Why I left Notion for Obsidian

couple years ago one of my coworkers introduced me to notion and i fell in love i told everybody i could that this was the app of my dreams i put my life from google drive and evernote and my bullet journal all into notion and i even created social media around it i was the notion girl but now i moved everything to obsidian hey guys my name is rachel welcome to my channel and in this video i want to talk to you about why i left notion for obsidian i'm going to divide this into five parts one why did i need a note-taking app in the first place why was notion the best app for me what were all the things that i found was wrong with notion rethinking what i needed in a note-taking app and finally why i chose obsidian so if you are maybe on the fence about either notion or obsidian then maybe this video is for you alright so why did i need a note-taking app in the first place i am an avid note-taker and the problem like most other avid notetakers is that i take notes and then i never see them again so i wanted to find a way for me to take these notes and actually reflect on them over time and maybe build some systems around them so that they're actually useful so i really was kind of looking for maybe three things in my note-taking app one i wanted it to be easy to take the notes in the first place i wanted it to be easy for me to find the notes that i've already taken and i wanted it to be easy for me to link notes to each other i kind of wanted a personal wiki page and at the time that i was looking for this it was actually really hard to find one and notion did all of that it was easy to take the notes it was easy to find them and it was easy to link them to each other and the great thing about notion was it introduced me to features that i never knew i needed in the first place it introduced me to templates which made my workflows a lot faster now that i know what i like to do it's easy to repeat it over and over again and then it introduced me to the idea of using databases for my notes which allowed me to create systems that would help my workflows be faster theoretically and then it introduced me to sync blocks which allowed me to take notes on one page and then sync them across a lot of other notes i found that notion was exactly what i was looking for because it looked clean it looked minimal it was easy to use for me because i was already familiar with the idea of databases and how i could probably use them and it was so customizable that i could basically make it look however i wanted to it seemed too good to be true and eventually i did learn that it was over time i analyzed what i was doing with my time and i noticed a couple of patterns that i really didn't like because notion was so customizable and flexible i was spending so much time in notion building the system of my dreams that i wasn't actually doing work when i wasn't building my systems i was spending all my time customizing notion that i wasn't doing work either and then finally one thing that really annoyed me was that notion was not keyboard shortcut friendly so if you are like me and you like to use keyboard for kits for everything you'll find that there are some typical keyboard shortcuts that you would expect to work in basically every system that doesn't work in motion and in the beginning it was fine but when you're in the middle of a meeting and you're trying to take down notes and then your keyboard shortcut doesn't work it takes you out of the meeting out of your flow and you lose track of what was going on in the first place it's very distracting a little caveat i actually haven't used notion in a couple of months so maybe they've improved that since then but at the time that i was using it it was a little bit frustrating for me so all of this made me rethink what did i really need in the system so i kind of narrowed it down to something that looks good something that has some of those features from notion that i really enjoyed things like sync blocks templates that folding thing it needed to be easy to migrate from that system to something else in case in the future i decided i don't like the system either and finally the thing that i really didn't consider when i first jumped into notion it needed to allow me to get into the flow and stay there meaning it can't be a distracting application it's hard enough today with so many distractions i needed a note-taking app that was just a note-taking app so this all leads me to why did i pick obsidian obsidian has a lot of great things going for it in fact if you look on the youtube space you're gonna see videos on why it's more secure and you own your data all great things but the features i just listed are some of the most important things for me obsidian looks great out of the box and while i've tried looking into their themes i've found that i actually like the out of the box look more than a lot of the themes that are available and since i'm not a designer it looks way better than what i could come up with on my own i also take full advantage of the template feature that obsidian has that i originally learned from notion you can enable it by going into settings and core plugins and just clicking on the templates button i have templates from everything from my daily workflow my youtube work and notes i take very often like book notes product requirements documents and weekly reviews for both my work and personal life honestly these are all basically checklists but i find it very useful because it makes it automatic and takes up very little mental energy for me to remember what are all the things that i need to do now this sounds basic but notion introduced me to the idea of folding and i cannot live without it at this point i'm really glad to see that obsidian has it as one of its features available in its settings page just go to the editor and then choose the fold heading and fold indent options obsidian doesn't have sync blocks the exact same way that motion does but it does have section previews so for instance if i were to create a note about building systems i could reference some of my existing notes from the book willpower doesn't work the way i would do that is by typing in an exclamation point and double square brackets to bring up my notes on willpower doesn't work what that does is give a preview of the entire note will power doesn't work and if i want to be more specific i could type in hashtag and then pick the heading that i want to display so for instance i can choose don't rely on willpower and instead of showing the entire willpower doesn't work note it would just show this particular header one thing i really like about this is as opposed to notion where you have to think ahead of time which parts of your notes will need to be synced to other pages in obsidian you could choose your previews after the fact so i could type as many notes as i want today without thinking of what will be reused in the future and then when i do get to the future i can just choose which of my previous notes are actually relevant and it helps me keep the flow once i start working on obsidian it's actually really easy to just keep working instead of going off into a tangent of how can i make this look good or i don't know build another database i don't need to build more databases guys and just like when i found notion where notion introduced me to things that i needed and i didn't know i did obsidian did the same thing and obsidian is a lot more extensible there are people out there who are building plugins for obsidian for free but can make obsidian whatever you want it to be i love obsidian so much that i use it every day for everything from note-taking to product management so if you're interested in how i use obsidian for all of these things please click on these and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Rachel V Madrigal

Views: 647,182

Keywords: obsidian md, obsidian workflow, obsidian notes, notion vs obsidian, notion roam obsidian, obsidian vs notion, notion alternative, obsidian app notes, notion, knowledge management, personal knowledge management, building a second brain, best productivity apps, personal growth, obsidian

Id: 4DXHVawhh4c

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022