- If you've recently
looked into taking notes in the digital age, you may
have been surprised to find that a lot of things have
changed from the time when we were kids, and taking notes just meant writing stuff down. Now, there are words like Zettelkasten, and Personal Knowledge
Management, Maps of Content, and PARA Method that all try to complicate what should
be incredibly simple. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the practical side of note-taking. How to install Obsidian, how to set it up, and how to get started with taking notes without learning any of that theory. Obsidian is a free, but
not open-source tool that happens to be great for taking notes, whatever that means to you. So you could use it as
a dev log or a journal, or a D&D preparation tool,
a language learning tool, or even your own personal Google. First let's download Obsidian. To do that, you just have
to go to obsidian.md. So then just click on
that, save it to downloads. And when that's done, you
just have to click on it. You'll get asked to save it
to your applications folder, which I'm gonna do. Now, in my case, I already had
an older version of Obsidian, so I'm just going to click replace. Now let's open up Obsidian. I'm just doing a command
space to open up the search, and I'm just typing in Obsidian. You might get a warning like this, and in that case, just hit open anyway. You can see that I already
have a bunch of Obsidian vaults because I've already been using Obsidian. But you're going to want to
click on this Create New Vault. Click on create, and then
think up a name for your vault. This doesn't really matter, it's just what you're going to call it. It's just to distinguish it from others. So I'm going to say this is a demo vault, and then look for the location. Now, your location
doesn't matter too much, but if you are already subscribed
to a service like Dropbox or Google Drive, I would go ahead and create an Obsidian
vault within that folder so that you just have a system
of automated backups going. Personally, I use Dropbox but I also make it a
GitHub repository as well. But you don't need to do that. You can just go back to
Obsidian here, click browse, and just select any old folder
that you'd like to put it in. So I'm going to put it in Dropbox, and I'm going to hit
open, and then create. You're going to see a message
about one of the new features in Obsidian, which is live preview. I do suggest that you turn it on. So go ahead and click
on live preview here. Okay, now we have our first vault. I'm going to maximize Obsidian here, and let's talk about the
interface of Obsidian. There's this left sidebar here
that has the file explorer which is where all of
your notes will be kept. And this is the search bar
where you can go through and search the contents or
file name of any of your notes. And then on the right here, you'll see this little
arrow here that says expand. And when you do expand
it, you'll see linked and unlinked mentions. And we'll go over that later. But this is one of the most
powerful things about Obsidian. I'm going to collapse that for now. And let's get started with our first note. To do that, click on
this new note button here that automatically goes within your vault, which for me is called demo. It's prompting me to enter a title. So I'm going to put "My First Note". Before we go further, let's
see what this looks like on your system explorer. So just right-click on
that, and then click show in system explorer. And you can see within my Dropbox folder, there is a folder called Demo, and then a note called My First Note.md. MD stands for Markdown. All Obsidian notes are held in Markdown. So I already named this
note my first note, I usually put a first heading,
and I usually just make that the title as well. Now, you may wonder what this hash is, in markdown syntax that denotes that this is the biggest heading. So if you do two, this is second heading, and it's a little smaller and so on. And it just gets smaller and smaller. You may have noticed that as I typed, the hashtags disappeared, and that's part of the live preview. Once you move your cursor
away from that line, those heading signifiers are deleted, just to make it a little bit cleaner. So now you've got your first
note, and you don't really need to install anything
else to Obsidian for it to be a useful tool. Personally, whenever I create a new vault, there are always things that I enable. So if we go back to
Obsidian, we go to settings, you can go to core plugins,
and these are plugins that are already installed
but not necessarily enabled. So we can go through them and I'm going to enable the daily notes plugin. Just because I think that
that's really useful. Now let's go back here
under plugin options. We have a daily notes option here that just came up as we enabled it. Now, in this new file location,
I'm going to type daily, just so all my daily
notes will be categorized under the folder daily. I always use daily notes, so
I'm also going to take this for open daily note on startup. While we're at it, I'm going to go to community plugins and
disable this safe mode. You're going to see this
scary-sounding message saying that community plugins can
access files on your computer. It's always a good idea to have confidence in what you're installing. If you didn't write a piece of code, then there are always risks to
running it on your computer. However, the Obsidian community develops these plugins entirely out in the open, and there are definitely ways
that you can protect yourself without having to go into the code. So I'm going to turn off safe mode, and browse in community plugins. And this number here below
each one is the number of times that it's been downloaded. So a shortcut for finding out
whether something is secure or not is by looking at
this number and making sure that it has a significant
amount of Obsidian users that are using it. And that's because these are the plugins that get the most use, and have
