Articles

Claude Code x Obsidian Workshop Happening February 7th. Click below to sign up, where you'll be told more about what to expect, in terms of session agenda, and post-workshop resources and recordings. Sign up for free I’m hosting an important workshop about this on the 7th February — read this piece and look at the footer to see what it’s all about I’ve been finding loads of interesting signs online that people are becoming increasingly bullish on using AI for note-taking. ...

So this title might be misleading, but I think that it’s important we address the pandemic of overly-complicated PKM systems. Every time I log into Medium, I see something new along the lines of… “I ditched my folder-based note-taking system for a synaptic, symbiotic combination of the latest two research papers on how we can attach notes 2.2x more effectively.” And this just seems like a waste of time, content for new pieces of work. ...

For a long time, I’ve created Folder notes in Obsidian, containing indexes first from Dataview and second from Obsidian Bases, to give me a simple outline of a project’s progress. However, more recently, I made a small improvement that I thought might be interesting to you. This isn’t going to be a long piece, but it’s going to be an interesting one… The folder-note-index setup This is what I’ve called the most revolutionary change on the system side of my note-taking that I’ve ever made. ...

The internet is a minefield of note-taking apps, systems and general confusion, but you don’t have to let it affect you. There’s a way to build a note-taking practice that doesn’t require trying hundreds of these ‘solutions’, and can be applied at exactly the scale that you need to work effectively. It comes under the name of Minimal Note-Taking, and this is what you can learn in my new book! ...

In the last two months, since I’ve come to Southeast Asia, PARAZETTEL has changed and looks completely different. And I realise that I’ve not really spoken about this on any of my channels. So that’s what this piece is going to be… A low-down on how PARAZETTEL has changed, why it’s changed and how it’s designed to help you more than ever today. The two core pieces of the business are now… ...

The other day I was scrolling Twitter (like usual), and I came across a @kepano (Obsidian’s CEO) post. Steph was sharing how he makes maps of different locations inside of Obsidian. In his sample vault, you can find notes talking about a Japan trip, with all the locations visited arranged in Bases, including on a map. And I’ve just figured out how to do it for myself… (NOTE: I’m pretty sure as of when I’m writing that this feature is only available to Insiders, but this piece is here to get you ready for when it does arrive publicly.) ...

One of the first atomic notes that I ever wrote in my Obsidian-based Zettelkasten was about critical mass — how a Zettelkasten becomes a “sparring partner” only when it reaches a critical mass of notes. It was inspired by Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, which is a book all about Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. The other day, three years on from writing this note, I had a really visceral moment of realisation about how powerful this is, and so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about it in this piece today… ...

A week and a half ago, I took my first-ever long-haul flight, from London Gatwick to Shanghai Pudong. After sitting sleep-deprived in the Chinese airport for an hour or so, I boarded another flight that took me south, touching down in Bangkok four hours later. And I’ve been in Thailand ever since, with no plans as of yet to return home. Everything’s changed, and it’s been pretty full-on. In fact, I’ve only spent maybe three out of the nine-or-so days I’ve been here actually doing any work. ...

The other day I watched Tiago Forte (one of the, if not the most prominent name in personal knowledge management education) elaborate on how AI writes 90–95% of the volume of content in the blog posts that he’s been sharing recently. Now although this is a brave admission, it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, myself included (but I’m not address this fact by writing a knee-jerk YouTube comment tearing Tiago down). ...

Imagine it was impossible to suffer from shiny object syndrome with note-taking apps. Already, it’s hard to even imagine — There are 101 different options everywhere you turn, all trying to convince you that their platform’s going to be the one that keeps you from straying and distracting yourself. The truth is? They’re all right. So long as you build your system for work in the correct way. Let me explain… ...

Back in March, I came to a tipping point in Google Workspace use with my business. It was too complicated, bloated and impersonal. But I needed a replacement. Luckily, I could turn to my community and ask questions… And after a short period scouting out alternatives, I settled on Proton Business Suite’s services. In this piece, I’m very quickly going to quickly cover what was going wrong, and what changed when I switched platform… ...

This is a piece that I might normally post on my newsletter, Fundamentalised. But I realise there’s a portion of my readers who only access me through Medium, so I thought, seeing as my life has changed quite a lot in the two months, that I’d put together a small round-up to let you know what’s been happening… Life Changes — Graduation and Travel If you’ve read any one of my Medium articles that I’ve posted in the last two and a half years, you’ll have read work that I’ve written whilst being a student at the University of Sheffield. ...

Now, this isn’t the first piece of work on the internet published about Obsidian Bases. But I made a YouTube video that I shared when Bases first came out, and so I thought I could take my time with putting together this article. The video was a very off-the-cuff piece of work that I recorded in one take when I read on Twitter that the new feature had come out. ...

Which is a good thing amongst growing privacy concerns around plugins from elsewhere… **If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — **Obsidian’s Core Plugin Offerings Keep Growing and Improving Two years ago I wrote about Obsidian’s core plugins… Obsidian Core Plugins - Get These Right FirstThey're the foundation of most of the functions in the app, so you'd better not neglect them... ...

In the past, I’ve written about my idea called Minimal Note-Taking, where you use just enough complexity in your system to not hold you back, and no more. This piece is going to expand on the before and after you realise you need and learn to implement minimal note-taking, especially before. Here’s something you should consider — most people don’t need to know that PKM exists. They do just fine taking notes in the way that they’ve taken notes before. Whether this is cracking open a Google Doc to send stuff to a colleague, or just taking notes of their gym sets in their Apple Notes. ...

UPDATE: Wispr Flow is available on Apple devices and Windows, but not Android yet. Wispr Flow is one of the newest apps I’ve added to my everyday software stack, and very quickly it’s risen to be among the most-used. But what does it do? In short, it’s a dictation app. A very good one. In slightly longer, it’s how I capture information to Obsidian and talk to AI these days. In this piece, I’m going to go through how. ...

For the last two years now, I’ve made a habit of writing these complete guide pieces, summarising my recent work and pointing you to the best articles I’ve published. Obsidian Complete Guide (New and Updated for November 2024)New articles, updates, features and more… Obsidian - An Up-to-Date Guide (November 2023)Your one-stop location for everything new and exciting in the world of Obsidian PKM... ...

Last Wednesday, I submitted my final piece of coursework for my university course. Now, although I’ve got three exams still to go, this marks passing the last submission to turn in before I graduate. That’s it. This is a strange feeling really — the end of an era. And if you know a little about my story, and how I chose Obsidian to manage all my work before I went out to university, then you know that I’ve been studying as one of my priorities for the entire time I’ve been using the app. ...

I’ve been at this for over two years now, here’s the most up-to-date stack… In the past, quite a while ago, I used to write now and again about the different apps and services I was enjoying at that moment in time… Apps Worth Paying For (IMHO)Apps with the highest return on investment in my life... Top Apps for PKM, Online Business and Writing in 2023The apps, tools and services that have changed my life over the course of just a year... ...

The other day, when I was writing my last piece about note-taking theory (specifically Minimal Note-Taking), a seedling of an idea began to form. An idea of comparing your note-taking system to a house or living space. Now you don’t have to think twice about using your house effectively (even the phrase sounds a little stupid), so you shouldn’t have to think twice when it comes to managing knowledge effectively either. ...

