obsidian is horrible and you should try it
mei happs - 2025-03-25
notetaking is an incredibly useful tool for organising your thoughts, but its also really good at tricking you into taking tons of time writing things that you already know and are never going to forget.the one thing that truly sets obsidian apart from other tools is that it does a really good job of encouraging you to write more notes by making the notes you have feel more interconnected with little effort. you get visual feedback to show that your knowledge-base is growing, thanks to the graph view (as gimmicky as it may be, it still can be useful). this effectively turns note-taking into a game. and this is a great thing! because if it feels like a chore you're never going to get to the point where you can figure out what does and doesn't work for you.
however it has a huge issue, the community that insists on telling people how to organise their notes! as a new user of obsidian, your first instinct will probably be to look up tutorials and follow someone else's layout that they've spent forever altering to suit their very specific and personal wants and needs. theyre going to have countless plugins you dont care about, a layout that is so complex that it's guaranteed to overwhelm you and an approach to creating notes that will make absolutely no sense to someone who, as of yet, has none.
so instead, learn the basics. everything you could ever want or need to know to start off with is here on the main page. ignore the expensive syncing and the unnecessary publishing feature, and just start making some notes. at some point you'll start feeling like more organisation is needed. try the first thing that comes to mind. maybe you'll start to wish a particular feature existed, and take a look on the marketplace to see if someone's made a plugin for it. whenever you have a problem take the fastest, easiest solution you can find that gets the job done. maybe you'll decide obsidian doesn't fit your use case and start hopping around other note-taking apps, or maybe you'll give up on note-taking entirely, and if so, good for you. it doesn't work for everyone and if it doesn't help you, don't waste your time on it.
but whatever you do, don't look at somebody else's layout until you're certain you have a good idea of what your ideal looks like! if your notes aren't tailored to you, your wants and your needs, all you really have is a shitty little knockoff wikipedia, and that isn't useful to anyone.