Obsidian vs. Notion: My PKM Journey and Which is the Best Second Brain Tool (After 2 Years)

hi I'm Paul and I used to struggle with knowledge retention and memory that is until I discovered a new solution a second brain in today's video I'm excited to share with you how I built my first personal knowledge management system using notion how this process led me to discovering obsidian and how these two apps have transform my life by the end of this video you will understand the pros and cons of each system and I'll share my own experiences and insights to help you decide which one is the perfect fit for you join me as I unreveal my PKM systems inside no and obsidian over the past few years I've been experiencing a transformative Awakening I can't pinpoint the exact time I woke up but I definitely felt like I was letting go of many old beliefs no longer served me it's like my conscious mind was starting to become aware of my subconscious mind's agenda after years of running on a honic treadmill and Mis wanting things I finally realized that I'd been wasting time passively consuming and not actively consuming information my attention and focus had been hijacked these habits and behaviors were not only influencing my thoughts and emotions but they were affecting my memory and focus recognizing the negative impacts on my physical and mental health I made the conscious decision to break free from its grip of my life Al though initially daunting this Awakening empowered me to take control of my own narrative and start working on changing daily habits that weren't moving my life in the right direction I started reading books watching YouTube videos about how the mind works I thought if I could understand how my mind works then that would be the first step to making a real change in my life taking analyst notes in multiple journals and notepads it felt good actively writing information down on paper and reflecting on it later were firing in my mind and the information was starting to stick the emotions I was experienced during this time were related to my feeling brain which is usually highly sensitive and completely unreasonable my thinking brain was struggling with remembering things and all I could think was why can't I remember what is important why was I always forgetting things that's when I stumbled on a quote by David Allen your mind for having ideas not holding them curious I explored the concept more deeply to discover Thiago Forte the author of building a second brain what was a second brain I asked well a second brain is a system of personal Knowledge Management or PKM for short PKM system helps us find organize and apply the information and ideas we've learned into a personal library in your pocket this system allows us to capture and organize information in a way that's useful in our effort and goals within our life rather than passively just consuming information and getting a cheap dopamine fixed after conducting some more research I stumbled on August Bradley's notion life operating system which uses the pillars pipelines and vaults personal knowledge system inside notion to me this felt like a good starting point something I could watch follow and take action towards Building A system that would move me towards taking taking back control of my life this was really the pivotal moment in April 2022 which marked the beginning of a journey towards greater mindfulness purpose and fulfillment and no longer felt weak small and alone instead I was filled with a renewed sense of hope and possibilities each day was bringing new opportunities for growth and self-expression and I started looking at myself as a a life learner grateful for the chance to live my life with intention for the next 12 months notion would be my primary second brain system this gave me the opportunity to have a place to capture and organize all of my actively consumed information into a life operating database that made sense it felt good for a while but there were a few things bugging me about notion Pages were slow to load my files were not able to be stored locally which meant they weren't private I needed needed a more efficient way of linking my ideas to see the bigger picture visualize information and organize my thoughts through mind maps which notion wasn't able to offer my research in June 2023 led me to discovering obsidian and this was stage two of my PKM Journey drawn to Nick Milo's access system for linking your thinking I downloaded his linking your thinking kit while a solid starting point I desired some customizations to better align with my workflow this ultimately led me to develop a tailored system that truly worked for me combining my research and experience from using notion and borrowing other ideas and Concepts throughout the internet before we dive into notion and obsidian we've got to ask ourself the question why a personal Knowledge Management System building a personal Knowledge Management System can help you organize retain information more effectively which leads to better decision making and personal growth it will reduce stress and mental clutter by allowing you to offload all the information in your mind your brain is meant for having ideas not storing them the second brain gives you space to capture information which frees your mind for more important tasks it gives you peace of mind knowing that you have a reliable place to store the information which reduces anxiety about forgetting things it will enhance your focus and and productivity with Clarity this allows us to spot patterns and make better decisions earlier less time searching means less wasted energy and we can access our information quicker this leads to a focused workflow which allows for deep work and creative thinking by connecting our ideas this Builds on knowledge retention and ignites inspiration through creativity and learning your system will provide insight and a chance to review and collect your thoughts which may reveal patterns leading to a deeper understanding of yourself the best thing about a second brain is you can record your journey and appreciate your progress and development within my notion system I have cycles and reviews within there I have my weekly reviews and my weekly reviews gives me a snapshot of everything that's happened throughout the year and it makes it easy for me to spot patterns and reflect on my achievements and disappointments it also allows me to plan my value and outcome go goals unlike your brain a digital system is endlessly customizable to suit your personal needs and it's easily accessible what is notion notion is a powerful and versatile productivity app that offers a unique blend of features notion combines several tools into an all-in-one workspace which acts as your note toing app project management tool your knowledge based Wiki task list and database manager the core of notion is a system of blocks and blocks are modular content pieces like text images video code Snippets web embeds and much much more notion is highly customizable and connects information across Pages using relational databases for example a project management page might link to a task list meeting notes or relevant documents stored in other parts of your notion system the best thing about notion is there's lots of customizable templates notion has a free plan