As I’ve developed my ideas more and more, the teaching that I now do surrounds more of the theory and ideas behind personal knowledge management that apply to any system and any app that you might want to use, rather than Obsidian. This is the piece where I bring everything together and let you know the ultimate PKM theory starter pack. This article is going to serve to consolidate things and do the best possible job of giving you somewhere to go if you lose track when trying to manage your knowledge and take notes. ...

For the last couple of months, I’ve been very quiet here on Medium. It’s quite a change, seeing as for most of 2023 I was writing almost daily articles, only letting up slightly in 2024. There’s a lot of work to be getting on with at university, and I’ve been building a new offer that’s even better than the PARAZETTEL for Obsidian vault, which I’ve been offering for the last year and a half. ...

It’s easy to see who we are as set in stone, but we’re not completely without the capacity to improve certain character qualities Throughout the last few years of taking notes first for university, then for myself and creating content online, I’ve noticed two characteristics which appear to be more important for useful knowledge management than any others. We’re going to cover them today. I’ll explain why I think each one is so important, as well as what I think you can do to tap into and build your ability in each one. ...

Capturing content from your world is the first step to generating new ideas in your knowledge management system, whether they come from your mind, from articles, books or anything else. In this piece, I’m going to cover every single tool and configuration that I use for this. We’ll start with by far the most important… Inbox — internal ideas and thoughts This is the most important of all sources of inspiration in the world. ...

Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from Obsidian revealing its 1.8 update. Now I’ve been expecting a few things from Obsidian’s upcoming improvements, like a new interface from data (I’m imagining Dataview but in core plugin form) as well as mobile quick capture capabilities. Web browsing I was not expecting. But here we are. I’ve already created a video walking through everything I’ve discovered about the core plugin ‘Web viewer’ since its release. ...

Since my first article about Obsidian, back around the start of 2023, all I’ve ever really done is write about the topic. That all changed less than a week ago, though, because I started posting video tutorials and workflow insights to my YouTube channel. But which medium is better? This isn’t a simple question to answer but I’ll attempt to do so in this piece in a little detail. (If you don’t want to read, the short answer is that some things lend themselves to video content a bit better, and some things work the other way around. There’s no one-size-fits-all response, and it depends largely on skill at creating the content in question.) ...

I’ve started to feel that you can only get so far teaching PKM and note-taking through written guides. At some point, I was always going to have to bite the bullet and start recording YouTube videos, to reach a wider audience and to let everyone watch me use my Obsidian vault in front of their eyes. So here we are. My first YouTube video, and it’s about one of my favourite and most resonant ideas — Minimal Note-Taking. ...

I’ve been writing about Obsidian online for over a year and a half now. Some of these articles I’ve written have acted as consolidation pieces, summarising my previous work on the subject into a simple single place people can surf it from. But the last time I published one of these was a year ago, and a lot has changed since then, so I thought it was time to create another. ...

I felt out of touch with publishing content earlier this summer, so I returned to the root of what might be wrong. This meant addressing my note-taking, idea development and creation mechanisms to see if there were any improvements to add. Although I’m very happy as a whole with the system I’ve been using for the last three years to take notes, I realised that as the projects and other work that I take on evolves, it would be ignorant not to evolve the system that I work in along with it. ...

You could say that productivity and trying to improve it has taken up a lot of room in my head. And I think after a point, wondering and stressing about productivity doesn’t help at all. Recently, I’ve been preferring to keep things simple and do only the tasks that I actually need to do to make progress. What I’ve found is best when distracted, counter-intuitively, is to just forget your work for a while, focus on other parts of your life and come back to your work refreshed and ready to keep going. ...

The other day I found evidence of Obsidian’s new official web clipper while scrolling through Twitter. I don’t think this browser extension has been announced officially yet (Edit: this is because it only works for the latest version of Obsidian, which is 17.2 at the time of writing) but I thought I’d get ahead of the curve and quickly share what I’ve been using it for so far. Let’s get started… ...

It’s almost a year ago to the day that I launched PARAZETTEL for the first time. And the vault’s role in my life stands as one of the most formative continuing experiences that I’ve ever had. It’s my first effort at offering any kind of product and is what started my online business and began to bring some kind of fruition to writing and growing an audience. So I thought in this piece I’d go over some lessons from what I’ve learned from this so far as well as introduce the new update to PARAZETTEL a little later. ...

I’ve been journaling for as long as I’ve been working on myself, my writing, and my development. This hasn’t always been in the same way, moving from notebooks to digital formats and back again, from bullet journaling to freehand. However, one thing has remained constant… The benefit I’ve gotten from the practice itself. After journaling about whatever the topic might be, I always feel more composed and calm, ready to sleep or tackle the day or anything between these two extremes. ...

Tiago Forte is one of the most prominent names of all time in the field of teaching personal knowledge management. Most of the foundational skills I learned to build up my own methods of managing knowledge came from Tiago. So I’m going to dedicate this piece to him and go through all these ideas that I’ve learned… Where did I first come across Tiago? To my memory, this was thanks to Ali Abdaal. ...

It was well over two years ago that I first found out about Obsidian now, and I can’t remember how it came to my attention either. All I remember was that I thought that this app would be a great solution for all clicking about between Notion, OneNote and more that I was doing. I needed something that was going to break me out of my shiny object syndrome rut. ...

The team at Obsidian have been making changes. Specifically, these changes have been coming to their mobile app. Today, I’m going to talk a bit about what I’ve noticed already and what I’m still expecting from the app’s upgrades in the future. Let’s get started… Mobile startup changes The first thing I noticed about mobile was the icon’s new appearance when you launch the app. A small change, I know, but a change nonetheless… ...

The Zettelkasten Method from Niklas Luhmann is one of the most infamous strategies for managing knowledge. When first developed, Luhmann wrote index cards by hand, an atomic idea on each, and placed them into wooden containers for easy future reference. Over time, most people who still use the system took it to a digital environment, using apps such as Obsidian, Logseq and others. Now, whilst many people still swear by the Zettelkasten, lots try their hardest to make it work without success. ...

I’ve been somewhat distant from writing articles recently. The reason for being so was explained in my most recent newsletter issue but if you haven’t read it, I’ll share it here to help you out… Just a little more than a week ago, I was assaulted in the street in the city I live near in the UK. Following this, I spent days in the hospital gradually recovering to a point where I could be discharged and go home. ...

My vault has changed a lot since I started using Obsidian. Nowadays, things run very smoothly allowing me to capture, generate and share ideas. But it wasn’t always like this — the process is something I’ve worked on for over two and a half years — it took over a year before I even started feeling comfortable with the system I was working in. In this piece, I want to share the main changes in my vault since I started using Obsidian. We’ll go over vault organisation, capture methods and more. ...

Back when I started writing on the internet, specifically online, I had a lot of engagement around my articles talking about AI. ChatGPT was taking off as a super-tool and everyone wanted to know where the technology would go next and how people were making the most of it in their personal knowledge management, productivity and other areas of life. I was, as everyone else was too, trying out new AI tools in my workflows, learning, making mistakes and trying to optimise. And the stories of my escapades were quite popular online… ...

There are some Obsidian plugins that I’ve fallen out of love with over time (think Kanban and Excalidraw) — although there’s nothing that I’ve got against these plugins, they’ve just not stuck around. However, there are some plugins that I’ve had installed in my Obsidian vault for a very long time, with some even as long as I’ve had the app as my main solution for note-taking and personal knowledge management. ...

