How to get started with Obsidian in 2022 - from scratch!

Summary

This video script offers a practical guide to digital note-taking with Obsidian, a versatile note-taking tool. It walks viewers through the installation and setup process, emphasizing the tool's simplicity and flexibility. The script introduces basic features like creating vaults, notes, and leveraging Markdown. It also touches on advanced functionalities such as linking, backlinks, and mentions, which enhance the note organization without requiring prior knowledge of complex note-taking theories. The video encourages viewers to start with daily notes and gradually build a personal knowledge base, debunking the myth that notes must be perfectly organized to be effective.

Takeaways

• 📝 **Digital Note-Taking Evolution**: The script discusses the evolution of note-taking in the digital age, introducing new concepts like Zettelkasten and Personal Knowledge Management.
• 💻 **Obsidian Introduction**: Obsidian is presented as a free tool for note-taking, suitable for various purposes such as a dev log, journal, or language learning tool.
• 🔗 **Linking and Backlinks**: One of Obsidian's powerful features is its ability to create links between notes and track backlinks and unlinked mentions.
• 📂 **Vaults and Folder Structure**: The script explains how to create a new vault in Obsidian and suggests organizing notes within folders for better management.
• 🌐 **Integration with Cloud Services**: It's recommended to create an Obsidian vault within cloud service folders like Dropbox for automated backups.
• 🛠️ **Customization and Plugins**: The video covers how to enable and use core plugins and community plugins to enhance Obsidian's functionality.
• 📅 **Daily Notes Feature**: The daily notes plugin is highlighted as a useful tool for maintaining a log of daily activities and thoughts.
• ✍️ **Markdown Usage**: All notes in Obsidian are in Markdown format, which is simple to learn and use for creating structured notes.
• 🔍 **Search and Discovery**: The script touches on how Obsidian's search function can be used to discover unlinked mentions, aiding in knowledge retrieval.
• 📈 **Growth of Personal Knowledge Base**: The video encourages users to let their vault grow organically as they accumulate notes, reflecting the expansion of their personal knowledge base.
• 📘 **Note-Taking Philosophy**: The script concludes with a note-taking philosophy that emphasizes usefulness over strict organization, suggesting that personal utility is key.

Q & A

What has changed about note-taking in the digital age?

In the digital age, note-taking has evolved beyond simple writing to include methods like Zettelkasten, Personal Knowledge Management, Maps of Content, and the PARA Method, which aim to enhance the organization and retrieval of information.

What is Obsidian and how is it used for note-taking?

Obsidian is a free note-taking tool that is excellent for various purposes such as a dev log, journal, D&D preparation tool, language learning tool, or a personal knowledge base. It allows users to take notes in Markdown format and has features like linking and backlinking to organize and connect information.

How can one download and install Obsidian?

To download Obsidian, one needs to visit obsidian.md, download the application, and save it to their computer. After downloading, the user should locate the file, open it, and follow the prompts to install it, possibly replacing an older version if necessary.

What is a vault in Obsidian and how is it created?

A vault in Obsidian is a personal database where all notes are stored. It is created by opening Obsidian, clicking on 'Create New Vault', entering a name for the vault, and selecting a location to save it, which can be within a folder that syncs with cloud services like Dropbox for backup purposes.

What is the significance of the live preview feature in Obsidian?

The live preview feature in Obsidian allows users to see their notes as they will appear in the final format in real-time, which helps in formatting and organizing the content more effectively without needing to switch between edit and preview modes.

How are notes structured in Obsidian using Markdown?

In Obsidian, notes are structured using Markdown syntax, where headings are denoted by hashtags (#) with the number of hashtags indicating the heading level, and content can be formatted using Markdown rules for lists, bold text, links, and more.

What are the core plugins in Obsidian and how can they be enabled?

Core plugins in Obsidian are pre-installed plugins that may not be enabled by default. They can be enabled by going to the settings, selecting 'Core Plugins', and toggling the plugin to 'Enabled'. Examples include the daily notes plugin, which helps in organizing daily journal entries.

How does the calendar plugin in Obsidian assist with note management?