which allows you to do most of what you need but they also have paid plans for more storage based collaboration options and artificial intelligence notion has an active community and lots of online YouTubers make videos about notion this one is subjective but notion really looks appealing to the eye and information is laid out in a structured way I use this every day in my eye job as a recipe book for looking up knowledge article I really find the knowledge Wiki relational database list layout really useful for my knowledge wikis motion is easily accessible with an internet connection and it syncs with Google Calendar which is also integrated with the new notion calendar after using notion for about a year I found sometimes it can feel like a to-do list the way that the relational databases are laid out there's a lot of fields to fill in can get a little bit tedious at times Pages can be slow to load which I found added friction to getting information into my second brain one of the things that irritates me about notion is I can't access my notes offline they're not stored on my local drive so if anything goes wrong I have to reach out to notion support ask them to access my notes in their servers which means my notes are not even private so this was a big turnoff for me especially when I started writing more personal journal entries where I was sort of thinking I don't really want people to be reading my personal notes I found notion to be difficult to recall fleeting and permanent notes what is obsidian obsidian is a powerful Knowledge Management tool designed to help you build a second brain but it helps you also discover connections within your notes obsidian is great because it's a crossplatform app for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS there isn't any web version like notion but there's no need to sign up for an account and it can be used entirely offline what stands out to me about obsidian is it has a unique graph view that shows a map of your notes with back links and outgoing links now this can be in a global graph view or it can be in a local view which just links to notes related to that particular note so that allows you to discover and link your thinking which really helps with recall and retention a really love that there's hundreds of themes to customize the appearance of OB obsidian obsidian canvas was a real game Cher to me I'm a visual thinker I find by building mind maps about my notes not only does it make me feel good but it makes me recall information easier it also makes me understand how everything is connected which works a lot like our brain obsidian Pros obsidian is free to use accessible offline and can be stored locally files are yours which is better for privacy there are hundreds of free community plugins and themes to choose from this gives you a lot more flexibility with customization using back links this allows you to link your thinking visualize your thinking with tools such as obsidian canvas and obsidian excal draw obsidian sync is an encrypted service which makes it more secure it's easy to import your notes from notion of a note Google keep and one note markdown files are widely supported interlinking allows you to connect and navigate effortlessly between your notes obsidian is faster than notion and has less resistance when taking notes obsidian cons obsidian has a higher learning curve for beginners syncing across multiple devices isn't free and the sync plan is quite expensive considering notion provides this for free the technical dependencies rely heavily on community plugins and themes for customizations most if not all plugins are hosted on GitHub which provides transparency but plug-in longevity could still be a factor in the future there are limited formatting and styling options compared to notion there is no built in task management or project planning tool by default obsidian being an open-source project you may need to adap to changes or updates in the future both notion and obsidian do not come with a dashboard out of the box inside my notion system I have set up a custom dashboard page to navigate two areas inside my system you can see here I've simply given this page a name of dashboard with a heading one block and then it says welcome back poll below that I have links to different parts of my Vault notion is great for setting up a database to track your daily habits haven't found anything similar in obsidian that works quite as well as notion so I'm going to give notion a point here jumping back to the dashboard look at how notion handles tasks and projects so notion supplies by default a task View and it comes with a project board which is a cand board and then a list of all your current tasks that you currently are working on this is a good way to track what you're doing for a particular project or if you've got things to do uh it's a really good and powerful way out of the box to start adding new actions or tasks to your notion system I've been using the actions uh layout which is part of the life operating system and this will give me a snapshot of all the tasks that I need to work on today this week and I can also put in future weeks uh if I need to once I've completed my tasks I can move them to the completed View and I can also look at tasks as per their priority managing tasks projects inside notion is really appealing to the eye if I was to try to do the same thing within obsidian I'd have to install Community plugins to do so so for projects I would have to go download a plugin called projects and then I'd have to install that plugin and then I'd have to enable the plugin and then that would give me a area to set up my projects and then I'd have to create a new project give it a name give it a path where it's going to live for task it would be similar so if I wanted to set up tasks within obsidian then I'd have to download something like cardboard and then cardboard would grab all my markdown tasks inside obsidian and place them into a cardboard here and it wouldn't look as good as notion it would grab all my checkboxes throughout my system and list them here as action items and I could put due dates on them which would filter into the this card here if I wanted to motion is great for knowledge wikis I mentioned this earlier in the video I use this daily for my it role I find if I have a snipper of code it's just really great to be able to add them to a section of my notion system and then I can easily recall them by searching for them here and then I can pull up the particular code that that I'm looking to use if I was to do this inside obsidian I would have to set up a space in My Vault for my system engineer Wiki then I'd have to set up a map of content to grab all those particular notes from that location within my obsidian system it does the same job but it's a little bit harder to find the snippet of code that I'm looking for compared to notion where it's all just easily listed out with tags and a little short note where I can easily grab the code that I want if I was to find a literature note on the internet and I wanted to make a note about it in my notion system I would add that to my media Vault so inside my media Vault I have my master view which tells me all the mediums of information that I've found online that I took some notes about so you