Unfiltered thoughts on Obsidian
My response to Robb's Bullet Journal thoughts yesterday got me thinking about how I currently use Obsidian compared to my initial purpose, and how I want to use my Bullet Journal. To save you a click, the short version is that I'm questioning my use of "Daily Notes" in Obsidian. Here are some unfiltered thoughts about both Obsidian and my Bullet Journal.
I don't remember the initial reason I fired up Obsidian (other than being able to use Syncthing on a private server to hop between devices). Thinking about it now, my original purpose for note apps (such as SimpleNote, Notion, etc.) is to have some place to write blog posts on any computer to paste into Bear Blog. The requirements were simple: flat text files, with the ability to copy & paste markdown notation. SimpleText fit the bill for a time, with plain text as the default input but supporting markdown in a preview window. This made it easy enough for me to have a rough preview of what I was writing and the ease of copying the text into Bear Blog. BUT - friction was introduced with their terrible Captchca so I went on a long quest for a replacement. I tried Obsidian once - but ruled it out because I thought it didn't support plain text output (I didn't know it was a file-based system at the time), and I also was only able to access it from one device without paying for sync. The point is I came back around to it after a lot of searching. It works pretty well.
In addition to writing blog posts etc. I've started some lists - shopping lists, various media to check out, a note where I log memories that come up (because I have memory issues but certain memories get triggered by random things, and I don't want to "forget" them again). It's a good database that is platform agnostic because of the plain text format.
Since then I've used some basic shell scripts to set up automated daily notes with weekly review files based on templates. This falls under the category of "because I can", and something fun to play around with1. Ever since I set up that automated system I've been practically obsessed with putting them together every day. Ostensibly the point of them is to make it easier to write my weeknotes so I can export them to srgower.com quickly. But they've turned into something different and thinking it through I don't like where it's headed, in retrospect.
I already have a system for daily notes: my bullet journal. I don't mind putting my weekly notes in a digital file to share online as I review my week, but I feel as though these daily files are overtaking my journal and rendering it redundant. Mind you, I like the idea of a daily note to store links and the like to put into my weeknotes - that is a function that I can't easily replicate in my Bullet Journal. I mean, would you want to write out a URL by hand, and then transcribe it again into a text file? I sure don't.
And then there's the obsessiveness factor again: everytime a thought crosses my mind I feel I need to enter it into Obsidian right away. One of the problems I have with digital streaming media is that everything feels disposable. The way that I'm treating daily notes feels disposable, too. I mean, sure - bullet journalling is not really supposed to be a special curated notebook, but I like to think that I put a little more care into the notes I jot into the book. If I'm able to type everything whenever I want, I don't think that those thoughts stick with me as long. There are certainly situations where it's more convenient to log something in an electronic note - when I don't have my notebook, for example - but I should be transcribing those to my journal as soon as I'm able instead of locking them up in the vault2 and forgetting them down the line.
It seems like what I envision is a world where I do a better job merging analog and digital input. I already do that well with a digital calendar. Every important time-bound detail goes into my calendar: birthdays, appointments, softball schedules, bills; I will write those things down in my journal the day they are scheduled to happen, but also the day I schedule the appointment and enter it into my calendar later. It's a good system. I think my automated daily notes still have a place in this system, but they need less prominence.
What's good:
- links that I want to share
- listing things that I've written or made during the week
- thoughts that I'm not able to transcribe into my notebook right away
- things that don't "fit" in my notebook - I think of tech or blog notes that I don't necessarily want to record in my notebook (unless it's part of a "bigger idea")
What's not good:
- allowing technology to take attention away from Life Happenings
- less information goes into my journal, making it less useful in the future
I think I have the makings of a plan here: my bullet journal returns to being the most important piece of information, while Obsidian serves as a tool to supplement the journal. I forgot to mention that it also works great at replacing the concept of "collections" in the Bullet Journal lexicon - I have never been able to use them and make them stick. Robb's mention of "The purpose of a system is what it does" resonated with me, and my journal's purpose has started to slide away from its intentions. Similarly the purpose of my Obsidian vault has shifted from the original usecase and I want to reset the two things.
We'll see how things go.
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Obsidian uses "vaults", get it?↩