I’ve been using Obsidian for over two years now — that’s around half the time the app has existed. But before this, I used to be notoriously bad at switching between note-taking apps, thinking that the perfect option for me was out there. This was a mistake and I will explain why and how I fixed this train of thought in this article. We’ll cover why the problem is not the app but rather the system you use, how to develop a solution for your work and how to pick an app and stick with it. ...

About a month ago, before I went on a writing sabbatical during university exam season, I installed Obsidian on my phone and purchased their Sync service for the first time. Just before that, I’d deleted Todoist because of task overflow, and I was looking for a simpler way to quickly capture content on mobile so that I wouldn’t lose the ideas that come to me during the day. Obsidian hadn’t crossed my mind as a solution in the past, but I’d become aware of a Mac/iOS shortcut that would create the functionality I was looking for. So I installed the mobile app and purchased Obsidian Sync. ...

Everyone’s on social media these days. Fewer people are building a personal website. So that’s exactly why I’m doing it. So what’s the story behind my personal website? I’ve been wanting to share my writing on a personal website for a long time. Since about last October, after the first launch of PARAZETTEL, I started to build on Obsidian Publish and although I really enjoyed the experience with this service, I knew that in the end, I wanted a completely customisable website for my work. ...

From around last August to January last year, I was working on launching and then relaunching my first digital product PARAZETTEL. It’s all about a system for knowledge management in Obsidian and in fashion, I managed the whole project using the system itself. Out of all the projects I’ve worked on, this one was by far the largest and longest-lasting, so I thought I’d share some insight on managing big projects that you might have yourself. ...

I wrote recently about the three apps that have helped me build my life. If you want to check out the piece, you can find it on this site. If you don’t, I’ll tell you in short what these apps are… Obsidian Todoist Cold Turkey Blocker Now it’s the first two of these that I want to focus on today. You might have noticed that one is a task management app (Todoist) and the other is a knowledge management app. ...

I’m not going to waste your time. If you don’t want to read or you can’t read far enough into this piece for details, the three apps that have been largely responsible for building my life so far are… Obsidian Todoist Cold Turkey Blocker If you’ve got a second or two to spare, you can hang around and hear why they were so important — what I use them for, why they’re better than other options. ...

I imagine that most of you reading this piece might have read one or two of my others before, all about managing personal knowledge. Less of you will know that I’m a photographer, and actively enjoy taking photos of nature and the natural world, from landscapes to wildlife. But as photographs are a part of our personal knowledge and information management almost as much as the written word, I thought I’d share a little about how I capture and manage images, and how they fit into my creative work on this side of the internet. ...

I’d been wanting to host a workshop for a while but had been putting off the task due to uncertainty. The first step in fixing this was to send a date to my email list so that I couldn’t back out of the process. So I did, after gathering some preferences around days, times and subjects. I set it all up, got through the procrastination, and delivered last Friday. Before I go into what I learned from the experience (in short — a lot), I’m going to give you a run-down of what we covered in the ~50 minutes I was presenting for… ...

Productivity ruts happen. You have to hit a dip to be able to bounce back and have good days. It’s how you react to the dips that matters. But it’s better if you can prevent the drop in productivity from happening in the first place so you don’t have to implement damage control when you start to realise you’ve gone days without making any real progress. I’ve noticed some things that are very consistent across every time I find myself struggling with creating. They’re clear to see for someone who steps back and looks into what might be going wrong, but whilst working you might not spot them. I’ve fallen victim to not zooming out. ...

When I was first looking to run a free workshop on personal knowledge management, I sent out a poll asking what topics my audience would like to see covered. One of the first responses that I received was from someone looking for advice on how to better organise their files in Obsidian. I’ve got my own method of doing this, which you can investigate if you check out PARAZETTEL, but it’s not for everyone (although I’ve done my best to make it adaptable). ...

You know the story — attention and focus are becoming ever more valuable. Many struggle to achieve either of them. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been, yet more lonely. What’s the reason for this? The obvious culprit is the internet. Our psychology hasn’t evolved quickly enough to cope with the huge changes to society that personal tech has caused. Some companies and individuals moved faster than others. Tools and services popped up and started to prey on our archaic psychology for profit. ...

I’ve been a student almost my whole life. Because of this, starting in primary school and moving from there to secondary school, sixth form and university, I’ve learned a lot about taking effective notes as a student. Some of my work mentions this studying status and as a result, a question I get asked very often is ‘How do you take notes as a student’? Unfortunately, it’s not a question that I like to hear, because I believe that it varies so much between person, subject and desired outcome. ...

Old habits die hard. One year ago, I wrote about how I’d chosen Obsidian over a host of other note-taking apps that I thought might have competed but now viewed as shiny objects… I Tried Tana, Anytype and Notion, Then Bought an Obsidian Catalyst Licence. Here's WhyWhy Obsidian is the best notes app for building a functional, no-frills productivity system. ...

It’s a controversial feature of the popular note-taking app. It’s also great thumbnail content if you’re making work about the note-taking app. But is the graph view in Obsidian actually useful? For a long time, I didn’t think so. However, my mind has been changed somewhat as I stepped back from the hype and thought about how the feature could be used productively. Here’s my opinion on the Obsidian graph view, starting from my own experience with it… ...

Workspaces is a core plugin in Obsidian. I don’t give core plugins much attention, especially when there are options such as Dataview and QuickAdd available. However, Neglecting the Workspaces core plugin was a mistake. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using this plugin to speed up my workflow and in this piece, I’m going to tell you how. Many of my readers know that I use Obsidian for both writing online and also doing university work. One day, looking through my plugin list whilst re-centring my vault, I noticed the Workspaces plugin staring back at me, unused. ...

“If it’s not getting me to £10k/m then I don’t care” I said this to my friend a few months back, only half seriously. Since then, it’s become a form of mantra between us, used to call the other out when we’re not focusing on the task at hand (which is often business, hence the cliché ‘£10k/m’ reference)… ‘That’s not getting you to £10k/m, why are you doing it?’ ‘I was going to go to XYZ, but it’s not going to get me to £10k/m so I’m not anymore’ ...

I can already imagine hearing the gasps of horror from the people reading this article’s title. Hopefully, I’ll make more sense by the time you get to the end of the piece. A bit more than a month ago, I was working on generating ideas for an update of my product — lots of ideas and tasks were popping into my mind throughout this, and I was writing them all down, one by one, into my Todoist inbox. ...

There are two common problems with knowledge work that people come across. They are: Productivity Creativity Everyone at some point thinks ‘Oh, if only I were slightly more focused then I might have XYZ’, or ‘Oh, if only I had an idea for XYZ, that would be great’. I’m not here to tell you that I can entirely optimise productivity and creativity. They will always be there to some extent, as is the way of the world. ...

Recently, I posted a tweet that read: “Remember to look at where you were one year ago. The results might surprise you.” It received a lot of positive responses. People said it reminded them to zoom out on how far they’ve come and look upon it with a feeling of pride. But where was I one year ago? Location-wise, I was sat where I am now. I’m in my parents’ house, home from university, spending time with my family over Christmas. ...

Many of us play more than one role in the digital world. I’m no exception. This year, I’ve been a writer, online business owner and student, using a variety of digital tools to get the job done in each role. Since I’ve been writing on the internet for less than a year, this has been my first chance to do a yearly round-up of a topic. Because what I talk about largely relates to online productivity and personal knowledge management, I thought it would be wise to start with some apps, tools and services that have made a difference for me this year. ...

