I’ve been a long-time user of Notion for knowledge management. For reference, I have around 1000 pages covering various topics from physics, to sports, to dreams and aspirations. I manage my to-do lists there, travel plans and goal tracking. It’s a terrific visual tool and readily accessible everywhere. But I want more.
I’ve heard about Obsidian for some time, and always wanted to give it a go - but how to make the switch?
Recently I’ve been planning to review my research process, which presented an opportunity to start a new knowledge management and note-taking system. I wasn’t going to pass this up.
I downloaded Obsidian and got working. So far I love:
- Graphical view: I’ve heard this dies down over time, but there’s something thrilling about seeing all your hard work in one view, being able to ‘connect the dots’ across different thoughts you’ve had.
- Linking: a basis for the graphical view, links feel like a really nice light-touch way to bring your ideas together and keep track of what you’re working on.
- Speedy: Notion is noticeably slow when loading notes and transitioning between pages. It’s never a big blocker, but Obsidian is noticeably faster, and it makes me happy.
- Extensible: there are a lot of community plug-ins. There’s the obvious themes, importer and templating, but also exciting tools like local Ollama integration for AI-assisted note generation and review. I’m looking forward to setting these all up and making Obsidian my own.
It’s early days, but I’m enjoying it so far!