Obsidian Note Taking Tutorial for Beginners - Start HERE (w/ example)

[Music] hey everyone it's vicki welcome back to my channel if you're new here i talk about mental models and frameworks for clear thinking and clear communications and today we are talking about the note-taking app obsidian if you know a lot but are not very good at retrieving it organizing your notes your ideas seeing the connection between all of them then this is the video for you i'll show you as a beginner how to get started with obsidian immediately and any of the core functions that you need to know so that you can make note-taking so easier and take all this in your head and onto your second brain so let's get started all right let's get started a very simple obsidian.md download it for whatever computer you're working on and now when you open obsidian it'll look something like this you'll see open folder as well to create a new vault or open help volt so a vault in obsidian if you compare it to a computer it's kind of like setting up your user profile so once you set it up everything that you store on your computer is on this user volt and it's really difficult to switch between volts so don't think of this as a folder but more of this is going to be your workspace that will contain everything so let's go ahead and create a new one let's call it demo and hit create all right vault is created and we'll see this page nothing much going on here name of the vault there are two things we need to know in obsidian obsidian is a note-taking app and so everything in obsidian is a note and then you can organize notes into folders so quite simple and intuitive i'll use an example from my notes in thinking fast and slow digitizing them putting them in here to show you how it actually works and then later on we'll talk about the specific functions that we can go into detail but show you an example i think is the most intuitive way to see how powerful obsidian is so let's get started all right let's create a new note let's name it thinking fast and slow now i want to take let's just take one idea and it's this idea that the frame that we put around a fact will change how we think about it so there's an example here of a study done at ucl in the uk where they say imagine you receive fifty dollars and you have two choices you either keep twenty dollars or you lose thirty dollars technically it's the same option right keeping twenty and losing 30 is the same it means you still have 20 left but the way that we react to these choices are very different so let's put that idea down to lose seriously and let's add a source page chapter 34 frames okay so that is so let's say this is the note now myself it's not very interesting it's just any other note but the great thing about obsidian is that you can connect notes so for example when i read this i was reminded of that this is related to russell's conjugation whoop okay oh my god why is it in korean conjugation okay and that in itself is an idea based on bertrand russell's talk on the bbc that journalists usually use a synonym for fact to change the meaning that's exactly what this ucl study is doing so i can create another note and now i have a note that's called russell's conjugation let's say we just want to record where it's from so we're sleeves for trend brussels so now we have two ideas that are linked and if we continue down this path let's say i find this very interesting and i think i should do a youtube video on the russians conjugations and now i can make this to do into another note so when i go in here i can let's say write the script so i can link back to it so i can see oh yes this is a source from this and i i will immediately have the notes i need to make the youtube script let's say then i talk about uh example and of course i can link to the thinking fast and slow uh example and now when i come back to youtube video right i have this example and if i want to see the details i just need to click on it and it will take me back to this step now that's the power of obsidian really to be able to connect all your thoughts together and as you'll see down here there's backlinks you know word count character count all very helpful but most interestingly here are the backlinks the notes that have linked to your particular note so you can see that right now youtube video on russell's conjugation is linking to this note here under example but as you build out your notes and there's more there are more connections that you have made between your ideas you'll see more patterns emerging and that's where new ideas will then come from so you don't have to really worry about where is my next new idea going to come from you already have documented all your ideas and you're starting to see them how they form right and this is what charlie mongers talks about right the lattice work of mental models of your ideas you need to hang them on something in order to use them and obsidian is a great way to do that and now let me move on to show you the specifics of how do you set everything up when you're just starting because it can be a little bit intimidating so let's jump to that all right let me create another new note called basics and talk about the five things i want to cover today so the functions the style the lists views and plugins to get you started so let's start with the first one functions first creating a new note this is a note first app so of course you can press here or you can use command n or control n on pc very simple let me do it now just like that you have untitled created now if you want to create a note in a new pane we can do that by command shift n now we've got a split screen say table of contents and you can copy and paste across them things like that now let's move to creating a new folder you can just go up here and create a new folder let's call this slow and all you have to do is drag