I’ve been writing on Medium for almost a year now. I started in January with little direction, but quickly a topic of expertise developed. This was personal knowledge management and productivity, particularly in the app of Obsidian. I’ve written almost 100 articles on Medium and most have been on this topic. Back in June, I did a piece that rounded everything up into a single point of reference in a single article for all the information I shared. ...

Since beginning to use PARAZETTEL, my bespoke system for personal knowledge management, I’ve learned a lot about effective systems for taking notes and working, and how to develop them. In this piece, I’m going to cover why it’s best to follow an evolution model in developing your own PKM system. This is better than changing things all at once. I call this evolution (it relates to biological evolution) and this piece is going to show how you can use the principles yourself. ...

Obsidian has been my PKM ‘daily driver’ for almost a year and a half now and it’s been the only tool that has stuck with me properly when creating work. Over these five years, I’ve been developing and optimising the workflows that I use every day to get work done. In this article, I want to summarise the four most important ones for you. They are: Planning and writing the script for content such as articles like these Taking notes for university and studying, turning them into flashcards Browsing literature notes and writing permanent notes from the information that they hold Managing projects and tasks in folder notes Prepare to learn how each workflow is set up and how I use them. ...

Update — I no longer maintain this website because I’ve created something more complex and powerful for Fundamentalised. This doesn’t stop Obsidian Publish from being a great place to start sharing your work. It’s good to have a personal website. A corner of the internet that’s yours, that nobody can take away from you. They’re not only reserved for bloggers or professionals — it can be cheap and easy to set up a website for yourself. ...

At the start of the year, my online audience was the sixth-form friends who followed me on Instagram. My online business endeavours were non-existent and I had little motivation or direction. Just under two months ago, I launched a digital product that earned $1k in revenue over the launch weekend. It’s called PARAZETTEL. But this post is not to promote and explain what the product is. If you want to learn about that, read this piece… ...

Using the internet and online connectivity in a useful way is not easy. There are a lot of things to contend with when you’re a content creator: Consistency Audience engagement Improving and staying relevant, These, among others, come and go throughout the journey. I’ve faced many of these troubles since first creating online notes and content, starting with YouTube some years ago. The problems have only magnified since focusing further on a true content creation process and business. This caused me to build effective solutions. ...

Hello Medium! It’s been a while. This is perhaps the longest I’ve spent without writing on this platform since I began doing so at the start of the year. But now I’m back. And this article’s going to be a special one. Ever since my work on Obsidian and productivity began to resonate with people here, I’ve wanted to create a product that captured my knowledge and experience. This is what I’ve been doing over the last two months whilst I’ve not been posting. Now it’s time for the big reveal… ...

If I’m honest, I didn’t expect much from writing on Medium… The related goal for 2023 was to publish 10 articles on the platform. But, by the title of this piece, it’s clear that I outdid my own expectations of myself, publishing ten times as many pieces as I challenged myself to do. This is disregarding the fact that there are still more than four months left in the year! ...

Working in Obsidian is a pleasure most of the time, but with such a customisable application things are bound to get out of hand at times. When this happens, you need a way to reset and get back to work. I do this by simplifying and clearing out my vault, and I’m going to explain my methods in this article. Simplifying my vault is focused on subtraction rather than addition, doubling down on making sure that the most important 20% of features work well. ...

I won’t waste your time… This work ethic hack is accountability. Specifically, accountability held by someone other than yourself. I’d like to start this article with a story… I have a close friend who’s also working on his own online business (he actually closed £1k of sales in one day recently for his coaching). We spent a weekend together with some other motivated online content creators and entrepreneurs recently, and he set me a challenge out of the blue… ...

Writing well regularly is a hard thing to do — I’ve been going for six months now, and the more I get into the habit, the more I realise how much I’ve got left to learn. There are some pointers that I’ve picked up from the experience though, so I thought I’d make an article about them. The most effective way to publish good writing consistently is to make a habit of it. However, this habit only works if there are some other foundational habits underlying the process. These are the habits that I’m going to go over in this piece. From capturing ideas to batching your writing, these are going to make consistent quality output a breeze. ...

This article’s going to be all about the one thing that’s made me a better writer since starting to create on Medium at the start of the year. You might have guessed by this point, but it was simply to wake up and write an article before I did any other work in the day. I’m going to explain why this method of working is so effective. If there’s one piece of advice that you take from me ever, it’s this one — get your writing done first thing in the morning, and make a habit of it. ...

It’s all well and good having high levels of physical health, but this becomes all too difficult to maintain if you don’t hold yourself in good esteem, or think highly of yourself in your own brain. This was something I used to struggle with very much. I was strong and capable as a teenager, but I couldn’t put this to good use because of what was holding me back. What was holding me back was my mindset. ...

Since beginning to write on Medium, I’ve learned a lot about engaging an audience and keeping views high on my work, and there was one mistake that stopped my progress during the first couple of months on the platform. This was writing to an audience that didn’t exist. What I mean by this is I wasn’t sharing any value with people in my writing, so they had no reason to click on, follow or otherwise engage with my work. ...

Most people don’t have access to Properties in Obsidian at the moment, because they’re only available in Insider Builds that come with a Catalyst license. I’m here to figure things out and tell you how best to use this feature when it rolls out to everyone. This piece was written several days after the release of the Properties to Insiders. I’ve had some time to play around with the feature, seeing how it changes things in terms of metadata in my notes, and I’m going to share my findings with you here in this piece. ...

Everyone reads. Articles, books, tweets and newsletters. Everyone watches and listens. YouTube, documentaries and podcasts. Fewer in number are those who know how to consume content effectively, inspiring content of their own. I’ve been writing since the start of the year, and managing my personal knowledge since a year prior to this, reading books like Building a Second Brain and How to Take Smart Notes. This has equipped me with detailed knowledge and experience in consuming content and turning it into work of my own. ...

I’ve recently written a piece about my iPhone setup for productivity and thought it would be interesting to do an accompanying piece about how I set up a desktop for productivity. My tool of the trade here is a 13-Inch M2 Macbook Air, which I’ve had for the last month or so. Like the iPhone, I had to take some time to adjust to the new operating system, but I have everything in place now, so I wanted to go over what I’ve chosen to use for productivity on this device. ...

Obsidian templates are an obvious addition to any power user’s arsenal in the app. You can add complex properties and note content just from a simple shortcut or search, saving you hours of time in the long run. There are plugins that make this even more powerful, such as Templater, with you being able to add internal functions that complete up-to-date information in the note when it’s created with a given template. ...

I got an iPhone for the first time a couple of months back after my Android phone smashed. It was the first piece of Apple technology that I owned, so there was a learning curve whilst setting it up, but at this point, I think that I’ve done enough to make sure that it’s an asset to my productivity rather than a distraction. In this piece, I’m going to share how I’ve set up this phone, from apps to settings, in order to maximise the benefit that I’m getting out of it. ...

Back in May, I released an article about how I’ve created a fusion of Building a Second Brain’s P.A.R.A. method of organisational note-taking and Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten of interlinked atomic notes. Fusing the Two Most Powerful Note-Taking Systems in ObsidianThe two note-taking strategies of Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten and Tiago Forte's PARA in Building a Second Brain have dominated managing many people's personal ...

Everyone takes notes, from uni students to kids in school, to content creators and to workers in information-related jobs. Despite this, few do it; right. This guide is here to change that. I believe that the best note-taking method for you, the reader, is minimal note-taking. This is regardless of what you take notes for. This article’s going to go into some detail about why taking notes is best done minimally, as well as how you actually go about minimal note-taking. ...