the most attention on them. So if there were something
that were insecure about them, many people would not want to use it. Of course, this is just a shortcut, and as always, this is
your decision as to whether or not you want to take this risk. But I'm going to install calendar because I never use Obsidian without it. So then I'm gonna click install, and I'll click enable as well. Now we'll exit out of that, and we'll see that we have a new calendar
plugin option as well. Now let's open this right pane here. And next to this backlinks icon, you'll see we now have calendar, which is the plugin
that we just installed. So click on that and it
displays a typical calendar, and it's taking the date
from your computer time. So it's saying that it's Feb
14th, happy Valentine's day, by the way. (Nicole laughing) Now, the reason that I suggest
installing the calendar is that it's a good way to manage
and review your daily notes. So if I click on 14 here, it'll say, "Oh, this file with
today's date doesn't exist. Would I like to create it?" And I'm going to click create. Now, we'll see that in
addition to my first note, Obsidian has created
another folder called Daily because that's the
folder that we specified in the plugins for the daily note. Now it's created a note
just for this date. I think that the easiest way
to start with Obsidian is to just think about it as
a way to dump in everything that's happened throughout the day. I don't think you really
need any more structure than that when you're starting out. So let's say that on today's date, I could say something like
Monday, February 14th, 2022. What I personally do is
I keep this daily note up throughout the day, kind
of like a as a daily log. And I just write down things that are a little bit interesting. So I could say I watched a
video about observability. And then maybe I would type in some things that I learned during this video. So if you notice there,
the dash and the space already made it automatically a bullet. So then maybe I'll type in some things that I learned about observability. So now I've typed out
things that have learned about observability from the video. And normally I'll just
go throughout my day. I could also say things
like I talked to Pepe today. He thinks we should do a
workshop about how to use k6. So I don't really have a structure here, you could do it in bullet points, you could do it in paragraph form. I don't think it really matters here. What matters is that
at the end of the day, sometimes you can then review this and think about what you
want to make into a new note. For example, maybe this
thing about Pepe wanting to do a workshop might not be something that I really need to remember, but this thing about observability, if this is a topic that I'm interested in, then maybe I should think
about creating a page for it. Now, we could do it the
way that we did before, we could create a new note
and name it Observability. But another way to do it, if you've already typed out the word is you can double click on it, and
then just type the brackets. You'll see that it kind
of changed a little bit. It became purple, and that's
because it's being turned into a link. I'm just going to capitalize this so that it's Observability. Now I'm going to command click on it, and that's already created a new note. So my purpose for creating
this note is to be able to have it outside of
the daily log structure, because I think that this is
a topic I'm going to refer to often, and maybe I want to
start to form a knowledge base around this topic. What that topic is or how
important the topic has to be before you create a
note is really up to you. So now I have my note on observability, and I'm going to title it Observability. So now I'm going to command click on this, and you'll see that it got
brought up on another pane. This is one of the cool
things about Obsidian is that you can really drag
and rearrange these. You can put it there, or I can
just put it on the left side, and it gives me more leeway to work with. So now I'm going to copy this part, and I'm going to just
put it in my note there. This type of linking is pretty
normal in most applications, but Obsidian works the other way, it also has backlinks. So let's take a look at that. If we go to the observability note and open up this panel
here, go back to backlinks for observability. We'll see that under linked mentions, this note that we created, this daily note from today is also showing up because we mentioned observability in it. So it will have a list of all of the pages that have mentioned observability. What's even cooler is unlinked mentions. The unlinked mentions will show not just where we linked to it from,
but if you can see here, I never linked to it in the sentence. It's this one, right? And yet it is still showing
up in observability. And that's because Obsidian
not only tracks backlinks, but it also tracks back mentions. So you don't even have to
link to something in order for that reference to show up here. So that's really cool
because there are times when I might not have decided to create a note for observability. And in that case, if it comes up later on, and I then decide to create
a note for observability, I'll still see all of
the previous mentions, even before I knew it was important enough to have its own page. Do this for a few weeks, and you'll start to see your vault grow as
your personal knowledge base expands as well. I think one of the most
damaging myths about note-taking that prevent people from taking notes in the first place is
this idea that notes have to be organized to be
good, whatever that means. But they really only have
to be useful for you. My notes are messy, unfinished,
sometimes blatantly wrong. And you know what? They're still intensely useful for me. Check out this video to
see how I use Obsidian in my work as a developer advocate. But go out and explore and
find your own system as well. Thanks for watching and happy note-taking.
