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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5160 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

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I’m trying to get a personal knowledge management system set up in Obsidian per @DaseindustriesLtd ‘s recommendation. Struggling to find a simple easy starter guide that explains how to, for instance, import google drive documents and/or automatically create daily notes.

I’ve found a lot of stuff but they’re all insanely complex - like way more than what I’m looking for. Anybody have advice or know good guides on how to navigate using this tool or general advice for organizing folders/notes/thoughts?

I find Obsidian very comfy because I came to it after (simplifying the story) written diaries, small-time markdown note apps, Onenote (nice but when you try to automate anything or do anything nontrivial or interact with other non-Office programs, uh...) and Emacs Org Mode (allows for near-total freedom, gwern swears by it, and it was a helpful reminder that I'm no gwern; also that many GNU/Linux enthusiasts are, just like their Messiah, fetishistic, self-absorbed clowns who cannot fix obvious flaws because their pride depends on their sad little turfs in the opensource community). Obsidian is especially good because you don't have to learn a massive system to begin getting benefits – you can start with a barebones note dump, using only search to move around, and add features every time you feel some constraint. Built-in search is enough (Omnisearch plugin when it's not).

There's a wealth of information on Obsidian – youtube gurus, beginner guides, telegram chats. Like with Stable Diffusion, I used to follow the roundup but have fallen behind «the community». Plus my default assumption is that such things – PKM/GTD/journaling tools – are prone to degenerate into regimes of procrastination they are supposed to prevent, and beget incestuous competitive/exhibitionist subcultures on par with desktop ricing. Better to suffer the defaults than to allow oneself to slip into this failure mode.

Daily notes seem to be solved for me – Periodic notes + Calendar create them on demand, you just need to specify a daily and weekly template. For me it's


## {{date}} – 

**Mission:**

## Day Planner

### day  

- [ ] 8:45 [russian gibberish]

### evening

- same

 
### Wind down

-same

---

### Bonus 

## Chronicle

#Dream

## Reading

1. 

## Writing

1.

and


# {{date:YYYY – ww}}

[tables with various categories for weekly summary, such as biomedical stats, finances, epic fails, extraordinary events]

 
![[{{sunday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{monday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{tuesday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{wednesday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{thursday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{friday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

![[{{saturday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]

It's all stored in one folder, namely Obsidian-diary. Take care to use compatible date ISO standards, ideally the same as in your system. It's a bit wonky.

My needs for adding notes are covered by QuickAdd plugin plus a few templates.

Choose a sane hotkey arrangement. I recommend plugin «hotkeys for starred files and searches», just star some high-level files (or canvases, now that this is a thing) like Inbox, Workbench, Library, Agenda, Projects or whatever to quickly navigate to them.

I don't use google drive so not sure what your use case is, but surely many people do.

Hey a reply from the man himself. Thanks for the tips I’ll get started with the daily journals and see how it goes.

Can you compare Obsidian to org mode specifically? Org seems to have a lot of the advantages you highlight, and IME, the Org people aren't nearly as insane as, say, the OpenBSD people when it comes to egoistical free software BS. What specifically would I miss by sticking with Org?

I just don't want to touch emacs with a ten-foot pole. Last I tried, even the most «user-friendly» setups of Emacs+org-mode felt flaky, slow to start, and plain ugly – bad at handling multimedia, bad at rendering, bad even at smooth scrolling, with a lot of dicking around .emacs to get anything done well. It was clear that I need to dig into Emacs Lisp and build my tools from the ground up. I also don't like the concept of buffers and frames as separate from tabs and windows; it makes sense in the context of programming, but I seriously don't need an IDE in a pure note-taking tool.

If you like emacs, you definitely should use org mode. It is conceptually elegant and of course open source. Even core features of org mode like the agenda view are very good, AFAIK impossible to replicate in Obsidian (to some extent possible in Notion), and I know that's only scratching the surface.

I'd say start with the simplest tool first. The most important feature of a tool is lack of friction. Tools like obsidian are great for those who perceive it as low friction or already have a developed habit of personal knowledge management.

I have personally found notion & one note to be sufficient. They are remarkably easy to use and I specifically like them because they explicitly preserve hierarchy unlike Obsidian.

I’ve used notion for work but find it kind of annoying, and the tag/back link features in obsidian seem amazing if you spend a lot of time in it.

Fair.

What I meant was for you to identify your problem properly. Are you struggling to get started with wiki building or are you looking for the right tool to make your present wiki-building efforts better.

It will be a long time before you have sufficient content on there to need any of the advanced features offered by these platforms. The question : "which tool" is only relevant after you have been at it for a couple of years and are now looking for better organization. If you are getting started, then the answer for "which tool" is always : "whichever gets you started".

I'm looking to kind of note down and keep random stuff then try and find connections. Obsidian seems good for that over time.

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