The calendar plugin in Obsidian helps manage daily notes by providing a visual calendar interface. It allows users to create notes for specific dates and review or create notes for past or future dates, making it easier to maintain a log of daily activities or thoughts.

What is the benefit of using backlinks and unlinked mentions in Obsidian?

Backlinks in Obsidian show all the pages that have linked to a particular note, while unlinked mentions display all references to a term or concept, even if they are not explicitly linked. This feature helps in creating a comprehensive knowledge base by connecting related ideas and concepts across notes.

How does the script suggest starting with Obsidian for new users?

The script suggests starting with Obsidian by creating daily notes as a way to dump thoughts and events from the day. It emphasizes that the structure can be as simple as bullet points or paragraphs, and that the key is to make notes useful for oneself, even if they appear messy or unfinished.

What is the role of community plugins in Obsidian and how can they be safely installed?

Community plugins in Obsidian are developed by the user community and can add additional functionality to the tool. They can be safely installed by ensuring they have a significant number of downloads, indicating widespread use and trust. Users are advised to disable safe mode to access community plugins and should always be cautious about the source of the plugins they install.

Outlines

00:00

📝 Introduction to Digital Note-Taking and Obsidian

The paragraph introduces the evolution of note-taking in the digital age, highlighting new concepts like Zettelkasten and Personal Knowledge Management. It emphasizes the simplicity of note-taking with Obsidian, a non-open-source tool suitable for various purposes like journaling, gaming, language learning, or as a personal search engine. The speaker guides viewers on downloading and installing Obsidian, setting up a new vault, and navigating its interface, including the file explorer, search bar, and linked/unlinked mentions. The paragraph concludes with a step-by-step on creating the first note in Markdown format and adjusting settings for a personalized experience.

05:02

🔧 Customizing Obsidian with Plugins

This section delves into customizing Obsidian with plugins, starting with enabling the daily notes plugin for better organization. The speaker demonstrates setting up a daily notes folder and the option to open a daily note upon startup. The discussion continues with disabling safe mode to access community plugins, emphasizing the importance of community trust and user downloads as indicators of plugin security. The calendar plugin is highlighted for managing daily notes, with a walkthrough on creating and using daily notes. The paragraph ends with advice on starting with Obsidian by using it as a daily log without needing an extensive structure.

10:04

🔗 Linking and Backlinking in Obsidian

The final paragraph focuses on Obsidian's unique linking and backlinking features, which facilitate the creation of a personal knowledge base. It explains how to create a new note from within a daily note and the convenience of Obsidian's multi-pane interface. The speaker demonstrates copying content from a daily note to a new topic-specific note and how Obsidian tracks both linked and unlinked mentions, allowing for comprehensive knowledge management. The paragraph concludes with a reminder that notes don't need to be perfectly organized to be useful and encourages viewers to explore and develop their own note-taking system with Obsidian.

Keywords

💡Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten refers to a method of note-taking and organizing knowledge developed by Niklas Luhmann. It involves creating individual notes on different topics and linking them together, which is useful for building a personal knowledge base. In the video, Zettelkasten is mentioned as one of the complex terms related to note-taking, suggesting that the speaker aims to simplify the process for viewers.

💡Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Personal Knowledge Management is the process of organizing and maintaining information relevant to one's personal interests or work. It often involves digital tools and systems to help individuals manage their data and knowledge effectively. In the context of the video, PKM is mentioned as a concept that can complicate note-taking, indicating that the speaker wants to focus on practical, straightforward methods.

💡Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management software that allows users to create, link, and organize notes in a non-linear way. It supports Markdown formatting and has a feature for creating daily notes, which is highlighted in the video as a useful tool for starting with note-taking without needing complex theories or methods.

💡Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language used for formatting text. It allows users to add formatting elements like headers, bold text, and lists using simple syntax. In the video, Markdown is the format used for all notes in Obsidian, and the speaker demonstrates how to use Markdown syntax for headings and lists in their notes.

💡Vault

In the context of Obsidian, a vault is a collection of notes stored in a single location. It serves as a personal database for the user's notes. The video script describes the process of creating a new vault, which is a fundamental step in setting up Obsidian for note-taking.