It’s no secret by now — I use Obsidian to take notes. I talk about the app an awful lot, but there’s a method to my madness. It’s the one app that’s quite literally changed my life. It got me through my first year of university whilst starting a habit of writing online which has led to digital income. The app is almost perfect — it’s under active development, with exciting updates coming out regularly. An example is the Properties feature that became available to Insiders recently, adding a UI to YAML metadata. ...

One of the very first pieces I wrote on Medium was about bullet journaling. How to Quit a Digital Task Management System to Start Bullet JournalingBullet journaling uses a single notebook to keep track of everything from tasks and events to goals and collections of notes. It was also the first piece on the platform that got recommended to a wider audience. ...

Since starting to write on Medium in January, I’ve gathered just over 50,000 views on the platform. About 43k of them have come in the last two months. I’ve learned a lot through this process, about many different aspects including quality, consistency, managing emotions and iterating content. Many of these pieces of advice are scattered throughout my other writing, from article to article, as I drop them in as and when I’m experiencing them or learning from them, but this is not much help. ...

Obsidian yesterday released the 1.4 update, available only to Insiders for now, introducing a feature that they’re calling Properties. Based on YAML metadata, which has always been a feature of the app, now adding certain metadata properties in your notes is more feature-rich and accessible. This article’s going to go over the changes and upgrades, as well as the new features that this brings to metadata (or properties) in Obsidian. I’m also going to cover some plugins that will help you manage this metadata. ...

I’m sure everyone agrees that there are some notes in your workflow that you keep coming back to. Perhaps they’re the root of your vault, where you’ve linked all your maps of content. Perhaps they’re task lists with due and important reminders for what you have to get done that day/week/month. There are only two notes that I access regularly, but they’re pivotal in my workflow, and I couldn’t work as effectively without them: ...

Recently, I spent a weekend away in the Lake District in the north of England with some new friends of mine. We made the most of the time despite the horizontal rain and grey skies, going cliff jumping and cold-water plunging, talking business and life at large in our caravan during the evenings. It’s in everyone’s interest to become as fulfilled and as self-actualized as possible during their lifetime, and I noticed and defined the three things that help the most with this, based on my experience, especially of the past few days. ...

For a long time, I’ve used the P.A.R.A. method for organising my notes in Obsidian. This method, from Tiago Forte, breaks down your notes into one of four categories: Projects — notes related to projects you’re currently working on Areas — ongoing topics of focus or interest in your life Resources — files that you think are going to be perpetually useful, referenced in many other projects Archive — a storage silo for all the notes that you don’t think you’re going to need to reference in the future This article will talk about the first one in particular — projects, covering the plugins and strategies I use to manage my project folders in Obsidian. ...

Since receiving my first phone three years ago at 16 years of age, I’ve had a personal Instagram account. I was late to the party in comparison to the majority of my peers, and after finally opening an account, I enjoyed being able to keep up with them digitally as well as in real life. Or so I thought. For the last year, however, I’ve become increasingly aware of my compulsive actions around using the app. This lead me to the belief that I had a behavioural addiction to Instagram. ...

Recently, I made a tweet saying that people should change their note-taking systems less, focusing only on making a change when it’s actually required, in order to fix something or add a necessary feature. I was simply projecting my own discoveries through succumbing to shiny object syndrome too heavily myself. However, a few days ago I ran into one of the scenarios where my note-taking system in Obsidian actually required updating… ...

I’ve been tweaking my note-taking systems too much recently, and haven’t been focused on creating content, so I decided to cut most things back to focus on the writing rather than the system. This probably should have happened earlier to stop the overload of my system with all sorts of pointless features that were stealing my attention. It doesn’t take that much to be able to take useful notes and plan good content from within the application. ...

This was inspired by an article covering PKM Beth’s recent paid app subscriptions. I’ll preface this article by saying that I don’t pay for many apps and services, but the ones I do pay for I think are worth the return on investment for their purchase. From audio services to AI, these subscriptions are pretty wide-ranging, so you might find something here that you’ve never heard of before. Let’s get started… ...

For the last year or so, I’ve been keeping a journal in one form or another, whether it’s bullet journaling in a Traveler’s Notebook, or daily notes in Obsidian. I trawled back through all these notes, with the purpose of learning how I’ve developed over the course of the last year — what has changed and improved, and how I perceive my wins and losses now versus when they took place. ...

Very many people, myself included (until recently), use task management systems to keep long lists of things they should be doing to make the most progress towards their goals. Through my own experimentation, I’m now claiming that task management systems aren’t the right solution for most online creators/solopreneurs. The real solution? Idea capture systems. In this article, I’m talking about how capturing ideas and neglecting to capture and organise tasks brought more clarity, better prioritisation and a greater creative output to my day’s work. ...

Sometimes, I find myself tinkering with my Obsidian system and plugins just for the sake of things. Procrastinating like this means I’m just as ineffective as I would be if I was just watching YouTube or scrolling somewhere else. However, it’s easy to block distracting websites. It’s less easy to remove yourself from the distracting elements of Obsidian, because they’re right there, in the app that you have to work in. ...

Internet browsers are all the same. Or are they? If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Arc Browser Review — Love the Internet Again You open tabs, search the web, scroll on your favourite sites, and open even more tabs, losing yourself within them. Right? Well, with Arc Browser, from **The Browser Company **(Available on Mac and iOS), wrong. ...

The whole time I’ve been writing on Medium, I’ve been studying for a degree in Zoology in the city of Sheffield simultaneously. During this time I’ve also filmed and produced three videos on my YouTube channel. There have been some points where I’ve had to juggle writing and creating with studying for exams and writing essays. I’m going to share how I did this and plan to keep doing it next academic year too. From prioritisation to using the power of AI, there are plenty of techniques you can use to fit all of your creative endeavours around studying. ...

A few weeks back, I published an article about tagging notes in Obsidian, relating to information that I read in the bonus chapter of Building a Second Brain. Power-Up Your Tagging in Obsidian With The Secret Building a Second Brain Bonus ChapterTiago Forte suggests tagging for actionability - here's how to do this in Obsidian... This article ended up gaining some traction in the community, and was mentioned in a story by the CEO Tony Stubblebine, in a piece about the value of Medium: ...

When working on the internet, as I imagine many people reading this do, it can feel like your brain is in 100 different places at once if you don’t guard your attention against these distractions. When your thoughts are spread out over many different things, it’s hard to find a deep flow to produce your work within, leading to a reduction in the efficiency of creating a quality output. This article is going to cover the different ways in which you can make sure that your digital environment stimulates you as little as possible so that your attention towards your work doesn’t become clouded with different things that don’t matter. ...

Whether it’s Apple Notes, Obsidian or something else, everyone has their own favourite app for taking notes… If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — What Makes a Good Note-Taking App? However, there are some options that rise above others in terms of popularity. But what makes these options the best? This article’s going to go into detail about what makes a note-taking app popular — features that seem to be a must-have, as well as unique functions that set some unique offerings apart. ...

You all know the story by now. Obsidian has plugins. A lot of them. The functionality that they provide is the main reason that so many people find they can create a working second brain system in the app. There are so many plugins, however, that you can’t know what they all do. There are hidden features and functionalities that a lot of people miss out on, especially within plugins that aren’t very popular. ...