and drop things into the folder then you have organized on different categories say yep that looks about right and then we can do another one for youtube and we can draw listen so very simple to do now let's come back to our obsidian basics the next one is internal link creating the connection between notes we've already tried it here and all you need to do is press the double brackets twice and when you do that it'll automatically pull up all the notes that you have and so you can pick the saying i want to link to thinking fast and slow here you just press on it and it will be created now you can also create a new note for a link if you don't have that note yet so for example when you say it's like ideas we don't actually have a note named ideas but you want to link to it then all you have to do is press command or control on a pc and then click on that link it'll automatically populate the title there and you can create a note very simply now the next one is external links so external links very easy just paste the url and you'll be able to click on now you'll notice that i can't actually click on these links and that is because i'm in edit mode so there are actually two modes when you are in a note one is edit and one is view so currently we're in the edit mode and you can go into view mode by either clicking here so it's called preview preview where you will see the links and you can click on them for example like this or if it's an external link you can press on it and it will lead you to the external link now you can also do that by pressing command or control plus e so this way you can quickly switch between the two next let's talk about tags so you can add text to any of your notes with hashtag and whatever tag that comes after the only thing is that you can't add spaces to your tags so simple enough very similar to twitter to instagram the only thing is the usage of tags because already you can search for any keywords so tags don't really help in terms of letting the system know what it is for example if i want to look for conjugation i type it in every note that has the word conjugation in it will appear so i would actually recommend using tags the way that zettocaston if you know that note-taking system uses them which is not to categorize but to remind you towards what does what purpose does this note serve but anyway i won't talk about it in this video i'll probably make another video if i make it the link will be up top and now let's move to the next one at image this is super easy and really helpful to make your notes a bit more visual than this black and white so just drag the image in here now you'll see it actually doesn't show up and that's because we're in the edit mode if we go to view preview then you'll see the image show up very simple now let's move on to number two style so first headings very simple you just have to add the hashtag before the word and leaving a space in between so if it's tags no space if you want to make something a heading then hashtag with space one hashtag is the biggest heading two hashtags heading two heading three all the way up to five i believe so very simple and bold and italics these are the same shortcuts you know command b control b or command i control i or in the edit mode you'll see them show up with asterisks so pretty simple then uh there's also highlights highlights are easy as well you just put two equal signs before award and after award and they will highlight the words just like this and then if you want to show block quotes scroll up here that all you have to do is use a greater than sign and then put in the quotes and then immediately translate that into a block quote and finally dividers easy enough three dashes and it'll show up as this line right here so styles very easy all right number three lists you can do a couple of different ones again i'll switch to preview mode so you can see them the first one is check boxes so very helpful command plus enter twice and you can actually click on these so you can cross them out then it's bullet lists so of this you can just start with a dash or you can do control enter once and it'll also give you a little list just uh to note that when you are in preview mode the dash turns into actual bullets and you can tab to um indent and things like that same as what you'll find in word documents now number list also very easy you just put the number plus a period and then when you press enter it will automatically generate the next number for you if you use it in any other formats like for example one with a brackets it won't auto populate the next numbers all right let's go to views so there are two things i want to show you here one is open in new pane so for example um let's say i've got obsidian basics open here and i want to open another one next to it then all i need to do is press command and click or control and click on the pc and what you'll notice is that these two are not linked so you can link with a different pane and this way you can scroll together so you can have one in the preview option one in the edit option so when you edit this you'll see real time changes this is really helpful especially if you've got images you've got links that you want to look at this is very easy to use then the next one is unlinking panes so you can go here and you can click unlink pane and now you can just move one at a time now the other thing are back links and i've showed you previously it's in the side toggle here so when you expand it you can see links mentioned i don't have anything linking to this one but let's say you press on the ucl one you'll see that there are backlinks so that's how you can eventually when you build out your connections between your notes to see where is your idea going where have you linked them to all right plugins let's talk about templates first so if you ever have any formats that