Obsidian PKM

12 May 2021

coding

I was reading an article about personal knowledge management (PKM)/productivity applications the other day after it popped up in a feed. It was comparing an app called Roam Research vs another similar app called Obsidian. It got me thinking on how it could be used. For work we have something similar in Atlassian 'Confluence' to store work knowledge (policies, procedures, guidelines, tips, tricks and FAQ's) but I have never thought that I was a huge user of personal knowledge capture until I sat back and considered it. I have used google notes to record snippets of information, I save Reddit items that I would like to investigate further (usually internet is beautiful posts) and I have a tonne of notes I write down in notebooks along the way. I also have a library of post-it notes on my desk that could be transcribed into digital. I also see this blog as a bit of a method of collecting my thoughts for future consideration but obviously there are things that I can't put in here due to the nature of it being public. So I decided to install Obsidian and give it a go.

I find that Obsidians use of local md files is really handy - it is restricted to my computer i.e. not publically accessible, but I can store the 'vault' on a cloud sync'ed folder and thus can use it across multiple devices. Bonus is that md files don't take up a lot of space. I also like the idea of using markdown (similar to this blog) as opposed to using an html heavy interface. While I enjoy writing html, markdown is a bit more simple but it still allows you to embed and link everything together quickly and easily. I also like the idea of adding tags which can be used to quickly search for other pages/information. I see it as a bit like Twine in many respects but more for an internal monologue as opposed to making it for public consumption. It is still early days but I am really liking the idea and the opportunities that it presents and I hope to use it more into the future.