💡Live Preview

Live Preview is a feature in Obsidian that allows users to see the formatted version of their notes as they type, rather than just the raw Markdown text. This helps in visualizing the final appearance of the notes. The video encourages viewers to turn on this feature for a better note-taking experience.

💡Daily Notes

Daily Notes is a concept and a plugin in Obsidian that helps users create and manage notes on a daily basis. It's mentioned in the video as a useful tool for starting with note-taking, as it provides a simple structure for recording daily thoughts and events without needing to worry about complex organization.

💡Backlinks

Backlinks in Obsidian refer to notes that link to a particular note. This feature helps in creating a network of interconnected ideas and makes it easier to navigate through related concepts. The video emphasizes the power of backlinks in building a knowledge base and how they can be used to find all mentions of a topic across notes.

💡Unlinked Mentions

Unlinked mentions in Obsidian are instances where a term or concept is mentioned in a note but not explicitly linked to another note on the same topic. This feature allows users to discover all references to a term, even those that were not intentionally connected, which can be useful for later organization and knowledge discovery.

💡Community Plugins

Community Plugins are additional features developed by the Obsidian community that can be installed to extend the functionality of the software. The video discusses the process of enabling and installing community plugins, such as the Calendar plugin, to enhance the note-taking experience and manage daily notes more effectively.

Highlights

Digital note-taking has evolved with terms like Zettelkasten and Personal Knowledge Management.

Obsidian is introduced as a tool for practical note-taking without complex theories.

Obsidian is free and versatile for various note-taking needs like journals or language learning.

Downloading and installing Obsidian is straightforward from obsidian.md.

Existing Obsidian vaults can be replaced or new ones created for different projects.

Obsidian vaults can be conveniently located within cloud storage for backup.

The live preview feature enhances the note-taking experience in Obsidian.

Obsidian's interface includes a file explorer, search bar, and linked/unlinked mentions.

Markdown is used for all notes in Obsidian, with headings denoted by hashtags.

Obsidian's live preview automatically formats text into clean headings.

Plugins like Daily Notes can be enabled for additional functionality.

Daily notes can be organized into folders and automatically opened on startup.

Community plugins can be installed after disabling safe mode for more features.

The Calendar plugin helps manage and review daily notes effectively.

Obsidian allows creating new notes by linking or unlinking mentions within text.

Backlinks and unlinked mentions are powerful for building a knowledge base.

Obsidian's linking system is bidirectional, showing both links and unlinked mentions.

The importance of starting with a simple note-taking system and growing organically.

The myth that notes must be organized to be useful is debunked.

Personal usefulness is the key criterion for effective note-taking in Obsidian.

Transcripts

- If you've recently looked into taking notes

in the digital age, you may have been surprised to find

that a lot of things have changed from the time

when we were kids, and taking notes

just meant writing stuff down.

Now, there are words like Zettelkasten,

and Personal Knowledge Management, Maps of Content,

and PARA Method that all try

to complicate what should be incredibly simple.

In this video, I'm going to talk to you

about the practical side of note-taking.

How to install Obsidian, how to set it up,

and how to get started with taking notes

without learning any of that theory.

Obsidian is a free, but not open-source tool

that happens to be great for taking notes,

whatever that means to you.

So you could use it as a dev log or a journal,

or a D&D preparation tool, a language learning tool,

or even your own personal Google.

First let's download Obsidian.

To do that, you just have to go to obsidian.md.

So then just click on that, save it to downloads.

And when that's done, you just have to click on it.

You'll get asked to save it to your applications folder,

which I'm gonna do.

Now, in my case, I already had an older version of Obsidian,

so I'm just going to click replace.

Now let's open up Obsidian.

I'm just doing a command space to open up the search,

and I'm just typing in Obsidian.

You might get a warning like this,

and in that case, just hit open anyway.

You can see that I already have a bunch of Obsidian vaults

because I've already been using Obsidian.

But you're going to want to click on this Create New Vault.

Click on create, and then think up a name for your vault.

This doesn't really matter,

it's just what you're going to call it.

