidian is because it is cross-platform, flexible, and uses Markdown. And there was a lot of hype around it :)

Watching YouTube videos of other people’s setups, It felt like obsidian was really difficult and would take months to master. But you don’t have to make it that difficult - it’s up to you! Just install it and create some notes, just like in any other note-taking app. You don’t need to learn plugins, workflows, dataview queries - leave all that for later. Only add these complications when you really need them. This is called a gradual approach.

The idea behind Obsidian is simple - you don’t need to structure your notes in any way, you just need to connect them - like in your brain.

The most important are the connections between notes - links. Type [[ and insert the name of another note - the connection is now established and visible on the graph. You can even connect to missing notes and create them later.

Then there are folders - the OG way of structuring data. They strictly separate data and allow for bulk operations.

Finally, tags - they add keywords to notes. This is useful for finding notes. Unlike folders, one note can have multiple tags.

That’s enough - now you can start creating your PKMS.