Why I'm Still Using Obsidian in 2024

I've been covering obsidian on this channel for four years now and there's been a ton of changes to the app landscape with AI lots of new tools lots of new Innovations but I'm still using obsidian as my main Notes app of choice so why do I still use it I'm Justin with effective we're going to dive into this but first I wanted to offer you if you're on a journey to improve your personal knowledge management and note taking I have a free resource that I created for you that I would love to give you completely

free it's called PKM Kickstart and it's a 5-day email course that's designed to help you go from really just starting with PKM all the way to getting really launching into an app by giving you the key Min mindsets and ideas that you need to get started on this journey if you're interested in joining our course for free head to the link below I would love to have you so with all the advancements and Ai and new tools that are out there that leverage it sounds like Evernote is starting to get better uh notion is still

very strong and is getting better all the time as well why am I still using obsidian well first and foremost I think obsidian is the perfect place for developing thoughts in a relational context what do I mean mean by that well a tool like notion is what I would consider a structured note-taking tool it's very linear it's got a hierarchy to it uh you can still link things across but it's more of a secondary feature than a primary Paradigm for the application whereas an unstructured notetaking app is something like obsidian or log seek where the

main way that you interface with the notes is through relational linking obsidian I think is one of the best class for that unless you like an outline style then I think log seek is your app of choice but obsidian if you're more of a longer form writer or you like a blank page like this like to have more of a traditional note I think it's the best place to start putting your thoughts in and connecting them together plus the local graph view is one of my most used features because it allows me to see the

context of notes in the vault in the broader setting of all the other notes and thoughts that I have have in there I also think obsidian is one of the best solo designed note tools and I mean that that so many of the applications out there notion Evernote meem uh many others hepb is not one of those thankfully but there's very few notes that are designed for somebody on their own all of these other notes apps are primarily designed for teams to try to generate as much revenue as they can which their SAS companies I

don't blame them for having that business model but it does cause a lot of extra stuff to be in the app that isn't necessarily the best for just one person using it which is my case for obsidian now like I mentioned uh log seek and hepto are not really collaborative as much in nature and so there's other options out there for solo note taking tools but number three is probably the biggest reason that I'm not cons that I'm sticking with obsidian and that's I'm not concerned ultimately for the longevity of my notes all the notes

underneath are in plain text file formats or very common file formats images PDFs and so on if all of a sudden the team decided to stop developing obsidian and say we're not even open sourcing it we're just keeping it closed sourced see you later um I'm not concerned for the longevity of my notes because I know I don't have to try to fish them out of a database I'm going to get full quality of those notes as well but as I mentioned in the intro I've been covering obsidian for over four years and I've done

a lot in the tool to try to figure out where does this fit in my workflow and I know I haven't created as many videos recently on the channel covering obsidian uh for a number of reasons but there's been a few changes in how I approach looking at obsidian in my workflow number one of which is that obsidian is not my quote unquote one app to rule them all this is a conquest I think that many of us go on is how can I just put everything in one spot so that it makes sense to

me this is why notion is so popular with so many people because it's really easy to just throw everything in one place and have it accessible darn near everywhere however I'm not a big proponent of that mentality because more often than not there's a subset of actions that are the primary use case for that tool and then the rest of the stuff just really feels shoehorned in for example in obsidian there is a collaboration feature with obsidian sync but it's not the primary feature so you can use obsidian for collaboration but it's not the best

for that or with project management there's the conbine board plugin which I think is fantastic it's so powerful but there's been something that's niggled me in the back of my mind for a while uh with those types of plugins that I am staking my workflow on how I run my life on something that's developed by somebody for free um with something being so critical there's just a trust issue that ends up developing and so as a result of that I've pulled back a lot of my use in obsidian uh to things that are just things

that obsidian is designed for relational thought putting thoughts in there capturing them with tools like readwise reader uh and things of that sort and then linking them together um I'm not using it for much other than that anymore just solely for the reason that I don't trust building a solid workflow on third party plugins or Solutions I also don't like to fiddle with stuff too much and when you're getting into that territory of using an app for something that is not specifically designed for you fiddle a lot with it I just needed to work because

I've got a lot of stuff going on in my life all right and um I don't want to have to spend a significant chunk of my time getting the thing to work the way that I want it to and so that's why obsidian's not my one app to rule them all but you can see that I do have a bit of a stack a technology stack here what I would call a personal operations stack uh and to start off with is the bullet journal the bullet Journal has been a staple in my workflow since probably

200 18 I've it's gone through many iterations on how I approach using it but there's just something about uh working day-to-day off of paper that really helps me stay focused um clears the clutter in my mind where digital tools don't do that as well for me and then obsidian really fits in this stack as this relational thought tool it's this place where it kind of allows these ideas to incubate and develop and figure out what I really think about them over time time and then notion is something that I'm slowly starting to adopt again as

more of my big picture project management tool um all the workflows and processes really it's a great Ops tool and so primarily for effective is what I'm using notion for not really much for anything else at this moment in time just because it makes it super easy to track and create very ordered and organized pieces of information that I need to come back to another big big thing in the last couple of years is that I changed jobs I went from a company that was very free form in how they approached it to a company

that is incredibly strict about how they approach it and so I don't have the opportunity to use obsidian on my work computer and so it's not as accessible to me in the day-to-day yes I do have access to obsidian on my phone or an iPad but I just find that I don't use tools on those devices consistently when I have another computer sitting in front of me that I'm actively using all day long and so those are the big reasons why uh my approach to obsidian has changed but ultimately I still find obsidian a pleasure

to use I have found almost no reason to switch away from using it um just because the app it fits exactly in my workflow where I need it to as this place where I can capture ideas and develop them further and find where they fit in this externalized uh manifestation of my own thoughts on the computer um there is psychology that that a white space or a white board or a piece of paper actually functions like um an extension of our brains it's not what I I wouldn't necessarily term it a second brain personally um

but it it's it functions as a way for us to externalize our thoughts and then kind of loop them back in and our brain starts to make the connections a little bit better for ourselves so that's why I'm still using obsidian in 2024 and I think it's a great Notes app for someone who is interested in creating a spot for relational thought they don't need it to be collaborative and they want to make sure that their notes stick around for the long term again if you're just starting this journey with note taking and personal Knowledge

Management I would invite you to join me on my PKM Kickstart course it's completely free there's a link down in the description I would love to have you be a part of that completely for free again my name is Justin with effective thank you so much for watching this video I'll catch you in the next one but until then stay effective e