

How I dropped Obsidian Daily notes (RATP #11)

September 25, 2023

Before and After. Doing things with Obsidian. Second Brain and letting daily notes go. I’d like to “do more” with all the stuff I read. This “do more” means roughly remembering more about that (think about the plot of a novel or the main arguments of some essay), using it more (think about concepts of a programming book), and establishing more connections and relaborating it more (think about making more sense of book clusters, writing more reflexive pieces, etc.).

I tried and I am still trying various methods and ways, both in my free time and at work. I am still experimenting with Obsidian to have some sort of second brain working.

What I like about Obsidian is the idea of having everything in one place. Plus, graph mapping is something I really like. Honestly, this latter part is something I like more “in theory”. This feature – and the idea of having it local only – sold Obsidian to me. Nonetheless, I never used the feature that much. I’ve tried it at the beginning and I appreciate the idea of using it. I thought it needed more data to work properly and produce insights. So I left it out there.

TL;DR: I still have to start working in a way that enhances the graph view of obsidian.

Everything in one place?

As for the “everything in one place”, the issue is more complex.

If you buy into Obsidian for this, you assume that everything you have works well in digital form. As far as book notes go, well, that is something I wish that had worked for me. But I have reasons to be skeptical about that. I guess this calls for a digression about the note-tracking evolution.

Another super cool thing that sold me obsidian was the Kindle plugin. You can import your highlightings and notes. You have them in Obsidian. And from there on, I thought, they were all in one place and ready to be used for the greater good. Well. It did not work that well.

It is a hard effort and a lot of time to go through the notes and put them into manageable form. Like “a lot of time”.

The plugin, correctly, imports a lot of metadata about the book and the time, etc. But these are not useful if you want to condense all the info in a book.

Daily notes were not useful. I had a template for things learned. But that was not helping.

Privately, I started logging directly into the project.

Some early thoughts

Key understanding (namely: my key understandings) on some of the “Obsidian generated” marketing:

– second brain enthusiasts about CODE methods or other correctly emphasize how posts, presentations and shorter information items can be condensed in Obsidian. Books are harder. And maybe books are not the main target. If books are found in these presentations and videos, the strategy and approach is that of divide et impera. It will work on chapters of books. And especially with books built as collections of posts.

– no need for a daily note if there is no need to track daily activities (you can have a progress record in a month by monitoring something else, closer to the things that you are interested in. Example: write a log into the projects, do not log N projects in daily files)

Further steps:

– find a non-time-consuming way to move the stuff you need to the Kindle (i.e. blog posts, articles and other stuff that are suited for the “Obsidian processing”).