Trello is a mainstay in productivity software. It’s a classic and well-implemented instance of a Kanban board, but what if I told you we could create this kind of system within Obsidian, so you don’t have to leave your notes? This is possible with Obsidian’s Kanban plugin. One of the most popular and powerful plugins in the app, it brings a full-featured Kanban experience to Obsidian. I’m going to be covering the capabilities of the plugin in this article, as well as talking about some use cases it suits, some of which I’ve used myself. ...

I’ve used both of these tools now, so I think that I’m well-positioned to weigh in with my side of the argument. This piece is going to cover some comparisons of features, as well as my opinions on each of these note-taking apps, so you can better make a decision on what’s going to help you in your personal knowledge management. TL; DR — like every notes app comparison, Obsidian’s better for some things, Capacities is better at some others. Read on to find out what each performs better at… ...

Ever since I started using computers, they’ve been running a Windows OS. In school, at home and anywhere else. My first laptop was an HP running Windows 10, and later, Windows 11. A couple of days ago, however, I bought my first MacBook (a 13-inch M2 Air) and set it up. I’d had an iPhone for the last couple of months because of breaking my last phone (an Android) and wanted to progress to an entirely Apple-based ecosystem of technology. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — The Best AI Tools I’ve Used This Year I could write a cliche hook about how AI has changed the world and revolutionised every field you could imagine but at this point, it’s been overdone. I’ve made use of some very powerful AI tools, and although none of them have been ‘life-changing’, they’ve helped streamline the work that I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, so I’m going to cover them in this article. ...

I need not mention how much information there is on the internet on studying. How to study, when to study, what to do in preparation for studying, and what to use when studying. I want to focus on the latter today. There are a million and one different apps that claim to make life easier for students, and during my first year at university, I had to try a few things out to find the ones that were actually worth any time. ...

It’s probably part of writing about using this kind of thing every day, but I feel like my productivity systems switch too often. I’ve always seen this is an unproductive thing to do. Why switch from a system that functions well enough to something new that’s going to take time and effort to set up? Even now, I still consider this unproductive for the most part, but I’ve come to respect the fact that every once in a while your system is going to evolve for the better. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Conquer Your To-dos With the Best Obsidian Plugins for Task Management One of Obsidian’s main advantages is that it’s highly configurable. This is to the point that you can build systems for managing your tasks entirely alongside your notes. This can be powerful, to avoid context-switching from the app, which could potentially increase levels of distraction you’re exposed to. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Why You Might Not Need AI to Help With Your Writing I’ve been using AI for what feels like a long time now, in Obsidian and beyond. I grew on Medium when writing about AI, putting out articles about tips and tricks that I used to make my work more efficient. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — The Obsidian Solution for the Cornell Note-Taking Method I was recently invited to download TfTHacker’s Cornell note-taking method Obsidian demo vault. I was interested to see how TfTHacker had incorporated this into Obsidian, seeing as I’d considered this note-taking framework something mostly used on **physical pieces of paper **where you had more freedom to draw different sections onto the page. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Simple Online Creator Business Tech Stack You Can Use For Free I’ve been writing on the Internet for half a year now. The medium used to be the only service that I used for producing online work, but as my following’s grown and I’ve seen potential for engaging on other platforms and expanded to produce content there too. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — I Grew 1 to 19k Medium Views Per Month This Year. Here’s What I’ve Learned About Finding a Niche… A single view. That’s all my first month on Medium provided. One person (bless them) chose to read my notes about what I’d learned from taking A-level exams last summer. Since releasing this first article, it’s safe to say that I’ve learned a lot about building a strong following in a short space of time on this platform. ...

I’ve been publishing about Obsidian for two months, with one and a half of these months being through the publication Obsidian Observer. Yesterday’s article was my thirtieth on the subject. This has added up to a lot of my knowledge about Obsidian being spread across different pieces of work. This article’s here to change that. I’m going to go through all the work I’ve published, linking them into one coherent guide that covers all the topics you want to learn about in Obsidian. ...

I’ve been neglecting this feature in Obsidian for the longest time, but recently I decided to upgrade the way I use tags in Obsidian. There was one resource in particular that helped me… The book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte has sold all around the globe, and it seems like the majority of people interested in PKM have heard about the system and principles it teaches. Fewer know about the secret chapter offered at the end of Tiago’s book. This chapter talks about building an effective tagging system within your second brain. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — 3 Quick, Built-In Obsidian Tweaks That Make the App Better There are plugins that add every function you can imagine to Obsidian. However, people often underestimate the features and capabilities built into the app before you install plugins. I made an article about the core plugin settings and capabilities in Obsidian, but here I wanted to focus on three more settings that I haven’t covered at any point so far. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — 3 Student Habits That Will Improve Your Life I’ve been a full-time student for 15 years now. Admittedly, the first 12 don’t count for much towards impact on the rest of my life, but I’ve learned a lot about effective learning techniques and other more overlooked aspects of student life. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — The Best Ways to Tidy Up Your Obsidian Vault One thing I always struggle with when managing my Obsidian vault is tidiness. The problem is, my thinking isn’t linear and structured, therefore my notes aren’t either. The app is so **customisable **that sometimes things can get out of hand. This means that working in the vault over time generates loose ends and clutter like unlinked files and images, as well as inconsistencies with file formatting and storage. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Academic Writing in Obsidian — Complete Workflow Over the last year, for university, I’ve written two essays and two lab reports. This was without struggling at all with deadlines, ideas, referencing or any other typical point of friction in a process like this. This is because I built a workflow to make this writing as painless as possible, and I want to share it with you today. ...

Everyone needs a system to manage their tasks and ideas. At the moment, my task capture and management app of choice is Todoist. Despite this, there was a time in the past where I managed all my tasks in Obsidian, so I wanted to outline the system used whilst I was doing this. This article’s for the people who want to have a task management system in the same app as their notes, without compromising functionality. I’ll explain the plugins, files and settings needed to create a Todoist-like task management function in Obsidian. ...

It was a while after encountering the app before I started using YAML metadata in my Obsidian vault. Because it seemed intimidating to learn and use, I didn’t feel motivated to learn how it worked, meaning I missed out on all the power of harnessing this feature in Obsidian. Since then I’ve learned, and YAML features in all the notes in my vault. This article is for those of you who want to learn how to use YAML metadata in Obsidian, but perhaps feel a little intimidated by it. I’m going to go over how it works, some common uses, how I use the feature, and some plugins that make use of the power of YAML metadata. ...

I’ve been sucked into the trap of looking for a perfect task management system for the entire time I’ve spent creating work on the internet… Of course, this perfect system doesn’t exist, so this has just been procrastination. There’s no solution that’s magically going to allow you to breeze through the work as though it isn’t there. Having said this, many people could benefit from simplifying their task management system. This article will explain how to do this, based on what your task management priorities are, giving examples from the system I currently use. ...

There’s a lot of noise around community plugins in Obsidian. And why shouldn’t there be? They’re the essence of the software, bringing near-unlimited flexibility to build your perfect system from. By comparison, core plugins are neglected. People sometimes don’t realise the power and capability built in to Obsidian. Optimising your core plugin settings can save you time and help you create more impactful work. This article’s going to run through the core plugins that play significant roles in my workflows. ...

Notion is one of the most popular note-taking tools in the world, growing to dominate the face of productivity software today. But I don’t use Notion, I use Obsidian. I know there will be some people reading this that use Notion but are wondering whether Obsidian is better… How do I know? Because I’ve been there. I used to use Notion. It’s great, with: Online project management, wikis and templates for every need, Databases that add properties to and display your notes in an organised way, Collaboration with others on your workspaces, Full-featured editor, with slash commands for different blocks, But I’m happier on Obsidian. It fits my use case better, and I’m sure you’ll benefit from switching as well. If you want these perks: ...

