On the importance of finding the right note-taking app
"Alternative Title: How Obsidian helped me get my life together when Notion couldn’t."
It’s 5AM in the morning. I’ve been awake for an hour, feeling well rested as I look through my daily RSS newspaper, consuming wonderfully human posts about their days, thoughts, and feelings. It sets me in a great, inspired mood to learn and create.
I wonder where I would be right now if I never made the switch.
I found Notion around 2021 when I was looking for the perfect digital tool to organize my life. I found it before it was booming in popularity, when there were barely anyone talking about it other than a few professional-looking creators who make some paid layouts and preach about the beauty of the platform. At the time it was the perfect place for me; lured me in with the simple yet customizable features. There's different ways to notes and headers, there's checkboxes and tables, you can just drag and drop objects, easily format text and pictures, and embed videos and so much more! Your imagination is the limit!
How cool is that?
I loved it so much I made a handful of free cute templates and simple color icons that have been downloaded over 200,000 times overall.
I swore by it for years, up until this year.
For years I’ve tried to make Notion work for me.
Afterall, it has all the features I yearned for in an organization app, what more could I ask for?
So I kept remaking spaces and archiving the old ones. Every year (or half) I will try to start on a new clean slate, with a blank canvas and a clearer trajectory, all to organize this messy life.
But it just never worked.
I used this app for almost everything - goals, habit trackers, mood boards, personal journal, stories and poems, business checklist, game trackers, wishlists, emoji chart, brain dump. I wonder if it was the universality of the content, or perhaps my obsession with customization that ultimately killed the platform for me. Maybe all the freedom just wasn’t the environment I needed for this mushy, indecisive, thought-spitting, ADHD-induced brain.
I made the decision to find one that works in the beginning of the year, and decided to give Obsidian another try after the first time didn’t really go well a year ago. I was simply browsing alternatives at that time, and it struck me as something a bit complicated to learn that I couldn't be bothered to get into learning it. I couldn’t figure out how to customize properly, markdown felt weird, and the lack of customization made me walk away.
In Notion I had the freedom to create pages easily, which helped me put my messy thoughts in place. The thing is, my head is constantly messy. I have so many thoughts it’s embarrassing. So I tried to keep them organized, but that was the problem. I tried to keep my supposed train of thoughts in place when it wasn’t supposed to be. I made a new page every time I have some new ideas or thoughts, or a new goal I wanted to pursue, and that would be every 40 minutes interval throughout the day. Aside from the productivity aspect, I also used it for everything else in my life, so you can kind of imagine how chaotic that was, with all the different categories and brain dump I'd have in each page everyday. Even though I tried to reorganize by creating new workspaces (I have five now), I repeated the same cycle of endless attempts to simplify my workflow and maintain a clean space with all the thoughts in my head. It became too overwhelming that I ended up archiving everything in the end.
With Obsidian the first thing i did was ofcourse, figure out a way to customize it. I love to make my workspace a home; make it mine like it's lived on and constantly try to make it work for me. But it wasn't the same. The customization was limited to how the actual workspace looked, not really the content you make for it. But that was the whole point, and that was the best thing about it - it only affects what really matters: How the information is presented on the screen. I spent a couple of hours looking for the perfect font (you can use whatever you have on your PC and I downloaded a fuck ton before!), and downloaded some themes and colors to apply that I like looking at. How I look at the page, how easy it is on the eyes, and if it was enticing enough to read are all very important factors in determining a good note-taking for me, all of which Notion lacked a bit (limited colors and font). There's also community plugins made by its users who want extra features; add-ons that are optional but can very much improve the writing experience. I spent a few minutes looking at Youtube tutorials on how to start using the app, and what great plugins to install. Now my workspace is completely mine - customized but still relatively the same.
Once I actually got through the initial phase of customization, I began.
The project was to make a portfolio, and having just one side bar that contains all of the pages made me freak out.
And this taught me one thing.
Intentionality.
I started becoming more intentional with what I write. The simple interface that doesn’t let me drag text or make easy tables told me to just write.
It forced me to write so much that eventually, I began to type, type, type..
and since I had very limited space to hide my messy thoughts and determined to keep this app clean, I was deliberate in writing about what was important - content.
I began to write actual words for content, instead of planning and organizing. No more thousands pages of “goals for the year” or “organizing my thoughts.”
I mean, I still made a few pages like that, but it was cleaner and meant to be used and updated as I go, meaning everything that goes in it has to be organized already.
Here’s how I was able to make everything work out for my brain:
- i set up folders about content: I will write either a blog post, or the written content for my web pages. I’m allowed to have organization pages to help keep me remember things, but only one page dedicated at a time, no duplicates.
- I dedicate some folders for life lists and planning, like a page for all my goals this year. No tables, no customization. Just a big list in a blank page. Same for all the other topics I want to write about that wasn’t content, even idea dumps. No actually, ESPECIALLY idea dumps, the thing that is the most prone to constant rewriting and filling.
- I just start a new note and write. If I’m writing a draft of my thoughts, it goes on the blog post folder. If it’s scribbling my messy ideas, it will stay uncategorized at the bottom and will be revisited the next day to see if it's worth continuing. I will keep it if I continue updating, put it in a folder if it starts becoming more coherent, and delete otherwise.
I've been doing this system ever since and it works. My sidebar is 90% organized content in its respective folders, and there's 10% of brain farts waiting to be contextualized and realized in its own page. I was able to work on my portfolio because Obsidian helped me write actual content for it, and gave me the perfect space to focus on what matters. Now I still often use it to draft my blog posts and the reason I could post more than one blog at a time is because of how effective it lets me write.
So thank you Obsidian, for being my brain's best friend for the year and helping me get shit done. I hope to get along and continue writing with you for more days to come.