How do you personally use Obsidian?
How do you personally use Obsidian?
I go against recommended practice and have different vaults for different things in my life. The academic note vault is separate from the personal vault is separate from the creative projects vault. I have also committed sacrilege by not having many notes linked to each other. I’m trying to migrate a lot of notes from Google Docs and Notion over into Obsidian, so all of the vaults are pretty messy.
I love the LaTeX integration. Lots of math formulas in the academic note vault. I use the callout feature everywhere. I also nest callouts in callouts. I’m frankly treating them as equivalent to toggles in Notion.
I most often go to the personal vault where I have a list of things I’ve 1) seen online before, 2) spent at least an hour trying to refind that thing later and 3) will probably want to find again. This way I don’t lose time trying to find it again. It’s really helpful for me. I also have a list of food brands and how much I liked them, so I can remember which brand of turkey was bad and which was tolerable and which I’d definitely buy again.
I run RPG games for my friends. I create a new vault for each adventure. I typically create document folders like: locations, npcs, objects, events, rules, notes.
For common stuff that I use in every adventure, I just copy those files and folders into the new vault from the most recent old vault (the rules folder, for example).
I love how lightweight and simple this is in Obsidian.
I use links where it makes sense to me, and I don't worry overly much about link counts or the graph view. (I use both, I just don't stress over it). The tool should work for me, not vice versa.
I don't use plug-ins, but I do use style sheets and game specific fonts. Autohotkey is also great for making repetitive and/or complicated formatting easier. Getting the fonts embedded into the first project was a technical nuisance, but now I just copy that into every new vault.
Watching YouTube videos made by Obsidian power users, I'm super impressed by the things some people do with it. But I prefer keeping my workflow fairly simple. If I spend too much time messing with the tool, that feels counterproductive to me.
I have two vaults: one for general purpose notes, and one for the homebrew D&D campaign I'm running. In the regular Notes vault, there's very little cross-lining except for one section where I was studying for a certification. In the D&D vault, I use links and tags quite a bit.
Part of my creative projects vault is ideas for a homebrew D&D campaign! What's yours like? I need to flesh out my world a little and add a few spicy situations before it's ready for players.
I'm actually really happy with how world building went. I came up with a basic idea: a world where magic and non-humans hadn't existed for thousands of years, but suddenly magic begins to return--kind of like Shadowrun, but without the cyberpunk. Then I added in a group modeled vaguely on the Overseers from Dishonored to be a force of anti-magic social sentiment.
The next step was a couple of prequel oneshots. Since I'm bad at oneshots, those ended up being 4-5 sessions each. They were set about 30 and then about 15 years before the return of magic, and allowed the players to become familiar with the basic setting and to introduce some places and characters.
The crucial step was then doing a few rounds of Microscope with the players. Using that as a worlbuilding tool after we already built a shaded understanding of the basics of the world allowed us to collaboratively generate a really detailed and interesting history.
Between the oneshots and Microscope, the players are all really invested in the world they're playing in. I can throw out references to things and they actually catch them and are excited by them, because they're either things that their oneshot characters did or experienced, or they're things they created themselves in Microscope.
Needless to say this all made for tons of notes in Obsidian.
I use it as a writing app tbh
To me the only reason for a second vault is for sharing or collaborating with others. Obsidian really doesn't care how many notes you have in your vault so maintaining separate vaults just adds additional steps in getting to your info. (Obsidian doesn't care about directories either for that matter.)
I use both Obsidian and Anytype right now. I find Anytype better for things like journal, networking, notes on the fly, habit and idea tracking, reading list, literature notes and so on.
I use obsidian as knowledge base for IT stuff and university notes. I also have a kanban because to keep track of what i learned and where to go next.
I also have another vault that i use for D&D, since i'm usually the DM i use Obsidian to world building, design campaigns, keep track of new ideas or requests from my player and what other players do.
I started with one vault, but slowly broken it apart to several. Now I have a lot of reasonably sized vaults for various topics.
I like having separate vaults because it creates mental focus on what I want to work on.
I have a general/personal vault, but when trying to ramp up on topics, I also have research related vaults.
I have a work environment, which has a symlink to my private notes. Then I use it for some other stuff too with separate, tinier vaults, but I found that unless it's accessible in my primary vault, it will be ignored and forgotten.
But it does get annoying when is search I find both Linux notes, interview notes, and D&D notes.
I use the Supercharged Links Obsidian Plugin (alongside Style Settings Obsidian Plugin to break down my links into multiple different types with symbology for each so that at a glance I know what type of note I'm looking at
- Literature note: 📔
- Book: 📚
- People: 🧑
- Permanent note: 🗒️
- Low-quality note: Link turns red
- Medium-quality note: Link turns an orange
So e.g. A link to a book will look like 📚Building A Second Brain