you want all your notes to be in or if there are things that you track on a regular basis so daily checks to-do lists things like that you can create templates and all you have to do is go to settings go to core plugins look for templates and make sure that the toggle is on now once the toggle is on you want to come back to the main screen create a folder called templates and now you want to come back in here go into plug-in options actually my face is broken sorry and there will be a templates option just blocking all of this so you want to find the folder um that you've just created called templates and you'll have the date and time format now if you close it and go back to the templates folder if you create a new note in the folder let's say this is journal.org note template and you can use a few core functionalities that come with templates so let me just show you first in my split screen here you can use title date and time let's say you want all of your notes to have the title on the first line with a heading then we can do is do a hashtag put the curly brackets in or write down title then let's say you want the created on date and time tracked you can simply do this now when you go and create a new note let's just call this and slow reflections let's say and you want to use the note template then all you have to do is go to insert template and i'll immediately insert it for you and if you go to the preview mode you'll see that it's changed the format and giving you the created on so templates is definitely heavily used make sure you find it in here and once you have multiple templates let's say we duplicate this without the date entitled without the date and time for example now when you go and create a new note and you want to insert a template it will ask you to choose which one you want you can also use the plug-in random notes this one's quite fun um when you go into settings go to core plugins again and look for random it will open a random note for you to discover or to review and once you have a lot more notes and you are lost for inspiration this is the perfect functionality to have also there are daily notes so here if you go to settings core plugin again daily no so this is create and open today's daily note so every time you open it there will be a new note set up for you already and that's also very helpful another plugin that is helpful is the functionality so once you have a lot more notes and folders used you can star them so it's easier to do for example let's say i want to star my to-do list because i come back to this all the time then all you have to press is a star and when you go to the start folder and you'll see all of your starred items so this again once you start to build things out there are plenty to play with now i want to show you visually what it means to connect your ideas how this is going to benefit you let me show you the graph view so here are all of the ideas all of the notes that we've taken so far which is not a lot but already you can see ideas that are connecting together and with this once you see how they are connected you can build even more connections with what you already know and i think that's so crucial it's not just about learning new things but drawing out the things you already know and giving them more value so for example when i look at this and i look at russell's conjugation i look at the ucl study already i can add notes like the let me go back [Music] so this is a cognitive heuristic called framing effect right and i can create a note called framing effect and give a quick blurb right i can add examples which will include the ucl study there's also things about 3d bargains and things like that so already i can add the framing effect in also framing effect is related to the affect heuristic which is about um how our emotions affect our decision making and so this is another cognitive heuristic bias maybe i can name it that way and then i can start another note called cognitive bias and i can list the things i've just written about affect heuristic i can list framing effect i can list other ones and so now all of my ideas are starting to form together whereas before i was literally just writing down physical notes i was keeping things in my mind thinking oh yeah this is related to that but that was the end of it i didn't have the mental capacity to form all of these connections and so when you go back to the graph view now we can see a lot more nodes being added if we click on this again we'll see that it's connected to the framing effect if we press on framing effect now we can see it's also linked to cognitive bias and effect heuristic and so this is really the power of taking what you know and taking what other people have shared and really making meaning for yourself creating that lattice work of mental models of ideas so you can actually use them let me know in the comments if you use knowledge management systems like rome notion or obsidian or you're like me you are finally getting into it and at least for me it's completely worth it i've just created a list of i think almost at 100 new ideas that i can write about i can talk about just by making the connections between things i already know and i'm actually documenting that uh in another video from day one to day seven in one week how has my obsidian changed what are the ideas that are new and coming up things i learned along the way so stay tuned for that and if you found this video helpful make sure you give it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already let me know if there are any other questions you have and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Vicky Zhao [BEEAMP]

Views: 351,003

Keywords: obsidian app, obsidian, how to use obsidian app, obsidian note taking, obsidian note taking tutorial

Id: d3e7GWsqoU0

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021