Why you NEED to learn Obsidian // EP1 Mastering Obsidian

i'm going to be honest with you guys if you've never heard of xerocast and bi-directional linking or obsidian you need to watch this video it blew my mind early this year and if you're anything like me it'll blow yours in the past 10 or so years i have tried and used a multitude of different note-taking apps such as bear apple notes notion evernote the list goes on and the one thing all these apps had in common is that they used a folder hierarchy file system so for all this time i've only used folder hierarchies so i'd have a folder for books which would then subdivide itself into multiple different folders such as psychology history philosophy and then inside each of those folders there would be a note for the book that pertained to that specific category and this all changed earlier this year when i came across a book titled how to take smart notes by a gentleman named sanke arens i am definitely mispronouncing that one and i realized with the help of the author probably like many of you that i never really looked at the notes that i took ever again unless i was searching for that particular note so what's the point of taking all these notes if we hardly ever look at them again aren't we just hoarding notes at that point if this sounds like you you're definitely in the right video the solution that i propose in this video is bi-directional linking and specifically using an app like obsidian we're going to divide this video into four parts we're first going to go over why you need to learn obsidian and who benefits the most from using an app like obsidian and we're then going to move on to obsidian file structure and the user interface and lastly we're going to finish off with some obsidian basics to get you up and running today in the next multiple episodes i'll go much more in depth on my customization of obsidian and my personal workflow alright so why do you need to learn obsidian going straight to the point here the reason is bi-directional linking now obsidian is not the only app that supports bi-directional linking so first i'm going to tell you why you need to learn bi-directional linking and give you four reasons why i believe obsidian to be the superior candidate bi-directional linking simply refers to the process of linking a note to another note not in the hierarchical folder fashion but in a direct link fashion so that when you look at your note you see which other notes have links to it in the folder hierarchy structure when you're looking at a note all that you can see is which folder that note belongs to not any connections it may have with notes from far away folders when you're typing a new note you don't decide where you're going to place this note you decide how you want to stumble upon this note in the future this is absolutely crucial when you want to strengthen and grow the value of your notes and your thoughts i could speak for hours on the powers of bi-directional linking but i'd rather show you on the section four of this video how it works on the obsidian app all right so i'm going to give you four different reasons why i believe obsidian to not only be the best option right now but the best option in the foreseeable future the first reason is community plugins as we'll see in future videos obsidian has a community of really smart people that provide all these different plugins at no cost to you that augment your workflow and better your experience with obsidian overall of course if it's something that you like a lot and benefit to tremendously it's always nice to buy the developer a coffee one of my personal favorite plugins is the kindle highlights plugin which lets me import all of my highlights from my kindle onto my obsidian vault and then sync them always at the click of a button there are hundreds of really high value community plugins and more are constantly coming out the third reason and it's a really big one for me is future proofing when i spend hours upon hours sometimes weeks upon weeks on my notes they're very special to me and i don't want them to be held hostage by some apps proprietary format now obsidian is a markdown based app which means that whatever you do all your work that you put on your obsidian vault is fully transferable to pretty much any major note-taking app your notes aren't even stored on obsidian servers let alone in a proprietary format your notes are with you at all times you can store them on google drive icloud drive dropbox on your local machine you can store them wherever you want as long as you keep them safe which leads me to my next point which is privacy now obsidian is about as private as you make it because your notes are in your control and you choose where you store them you can store them as securely as you'd like them to be your data is in your full control there are a ton of ways to back up your data for free which will be one of my topics in the next videos in the series and lastly the fourth reason is its price which is zero it's a free application and it's free for personal use which is all i use it for and it's all i assume most of you watching this will be using it for so it definitely beats the competition on that one as well so now who benefits the most from using an app like obsidian although some people definitely stand to benefit more than others i strongly believe that this app is for everyone and everyone stands to benefit from using it so who benefits the most from using an app like obsidian i'd say writers of any kind but specifically non-fiction writers research analysts content creators and knowledge workers of any kind because as a knowledge worker you are constantly piling up new information processing new thoughts and you don't want to just be piling up those notes somewhere you want your notes to grow as time goes by and build strong connections between them so that you can later use it in the project whatever it may be having said that i strongly believe that anyone no matter the background stands to benefit strongly from using an app like obsidian writing