Jonas DowneyAnyone on here using Obsidian for life stuff? I would love for something to replace my erratic mess of notes apps, to-do apps, writing apps, and scattershot piles of bookmarks and links. Maybe Obsidian can do that?
Jimmy Sjölund 🇸🇪 🇫🇮 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇬🇱@jonasdowney Friends use Obsidian an swear by it. I use similar functionality in Emacs and it's quite nice. Best advantage that I hear is as everything is a text file so you're not locked in.
Paul Jacobson@jonasdowney I use #Obsidian for all my notes, work and personal. It works pretty well for me.
Piyush Chandwani 
@paul @jonasdowney Same here.
Vijay Prema@jonasdowney I have been using it for a while. As an early-ish adopter I got lifetime half price sync subscription (although it is easy to roll your own sync as well). I now use it for nearly everything, except maybe global TODO list, bookmarks and shared docs (I have those on my own Nextcloud, dedicated apps). Only thing I don't like is it's not open source but it is just a folder of plain markdown files so almost a good - no need to worry about being stuck in proprietary system.
Eytan Schulman@jonasdowney I’m not all in for every one of those use cases, but you absolutely could do all of those things with it! I highly recommend playing around with it
Gavin Nelson@jonasdowney I *love* it for notes. Plenty of people use it for full "life management" and such but I’ve found purpose made apps (task manager, spreadsheet type things for structured data etc) to be a bit more solid tho.
Colman Reilly@gn @jonasdowney definitely agree on the task management side, and specialised work needs specialised tools. You can do the project notes in #obsidian but unless you have a relatively simple life the actual task management is probably better off in a dedicated app - or you’ll end up patching that app together in obsidian and it’ll be more fragile, and much slower on mobile.
@gn @jonasdowney my tendency is to keep the detailed tasks for larger projects in a kanban board or check list in #obsidian and then my task manager (OmniFocus) has tasks like “spend two hours working on next milestone” rather than holding detailed lists of features separate from the context.
Michael Xander@jonasdowney I use it for notes and have a second vault for read it later where I parse web content to markdown. Every vault is a git repo. I prefer a dedicated task management app though.
Max Wheeler@jonasdowney I’ve started using it recently for notes and todos.
It’s a little rough OOTB but there are some well-supported extensions I’ve found for the behaviour I’ve found wanting. The main thing I’m liking is it’s flexibility and power as it’s allowed me to – relatively easily – adapt things to work how my brain does.
@maxwheeler ooh, any particular extensions you’d recommend?
@jonasdowney The ones I’ve found most useful are called:
– Tasks
– Outliner
There are a couple of utility ones that make the editing experience a lot nicer:
– Advanced Cursors
– Advanced Tables
– Advanced URI
– Paste URL into selection
And I haven’t nerded out enough to dive into it, but I’ve heard Dataview is great for creating and querying structured data (a la https://rachsmith.com/creating-a-habits-dashboard/)
@jonasdowney Tasks (https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/) allows you to inject content like this:
```
tasks
not done
no happens date
path includes Daily notes
sort by filename
```
Which I have in my "Daily note" template to force me to remember all the things I noted as needing doing without going back manually through stuff from earlier.
Ellane@jonasdowney #Obsidian is the first app I've been able to stick with, 2 years and counting. I've even transferred my browser bookmarks there, because none of the bookmarking solutions (Arc, Raindrop included) let you keep notes with your links.
The trick is to try it and see! Start with one folder and one file, and don't add more until you need them.
Obsidian might not work as a fully fledged task manager, but for basic to do lists it's perfectly serviceable.
MarkHere is the gold. Right in rhe middle.
> Start with one folder and one file and don’t add more until you need them.
Thank you @ellane
gregheo@jonasdowney I'm using it for all kinds of notes, and appreciate the vault system to keep things separate. Just for notes though; to-dos are still scattered across Reminders and OmniFocus.
Oz Lubling@jonasdowney I use it for notes mostly for work. You can do todos in it but it’s not great. If your needs are minimal there, it will do the trick. For personal stuff I just use Apple Notes. It’s much better at storing images, PDFs, etc. I tried putting that stuff in obsidian but accessing this stuff on mobile felt a bit brittle.
@ozlubling this is exactly what I was wondering! It seems like it can do all the things, but if you go beyond text notes it'll be a little clunky. (And if it's a little clunky, I'll probably end up back in my 10-other-apps situation.)
@jonasdowney I think if you’re opinionated about your software assume you’ll be using at least two apps.
Chris Hokanson@jonasdowney @ozlubling This was my situation, too: Wanting image support, PDFs, etc. for life stuff. Went with Craft over Apple Notes because I have to use Windows for the day job. If all I needed was text, Obsidian would be my go-to.
@hokanson @jonasdowney I think that’s the best way to divide it.
Peter Reaper-Reynolds@jonasdowney Oh I have thoughts! I felt like I spent more time organising, and thinking about how to organise Obsidian, than actually using it for writing and thinking.
I didn’t like how it stored attachments (relative links to an assets folder) which felt brittle compared to Apple notes, Notion, Craft.
Ultimately with EVERYTHING in there, it was hard to find ANYTHING.
My notes stack is now Reflect for daily scratchpad and meetings. Bear for long term facts and writing. Things for todos.
@petermcreaper this is very good info! I had the same worries. Any unstructured system always has the high burden of forcing you to figure out a structure that works for you. (Notion is kind of like this too?)
Your stack is the same as mine, except swap Reflect for Tot and Bear for iA Writer 😆
@jonasdowney haha that’s a quality stack. I always wanted to love ia writer but something about it doesn’t click. And Tot just looks delightful!
I still haven’t figured out bookmarks. Every bookmark manager I’ve tried turns into
a graveyard of unread links. But I always come back to Andy Matuschak’s post about collecting links.. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Collecting_material_feels_more_useful_than_it_usually_is