I’ve been creating content online since 2018. This started on YouTube and Instagram, sharing my photography and videography work, but since the start of 2023, this has grown to online writing as well. This expansion coincided with me developing a personal system in Obsidian to help me with producing work. I wanted to share the plugins that have the most impact on my ability to create and share value with the world. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Grow Engagement by Writing to Provide Value for Others I started writing on Medium at the start of this year, to develop a powerful habit. I wasn’t particularly concerned whether it was going to provide me with income or a route into a career, although I wanted people to gain value and insight from what I was producing. ...

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — The Most Efficient Obsidian Power Users Have These Plugins Installed Obsidian is customisable. I’ve touched on this being one of the main reasons that I decided to make the app the core of my PKM system. Because of its customizability, there is a lot of scope for optimising Obsidian for quick and efficient work, from templating to text snippets to document export. ...

We’ve all been there. You have a perfectly functioning system for taking notes and creating work in one app, but regardless, we feel a powerful urge to try out a new offering. So we transfer our files across to the new platform, and after a while of trying it, we realise that we’d have done better to just remain with our old system. Why does this keep happening? And what can we do about it? ...

Long before I started creating, I was an information consumer — collecting thoughts and ideas, but not doing anything with them. This gave me a lot of experience when it comes to creating systems for information capture and synthesis. It’s only now that I have the proper means and audience to explain how I’ve been doing it… This is a workflow that brings clarity in the midst of the unending noise that the internet makes. From books to videos, articles and podcasts, I’m going to show you how to steps to collect the most relevant ideas from every corner of the internet and synthesise them into personal notes that link all of your ideas together. ...

Obsidian updated its icon yesterday. Although there was no overall change in how the app functions, I thought it would be a pleasant change to jump on the trend and share some of the top ways to improve how the app looks. Of course, changing Obsidian’s appearance doesn’t contribute much to the functionality of the app. I’ll always advocate function over appearance, but it can improve your productivity if you have a visually pleasant an organised space to work in. ...

Since I started using Obsidian, I’ve always been looking to improve how I manage my files, projects and notes in one cohesive system. One breakthrough that has made an enormous difference in my project and knowledge management workflow was the discovery of folder notes. I haven’t encountered many people making use of this tool, so I thought I’d add a piece about it. In this article, I’m going to show you the different ways you can unlock this hidden superpower in Obsidian and use them in your maps of content, tasks, projects, and outlines. ...

I recently sent out a tweet requesting some ideas for articles — I asked what people would most like to learn about in Obsidian. This is an article to cover one of those requests, specifically — how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian? There are several unique and powerful ways to integrate the power of Obsidian with AI to generate ideas and I’m going to cover them in this article. Stay tuned… ...

Having written a recent article containing tips to overcome the learning curve of Obsidian, I wanted to follow up by giving some plugins that reduce the complexity of the software. This is contradictory to a point that I made in the previous article, which was to avoid complexity, but these plugins require very little maintenance and improve the usability of Obsidian significantly, so I thought they’d be worth sharing. 1. Advanced Tables One of the most popular plugins of all time in the Obsidian Community. This plugin gives you some additional control over creating and formatting markdown tables in your notes. This is notoriously difficult in markdown and Obsidian, so this plugin is a must-have if your notes often contain tables. ...

You’re all reading my work on note-taking, Obsidian and PKM, but I was far from the first person to write about these topics. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in this respect and I wanted to acknowledge the most influential pieces I’ve read in my journey since focusing on productivity and PKM about a year ago. I daresay you’re much better off learning from them than from me… These are mainly older, well-established pieces of writing that I’ve encountered and learned from. This isn’t to say that they’re the only resources to do with Obsidian and PKM that exist. There are people producing high quality content every day on the internet. I plan to make an article in the future on the newer short-form pieces that I’ve encountered and gained value from. ...

Despite being my app of choice for notes, Obsidian is not an intuitive program when it comes to comparison with some other options available. By default you have to get used to editing and reading views, markdown syntax and storing images separately in your vault. There are ways to make the process of learning how to navigate these features less painful, which is what I’m going to be going over in this article. ...

There is no doubt that AI is taking the world by storm and changing the world in too many sectors to count. The advantages are often to save time with no sacrifice to the quality of the work produced. As discussed in many articles I’ve published recently, AI has the potential to benefit our productivity systems heavily. At the same time, there are some things that you should never use AI for in workflows like these. This is what this article is for — to make sure that you are using AI in your work as efficiently and intelligently as possible because using AI in the wrong way will make your content uninteresting for readers. ...

I’ve been writing recently about how I use Obsidian for a lot of different applications related to my university course, but little about how I use it for creating content. I haven’t spent long writing on Medium and elsewhere. Despite this, I’ve built a minimal and effective system that allows me to create content regularly. This system has helped me publish consistently for the last two months especially, with university work climaxing around this time too. ...

I use Obsidian for several specialised functions that the base version of the app doesn’t support very well. These include sending flashcards to Anki for revision as well as creating book notes and academic scripts that I then have to export to PDF format. Because of this, I use a selection of plugins that help me achieve these different functions. This article is about my three favourites that I use for the above functions. These plugins play a central role in my productivity, increasing the efficiency with which I work and create output. ...

You should always aim to make changes to your workflow only to improve the quality of your creative output. One way to improve this output is to improve the efficiency of your productivity system. I work in Obsidian and use a few techniques to improve the efficiency of my work. I spotted two contrasting aspects to efficiency that need balancing to achieve maximum productivity and I’d like to share them in this article. ...

The two note-taking strategies of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten and Tiago Forte’s PARA in Building a Second Brain have dominated managing many people’s personal knowledge and projects. Freshly introduced to the world of PKM and note-taking, I started out reading books such as How to Take Smart Notes from Sönke Ahrens, convinced that making my second brain into a slip box for managing ideas. Then I saw a video of Ali Abdaal interviewing Tiago Forte about his book Building a Second Brain and decide to make a purchase. ...

One of the most important uses for my Obsidian vault is to allow me to effectively learn content for my university course. I have lectures on a very regular basis and at the end of each semester I am expected to be able to answer a wide range of questions concerning all the content that I’ve been exposed to over the last few months. This is a walkthrough of how I use Obsidian and Anki to help me learn all this content. This is very helpful not just for university students, but for anyone who is expected to memorise and be able to recall information. ...

Similar to my advice about why you should choose Obsidian over other notes apps, I wanted to give some insight into developing your own system of working in this software. This is because for a long time I was confused and ineffective when it came to creating an environment that allowed me to work with impact. I kept trying complicated new methods, new plugins, new file structures, all inspired by wanting to copy other people’s workflows. This article is for anyone who feels that they haven’t quite been getting on with their productivity — it will explain the importance of developing your own system for work. It will then give some of my best advice for how to do this. ...

Where do I start when it comes to talking about the variety of apps available for every kind of PKM purpose? A new software is released seemingly every day at the moment, all promising to be the one app that replaces all others, solving all your productivity problems. These new programs and systems always attract me at first but, without fail, they’ve never proven to be all that they claimed that they would. Now I’ve spent the best part of a year building a productivity system that simply works how I want it to, based around Obsidian, an app that I believe is the best possible fit for my use case. Just the other day I bought the Obsidian Catalyst licence, further motivating me to lock into an app that does the job quietly and efficiently, without distracting me outputting real value. ...