down their thoughts and making connections between them alright so now let's actually go over to the computer and get our hands on obsidian all right so once you've downloaded the app this is the first thing you'll see you'll be prompted to create a vault and your vault is simply the place where obsidian is storing your notes remember that everything is stored locally which means you'll need to specify where you want to store your vault that could be on icloud on google drive dropbox you need to specify it here when you first create it so vault name let's name this test vault and now we pick its location so for me i'm going to place it on my icloud that way it syncs with my other apple devices and i also take an extra precautionary step which like i said before we'll be going over in a future video once you've chosen the location uh hit create and now once you're all up and running you'll be greeted with this user interface and you can create a new note by pressing here or you can also press command n so now you have a new note and if we come here to the location of our vault you can see that our markdown file sits here so if we name it something else new note it'll update itself here and as you can see it's syncing to my icloud drive this is what i was referring to in both future proofing and privacy in that it's one of obsidian's main features all right so if we go back to obsidian this here is sort of a traditional file explorer in a sense that you can organize it as you wish you're more than welcome to organize every single note into a folder hierarchy but as you'll see sooner rather than later that really is not the point of obsidian but if you do want to all you got to do is create a folder and put your note here and as you can see the folder was created and your note lives inside that folder alright so now if we come here to our settings menu it can definitely get a little overwhelming compared to say notion or evernote but you'll get the hang of it very easily the first tab the editor tab is self-explanatory you just customize it to your preference and there's not really much you need to mess with the second tab however that deals with files and links is far more important and there's one setting that you definitely want to change which is automatically update internal links i'll touch upon that one in the last section of this video but that's really the only setting that you really should change in my opinion the other settings are totally up to you i keep almost all of it as default but each one has their preferences so there might be something you want changed in here alright so the next two tabs community plugins regular plugins and also themes is where most people spend far too much time on i'll be making videos on both going forward but a word of caution is that because obsidian allows for a great deal of customization i feel that many people spend way too much time on these settings than they need to you can easily spend days finding the perfect plugin and the theme that you love believe me i've fallen victim to the customization trap as well so don't make the same mistakes that i did another word of caution is that as you see here plugins divide themselves between core plugins and community plugins as the name suggests community plugins are made by the community and many of them are indeed great and i use them daily but it's important to understand that these plugins could have malicious code although the community is fantastic and all these plugins are open source it's definitely something to keep in mind i do believe however that if you stick with the most popular ones i think the risk is minimal but you do need to turn safe mode off which you can find here on the community tabs plugin once you start adding plugins regardless if they're community plugins or core plugins they'll show up here on the plugin options column and you can tweak the settings right here all right so now let's move on to bi-directional linking all right so this is all about linking your thoughts so let's make some links i like to use real world examples as opposed to abstract methods so let's use the example that you're someone evaluating what kind of diet you should go with you read the study on the keto diet and you take some notes on it so we start a new note and name it xyz article on the keto diet all right so now you start typing something like according to the article your body can enter ketosis after 12 hours of intermittent fasting but now you realize these terms are significant and they could be their own note as well so what do you do you link them and to do that all you do is put them inside squared brackets so you come here square brackets square brackets when you double tap square brackets it automatically fills it in for you so you just do it and type whatever it is you want to make a note for all right so now these two are their own notes so if you press command click you have a note here if you come back do the same here that's also its own note alright so now let's pretend you took some other notes on this article and shut down your computer that was it for this day some other day you come along and you start reading a book let's call it the health benefits of meditation and you want to make a note of it so you press command n or you come here to write a new note let's title it the health benefits of meditation and now you type your notes on this book and you type the author claims that intermittent fasting and meditation both promote better sleep in the long run we now place the brackets on your key terms and in here you choose intermittent fasting and meditation alright so this is when it gets interesting because if you come here to the side there's something called the graph view and if you hit it that's a graphical representation of all your notes so you can see something very cool here the intermittent fasting note is already linked to two different notes the article that you read on the keto diet and this book titled the health benefits of meditation all right so let's say you know a week two