It's just to distinguish it from others.

So I'm going to say this is a demo vault,

and then look for the location.

Now, your location doesn't matter too much,

but if you are already subscribed to a service like Dropbox

or Google Drive, I would go ahead

and create an Obsidian vault within that folder

so that you just have a system of automated backups going.

Personally, I use Dropbox

but I also make it a GitHub repository as well.

But you don't need to do that.

You can just go back to Obsidian here, click browse,

and just select any old folder that you'd like to put it in.

So I'm going to put it in Dropbox,

and I'm going to hit open, and then create.

You're going to see a message about one of the new features

in Obsidian, which is live preview.

I do suggest that you turn it on.

So go ahead and click on live preview here.

Okay, now we have our first vault.

I'm going to maximize Obsidian here,

and let's talk about the interface of Obsidian.

There's this left sidebar here that has the file explorer

which is where all of your notes will be kept.

And this is the search bar where you can go through

and search the contents or file name of any of your notes.

And then on the right here,

you'll see this little arrow here that says expand.

And when you do expand it, you'll see linked

and unlinked mentions.

And we'll go over that later.

But this is one of the most powerful things about Obsidian.

I'm going to collapse that for now.

And let's get started with our first note.

To do that, click on this new note button here

that automatically goes within your vault,

which for me is called demo.

It's prompting me to enter a title.

So I'm going to put "My First Note".

Before we go further, let's see what this looks like

on your system explorer.

So just right-click on that, and then click show

in system explorer.

And you can see within my Dropbox folder,

there is a folder called Demo,

and then a note called My First Note.md.

MD stands for Markdown.

All Obsidian notes are held in Markdown.

So I already named this note my first note,

I usually put a first heading, and I usually just make

that the title as well.

Now, you may wonder what this hash is,

in markdown syntax that denotes

that this is the biggest heading.

So if you do two, this is second heading,

and it's a little smaller and so on.

And it just gets smaller and smaller.

You may have noticed that as I typed,

the hashtags disappeared, and that's part

of the live preview.

Once you move your cursor away from that line,

those heading signifiers are deleted,

just to make it a little bit cleaner.

So now you've got your first note, and you don't really need

to install anything else to Obsidian for it

to be a useful tool.

Personally, whenever I create a new vault,

there are always things that I enable.

So if we go back to Obsidian, we go to settings,

you can go to core plugins, and these are plugins

that are already installed but not necessarily enabled.

So we can go through them and I'm going

to enable the daily notes plugin.

Just because I think that that's really useful.

Now let's go back here under plugin options.

We have a daily notes option here

that just came up as we enabled it.

Now, in this new file location, I'm going to type daily,

just so all my daily notes will be categorized

under the folder daily.

I always use daily notes, so I'm also going to take this

for open daily note on startup.

While we're at it, I'm going to go

to community plugins and disable this safe mode.

You're going to see this scary-sounding message saying

that community plugins can access files on your computer.

It's always a good idea to have confidence

in what you're installing.

If you didn't write a piece of code,

then there are always risks to running it on your computer.

However, the Obsidian community develops

these plugins entirely out in the open,

and there are definitely ways that you can protect yourself

without having to go into the code.

So I'm going to turn off safe mode,

and browse in community plugins.

And this number here below each one is the number of times

that it's been downloaded.

So a shortcut for finding out whether something is secure

or not is by looking at this number and making sure

that it has a significant amount of Obsidian users

that are using it.

And that's because these are the plugins

that get the most use, and have the most attention on them.

So if there were something that were insecure about them,

many people would not want to use it.

Of course, this is just a shortcut,

and as always, this is your decision as to whether

or not you want to take this risk.

But I'm going to install calendar

because I never use Obsidian without it.

So then I'm gonna click install,

and I'll click enable as well.

Now we'll exit out of that, and we'll see

that we have a new calendar plugin option as well.

Now let's open this right pane here.

And next to this backlinks icon,

you'll see we now have calendar,

which is the plugin that we just installed.

So click on that and it displays a typical calendar,

and it's taking the date from your computer time.