As a university student there is a need for specialised tools that allow you to produce top quality lab reports, essays and literature reviews. You need to be able to manage long manuscripts, references, formatting and rendering an output of a document. There are a selection of tools that can be curated to achieve all of the following, but it’s difficult to build a system where all the separate parts talk to each other seamlessly to remove the friction from building an output. In this article I’m going to talk about my system for academic writing within Obsidian, and explain the steps you can take to implement some of the tools yourself. ...

The final day of the Linking Your Thinking Conference from Nick Milo happened yesterday. When I saw the line up for the conference, I was particularly interested to see that Christian Houmann, the developer of the popular plugin QuickAdd, was going to be giving a talk on how he utilises the power of AI in his Obsidian vault. With a lot of my attention upon this topic because of experimenting with ways to reduce the time spent on pointless housekeeping tasks for my university degree, I decided to attend Christian’s section of the conference to see what he had to say on the topic. After all, Christian had developed QuickAdd’s AI Assistant, which revolutionised the way I work in almost all areas, so he was bound to add some insight to an already promising topic. This article covers some of Christian’s use cases for AI within Obsidian, and gives some of the more unique and original tips surrounding AI in Obsidian. ...

As a student myself, I am constantly exposed to the study techniques, habits and practices of my fellow learners. I see many different systems, and they would all be improved by incorporating AI to streamline the learning and writing experience. The purpose of AI in a student’s workflow is primarily to automate the tasks that don’t relate to directly learning content or producing written work. This article covers some of these ways to incorporate AI into your education workflow. Examples of this include producing the flashcards that facilitate learning and providing feedback on an essay that can be acted upon to improve the final work. I present each use case in order of how they are used in my own work, so you can follow along to my workflow easier, and decide how these tools might help augment your own learning system. ...

Are you an Obsidian user that feels left out when looking at the AI offerings of other tools? Well, this article is here to show you how to integrate this technology into your favourite notes app. I will focus on a selection of the best tools to use, for the the simple route to effective use of AI in your Obsidian vault. There are lots of plugins being developed all the time though, so the ones listed here might not always be the best. For up-to-date information, I like to read the Obsidian Roundup by Eleanor Konik — this gives information on new plugins, and updates of old plugins so you can keep track of new features and resources. ...

The Obsidian plugin QuickAdd recently released an update that contains a suite of AI features, allowing better integration of the power of OpenAI’s technology into your notes. Using these features I created a series of scripts containing prompts that draft realistic articles, and I’m going to show you how I managed to do this in the following steps. These instructions assume you have a basic understanding of the Quickadd plugin for Obsidian and how it functions. ...

Fundamental: Recency bias is the tendency to give more weight to recent events or information when making judgments or decisions. To avoid recency bias, consider different opinions, take time to think about all information, and don’t make decisions based only on recent events or information. Understanding how the mind works can improve our productivity — we better understand effective learning strategies and other methods that allow us to work to a higher capacity. Cognitive biases are just one corner of this subject, and in this piece I wanted to go into detail about one bias in particular — recency bias. ...

I’ve spent more time listening to the Huberman Lab podcast than any other podcast in the last year or so. It’s such a wealth of scientifically proven information that’s going to help you improve your life. One of the more recent episodes I found really interesting and relevant — It involved the concepts around the motivation and reward systems in the body. This system is governed by a molecule called dopamine. Dopamine creates a sense of craving something, motivating you to go and obtain what you are craving. ...

Because of the meteoric rise of digital tools, fewer and fewer people are experiencing the benefits of writing by hand. These benefits are varied, from memory to increased mindfulness and concentration. Here I give some tips surrounding how you can incorporate the practice into your life so you don’t lose the benefits that this skill provides. The author of ‘The Bullet Journal Method’, Ryder Carroll, vouches for writing by hand, saying that the ‘complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level.’ ...

Five years ago, I walked into the small gym in my childhood town for the first time. Aside from a love of sport, there was nothing to my advantage that was to say I would stick at lifting weights consistently. Five years on however, I view weightlifting as a cornerstone habit of my life, with it providing the practice and discipline that I required when it came to starting other good habits. It’s increased my confidence and taught me the value of working at the edge of my capability. Here are some of the lessons that I learned through my development inside the gym, and how this led to benefits outside the gym in an important time in my all-around development. ...

It’s been a year since I started reading Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism. The book talks about digital technology, how it’s invaded our lives to the point that we are experiencing diminished returns in relationships with others and productivity, to name the two most prominent examples. In the year since I started reading the book, the ideas and actionable strategies that Newport put forward for reducing and optimising screen time have changed my work and improved what I do in my spare time. Here are some of the ways in which I have incorporated digital minimalism into my daily routine. ...

I have been journaling on paper on a daily basis for around a month and a half, using the principles from Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method as the system for managing my tasks and thoughts. I journaled in a Traveler’s Notebook, which was too large to remain on me all the time, so I found myself conflicted by uncertainty around using a digital system to capture my ideas as well. ...

I believe that discussing sensitive topics is essential for developing relationships and improving emotional control. You should be able to approach a conversation feeling free to talk about anything that might present itself. If one or any participant in the conversation truly doesn’t want to discuss the topic then they hopefully have the self-respect to admit this, and the others should have the same respect for this wish. One should attempt to engage in a conversation concerning a topic that is found sensitive because of the personal growth that takes place despite the discomfort. This allows for experience of managing surrounding emotions and better understanding of others’ perspective on the topic. Often advice and knowledge can be gained if the conversation is unrestricted and honest. ...

Before the last couple of weeks I’d never experienced what you might call a true ‘productivity rut’. But recently my days were plagued with rock bottom motivation, low self-esteem indecision, spending more time procrastinating than creating impactful work. Now feel like my mental health and work ethic are on the rise again and because I know that this could happen to anybody, I wanted to outline what I noticed about myself during this down period that was threatening my wellbeing. I am then going to talk about how I went about breaking the downwards spiral and getting back to creating work, giving tips that I hope can inform and inspire those who might be experiencing the same thing that I did. ...

Since I started to keep track of the tasks I needed to do to make progress in my life, I’ve done it digitally. Whenever I had even the smallest idea I was very intent on capturing it so that I didn’t miss out on the thoughts that my brain had. For the last two weeks however, I have committed to using a practice known as bullet journaling. Bullet journaling uses a single notebook to keep track of everything from tasks and events to goals and collections of notes about any other relevant subject. I wanted to explain the decision for the change, why my digital system was no longer working well for me, and the change in my effectiveness and mindfulness that I have experienced since adopting this new method. ...

Like any delayed gratification activity (the clue’s in the name), it takes time before you notice the effects of meditation. As somebody completely new to the practice, it took me around six weeks of meditating at least 10 minutes a day, almost every day, before I began to notice any changes in myself. This was back in late summer last year, and since then I’ve seen enough positive impact on my life to justify continuing, making it a daily habit. ...

I sat A-level exams in the summer of last year. Being from the first cohort of students to have GCSEs cancelled because of Covid-19, I had no experience of the kind of pressure that end-of-course exams can bring. Despite this I achieved the grades that took me to my firm choice university, the University of Sheffield. Throughout revising for and sitting these exams I learned a lot about mindset and strategies that made the process of achieving my desired grades easier. Here I share four lessons that I learned from the experience that I believe can be applied to pursuing success, academic or not. ...