three four weeks passed and you took a bunch of different notes on different articles books videos and it turns out that you have 10 12 maybe more links to intermittent fasting and now let's say you want to write a blog post social media post youtube video article whatever it is on intermittent fasting so you come to your obsidian vault you type in intermittent fasting and you can see dozens if not more connections that you made to intermittent fasting as you consumed content and wrote it down on your obsidian vault this way you never start from zero i hope you understand how huge this is because just as you were consuming content over time and you're writing down your thoughts and your connections on obsidian you're creating these connections that would otherwise not exist on intermittent fasting or whatever the subject you are interested about and when it comes time to write and publish whatever it may be most of your work is done for you simply because you've been doing it slowly over time this is especially attractive for creators because as you build up more and more stuff in your vault you might start to realize that hey maybe this topic that i actually have you know dozens of connections to could actually be a well researched topic to write about as your vault grows bigger and bigger these will become more and more evident you'll have more and more connections to a certain area and you'll realize wow you know i've made a lot of connections to a specific topic maybe i'm actually very interested in it and this is something that maybe i should write about now something i like to do and i think it's crucial especially when your vault gets big is to come here type in command p which is essentially a way of typing whatever you want obsidian to do and you type in local graph it already already came up with it for you and you hit enter and this gives you a local view of the graph of course this is somewhat useless if you only have 10 20 30 notes but when you're in the hundreds or maybe even thousands this comes in very handy so then what you do is come here expand and add this to the side that way it's always visible and you can always see as you hop notes which notes are connected to it so if you come here to intermittent fasting you can see that you're intermittent fasting as these two connections as of right now and you can simply hop on from one to the other by simply clicking on it the more you start linking the more unexpected the connections become you don't have to worry in which folder your node goes in or any organizational feature for this to work all you have to do is link of course this is a very simplified explanation of bi-directional linking but i really don't want to overwhelm any of you especially if you're someone who's been using folder hierarchies for a decade or more it will take some getting used to but as i've developed this series i'll be showing you guys more and more advanced stuff that we can do with obsidian to really take your workflow to the next level the last thing i want to go over before ending this introductory episode on obsidian is markdown syntax since obsidian is a markdown based editor i think it's important that we know the basics of markdown syntax so the first important thing to know is titles and headers the way markdown works with formatting is that you put in one hashtag for a title like so that's a title and then two markdowns for a header and then progressively as you can see it gets smaller and smaller and by the time you get to header five or six you know it's going to be hardly distinguishable from text of course this will depend tremendously on what theme you're using for this i'm just using the obsidian default theme and it's very different depending on what theme you're working with another important thing to note is that you need to press command e to toggle between preview and edit mode and it is to say when you're on preview mode you can't write anything you can only see and hop between pages and also remember that when you're putting in your hashtags you need to press space otherwise if you don't it just becomes a tag and that's something for another video it's not something i use extensively but something you should know nonetheless and as you can see when you're on the preview mode you can no longer see the hashtags or the square brackets you just see smaller and smaller headers and you see the underlying version without the hashtags on the links some of the basic functionality includes such as the double equal sign this means something is highlighted and if you go on preview mode you can see highlighted if you type between underscore lines it will italicize your text if you type between asterisks it will bold your text again this becomes more and more prominent depending on what theme you're using in some themes the highlight the bold italics you know they stand out a lot this is not the case on the default theme on obsidian there are a lot more advanced markdown syntax features but for 99 of people this is really all that you need at least to get you up and running and expanding your vault i know this wasn't extensive but that was the whole point of it as i said before i'll get a lot more in depth during this series if you've never heard of bi-directional linking i hope this got you excited and that you see the immense potential that it has all right so that's it for the first episode in this series if you enjoyed it i hope you join me for the next several episodes where i'll be going over plugins organizational structure themes tags maps of content and way more thanks for watching and i'll see in the next one

Channel: FromSergio

Views: 5,566

Keywords: Obsidian, Obisidan app, Obsidian tutorial, why obsidian, how to setup obsidian, notion alternatives, notion roam obsidian, obsidian for beginners, notion alternative, why you need to learn obsidian, why learn obsidian, obsidian fromsergio, obsidian course, obsidian free course, how to get started with obsidian, obsidian guide

Id: ctetnQfSdfM

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021