So it's saying that it's Feb 14th, happy Valentine's day,

by the way.

(Nicole laughing)

Now, the reason that I suggest installing the calendar is

that it's a good way to manage and review your daily notes.

So if I click on 14 here, it'll say,

"Oh, this file with today's date doesn't exist.

Would I like to create it?"

And I'm going to click create.

Now, we'll see that in addition to my first note,

Obsidian has created another folder called Daily

because that's the folder that we specified

in the plugins for the daily note.

Now it's created a note just for this date.

I think that the easiest way to start with Obsidian is

to just think about it as a way to dump in everything

that's happened throughout the day.

I don't think you really need any more structure

than that when you're starting out.

So let's say that on today's date,

I could say something like Monday, February 14th, 2022.

What I personally do is I keep this daily note up

throughout the day, kind of like a as a daily log.

And I just write down things

that are a little bit interesting.

So I could say I watched a video about observability.

And then maybe I would type in some things

that I learned during this video.

So if you notice there, the dash and the space

already made it automatically a bullet.

So then maybe I'll type in some things

that I learned about observability.

So now I've typed out things that have learned

about observability from the video.

And normally I'll just go throughout my day.

I could also say things like I talked to Pepe today.

He thinks we should do a workshop about how to use k6.

So I don't really have a structure here,

you could do it in bullet points,

you could do it in paragraph form.

I don't think it really matters here.

What matters is that at the end of the day,

sometimes you can then review this

and think about what you want to make into a new note.

For example, maybe this thing about Pepe wanting

to do a workshop might not be something

that I really need to remember,

but this thing about observability,

if this is a topic that I'm interested in,

then maybe I should think about creating a page for it.

Now, we could do it the way that we did before,

we could create a new note and name it Observability.

But another way to do it,

if you've already typed out the word is

you can double click on it, and then just type the brackets.

You'll see that it kind of changed a little bit.

It became purple, and that's because it's being turned

into a link.

I'm just going to capitalize this

so that it's Observability.

Now I'm going to command click on it,

and that's already created a new note.

So my purpose for creating this note is to be able

to have it outside of the daily log structure,

because I think that this is a topic I'm going to refer

to often, and maybe I want to start to form a knowledge base

around this topic.

What that topic is or how important the topic has

to be before you create a note is really up to you.

So now I have my note on observability,

and I'm going to title it Observability.

So now I'm going to command click on this,

and you'll see that it got brought up on another pane.

This is one of the cool things about Obsidian is

that you can really drag and rearrange these.

You can put it there, or I can just put it on the left side,

and it gives me more leeway to work with.

So now I'm going to copy this part,

and I'm going to just put it in my note there.

This type of linking is pretty normal in most applications,

but Obsidian works the other way,

it also has backlinks.

So let's take a look at that.

If we go to the observability note

and open up this panel here, go back to backlinks

for observability.

We'll see that under linked mentions,

this note that we created, this daily note

from today is also showing up

because we mentioned observability in it.

So it will have a list of all of the pages

that have mentioned observability.

What's even cooler is unlinked mentions.

The unlinked mentions will show not just

where we linked to it from, but if you can see here,

I never linked to it in the sentence.

It's this one, right?

And yet it is still showing up in observability.

And that's because Obsidian not only tracks backlinks,

but it also tracks back mentions.

So you don't even have to link to something in order

for that reference to show up here.

So that's really cool because there are times

when I might not have decided

to create a note for observability.

And in that case, if it comes up later on,

and I then decide to create a note for observability,

I'll still see all of the previous mentions,

even before I knew it was important enough

to have its own page.

Do this for a few weeks, and you'll start

to see your vault grow as your personal knowledge base

expands as well.

I think one of the most damaging myths about note-taking

that prevent people from taking notes

in the first place is this idea that notes have

to be organized to be good, whatever that means.

But they really only have to be useful for you.

My notes are messy, unfinished, sometimes blatantly wrong.

And you know what?

They're still intensely useful for me.

Check out this video to see how I use Obsidian

in my work as a developer advocate.

But go out and explore and find your own system as well.

Thanks for watching and happy note-taking.