can see here I've categorized it under the title The purpose what the status is when it was added then a URL to the source I can filter that down to just videos or just online courses or what I'm working on or just simply view everything this is also really powerful you can just quickly dump all the information in here and have easy access to it if I was to do something similar inside obsidian what I would do is set it up in My Vault and then I'd have sections for all the YouTube videos that I was watching and then I'd make a map of content which would link to those sources and then it would give me a data view to list out all those particular notes I could also do a search for it or I could add more fields to my data view to display similar Fields as notion such as medium type status priority purpose tag it wouldn't look the same but it would achieve the same result inside obsidian if we look at a video from YouTube how do I focus by the healthy gamer you can see here that I've added some meta tags at the top I've listed my notes underneath I can find this by searching for the tag I can also find it through the graph View and I could also find it through linking of other notes that are linked back to this particular note through backlinks in notion I've simply just got the Note with all the matter data and the information no easy way for me to Interlink the information like I would in obsidian and I can't pull up a graph for to see what concepts and ideas are linked to this particular notes notion is great when you just want to grab the information quickly from a list style database and you don't want to necessarily link it to other information and explore the concept or or ideas more deeply writing a daily note inside notion is a lot different than writing a daily note inside obsidian when I used to use notion to write my daily notes I would do it in the notes and ideas section and then I had a little folder for personal journal entries and ideas and learning note I did have an archive and I did have a list of all my note but I found I wasn't really using this very much look at writing a daily note inside obsidian we're can go control n and we can call this is a new note that's going to drop that note into our default location here we can move that file to another location when we want to can also apply a template by contrl P typing in template and then we insert a specific template that we've predefined in our system another way is to use a plugin called quick ad contrl P type in quick ad and we run a predefined set of instructions in this case new learning note we're going to call this this is a new learning note and then what that's going to do is it's going to grab a template for the learning note and we'll just close this previous one that we made we got a few Properties or met metad dat to fill out here here put the date added today the length of time it's going to take priority first priority Creator if we have one and then the recommendation the good thing about the quick ad plugin is it drops the template into the new note and it also places it in a predefined location within your system so in this case if we close the note lab we go up to my spaces here you see down here I've got my learning and then it's placed it here in this is a new learning note so if I was learning a particular topic then I would just drag it into the folder corresponding in this location you don't need to do this but I just find it easier to keep everything organized by doing it this way notion Works a little bit differently if I was doing a learning note inside notion I click on my learning section and then I'd have my courses and trainings or to-do View and then I would add a new entry in here and you can do that by clicking new you can say Todo you can say the source is Maybe YouTube give it a summary this is a YouTube video I want to take notes on choose your topic area whether it's uh learning or maybe for your business the length of time it's going to take for you to learn might be lap one week recommendation uh you do that after you've completed the learning you can put a URL links to files you can even create a template to drop in here if you want to this one we'll just go my new learning note in notion if I was going to add a new fleeting note to notion I could create it here as a new note just call it new note or new fleeting note then I just fill out all the relevant tags give it a category which links to another part of my database to give it a project a media Vault an action a book Source who it was created by and a brief summary I was to do something similar in obsidian which is what I'll probably do now so I'll go new note and this is a demo of a fleeting note then if I want to know what a fleeting note is contr O go open up what is a fleeting note and then I could read what a fleeting note is I could drill down deeper and then I could open up a drawing of what that looks like and then I could close both these I can see a fleeting note captures brief thoughts and ideas as they occur then that goes into the inbox which is the note lab here and then from there I can either put it in my Vault or I can make a permanent note out of it as we've seen today notion and obsidian are powerful tools both with their own strengths and weaknesses so which one do I use as my daily PKM well I spend 95% of my time in obsidian these days there is just less friction and effortlessly enter my notes but hours and hours the visualizing and linking of my thinking makes more sense and being in control of my notes is so important to me Obsidian is largely meant for personal and offline use while notion lens itself much better for collaboration and online users so I can see that being used more in a team environment on the other hand I still really enjoy using notion for my knowledge wikis I just find it really great to go through a list and find a snippet of code that I need to get the job done tracking habits is quite satisfying within notion I really don't mind using notion for actions and projects filming this video I've actually gone back to notion to enter some actions and test the projects section out again the thing that still puts me off about notion is it feels like a do list which always made me not want to work this actually put me off notion the block approach means my notes had a tendency of getting lost and I really had to spend a lot of time setting up filters in my relational databases to connect all the information together the choice ultimately though it's going to boil down to your unique needs and preferences you might end up using both if I had to summarize the two in one sentence it would be that notion is better for lists and sharing whereas obsidian is better for personal notes and learning which Camp do you belong to notion or obsidian or both with this comprehensive guide I hope I've equipped you with the insights needed to navigate the dynamic landscape of productivity tools and Empower you to make the right choice for your workflow thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Paul Dickson

Views: 1,972

Keywords: obsidian, notion, personal knowledge management system, Second Brain, Notion Setup, Obsidian Notes, Obsidian for Beginners, notion for beginners

Id: mpn5fze4RKo

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024