My Obsidian Journey Part 1

My day-to-day workflow

Way back in February I wrote a post on how I switched from Notion to Obsidian for my daily writing tasks, and now, eight months on I thought I would write an update on my workflow together with all of the plugins I use to make my life easier.

This is a two part article, the workflow, and the plugins.

Now this might not be for everyone, but Obsidian truly has changed my day-to-day routine and I thought I would share it for those who are interested.

Now previously I used Notion for almost everything in my life from writing to hosting, and when I revisited Obsidian back in February I decided to switch to Obsidian for writing and task management as it is a great distraction free environment.

But here we are in the middle of October, and Obsidian is now my number one tool for everything I do. It is the only app that is open from the moment I start work till I hit the hay at night.

I run it on my Windows and Linux computers, iPad, phone, and have built it in to my AI assistant to remind me of important items etc.

So let’s dive in.

Why I switched to obsidian exclusively

First of all, there is an obvious reason for me, and that is ownership. I am not one of those people who don’t trust google and don’t want their information being used to train AI. No, well it’s true, I don’t trust Google, but I do have tons of documents stored on Google Drive, and hundreds of thousands of emails stored in Gmail.

The reason I care about ownership is that if I have everything stored in Notion, and if they go bust, get hacked, delete my account, or any other similar reason, I am left with nothing. Sure, you can export your data, but that is not the same.

With Obsidian, I control the data, it is all in markdown format, so as data formats change and get lost, everything is still readable.

… and if I need to, I can dump it all on a USB stick and do what I want with it.

I am also involved and working on projects that need secrecy, and having data stored on public services is a big no go.

But that being said, ownership is only part of the reason I switched.

The main reason is the plugins. There are thousands of them that can help you accomplish almost any task you can think of, and if it isn’t available and you are a geek, you can write your own, or like I did, got AI to write one for me. (it is truly scary how easy it is.)

So, to get a bit of an understanding on how I use this, let me take you through a bit of a workflow.

I start my day with coffee, a croissant, and my iPad and scroll through some socials and and my feedly.com feed.

I then save anything I want to look at later to Pocket and add the tag obsidian. This can be for anything that interests me. However…

If I am doing research on a particular project, and the article is related to that, I save it to Zotero. Zotero is a cross platform research assistant in which I store article, PDFs etc. for my projects when I am doing research. I chose the project and add additional tags as needed.

I have the same workflow setup on my desktop, iPad, and Android phone.

Later on I will explain how all this integrates with obsidian, but for now, back to the workflow.

The next thing I do in a morning if it is not raining is to head on out for a walk with Doris (she refuses to go out in the rain), and I usually listen to a podcast or a book.

More often than not, this will spark something in my head, and I will make a quick voice note, this is then automatically saved to Dropbox and a transcription is made (using the MAKE workflow I previously wrote about).

The transcriptions get automatically added to to Obsidian, which is where we get to next.

When I get back in, I fire up my computer, and Obsidian launches with my daily journal page. (I do this automatically or I forget and get distracted). It also opens my Dashboard page on my second monitor.

I have never been good at keeping daily journals, there would always be huge gaps between entries, but with it open, staring right at me, I make a couple of notes about the previous day and what I plan to do next. This is not a detailed pouring your heart out kind of entry, just a few thoughts.

When Obsidian opens, it also automatically plays background noise (I use a coffee shop audio), I used to like music when I worked but now prefer something not too distracting when writing, but have real music on when coding. Each to their own I guess.

Next thing on my daily routine is my Task Board, this is a stripped down Kanban board with Inbox, Work In Progress, and Done. I try never to leave things in Work In Progress at the end of the day unless it is absolutely going to be a multiple day project. I prefer to only put things in WIP if I know I am going to work on it and finish it today, just trying to set realistic expectations for myself.

On to the canvas.

I love to lay things out visually, so if I am working on a project I will open up the canvas view which is basically a large infinite whiteboard. Here there will be links to notes, images, PDF files etc. and it gives me a visual reminder of the project.

I often put random thoughts on here rather than create individual notes, and I usually find myself dragging in parts of the transcripts from the mornings walk if relevant.

Now the next thing I usually do is quickly go over the items I added to Pocket first thing, or from the night before. These are automatically synced with Obsidian, and then if I am working on a project I will go and review the Zotero content I saved, again synced with Obsidian.

So that is my general daily routine, but let’s deep-dive on a specific use-case scenario, and that is writing.

Whether it’s for an article, or a script for a project I am working on, I usually collect and collate a lot of information.

I use a lot of AI inside Obsidian, and I can chat with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Llama 3 directly inside it, asking questions about a note or my whole archive, it understands and provides links to other notes I make automatically, and is basically like having a full-time research assistant working for you.

One thing I find is that I pull in a lot of content from Pocket or Obsidian and tend to forget about it after a few days. The AI lets me ask questions, and find content without searching through what is thousands and thousands of notes.

But…

If I am trying to focus on one thing, lets just say writing an article on the metaverse, I will use Obsidian to show me all content tagged with metaverse, then I automatically compile all of those notes, PDFs, images etc, into a single PDF which I then bring into Google NotebookLM.

I don’t do this all of the time, using Obsidian and the AI plugins I have are usually enough, but when I have a lot of info I want to go though, Google NotebookLM is hands-down the best tool for the job.

Being able to automatically create a PDF with everything in it and just upload one file to the notebook is a really efficient way of working.

Then I can ask Google NotebookLM about everything I have collated and for free without using API credits etc.

One thing you might want to know is why use Zotero and Pocket at all?

I don’t really need Pocket, there is a nice Chrome extension that will work like Pocket and store items directly inside Obsidian, but I am all about using the same tools on every device and when you add items into Obsidian from an iPad or phone it is not as organised, or quick, so I prefer the Pocket workflow.

As for Zotero, most people wouldn’t need it. I use it mainly for a specific use case, and that is annotating PDF files.

I collect a lot of PDFs, from research papers, to whole books and I annotate a lot.

There is a plugin for Obsidian to do PDF annotations and to compile all of the annotations into one file but it is a little bit buggy and often breaks when there is a Obsidian update, and when it breaks it seems to lose the annotations I am currently working on and have not exported. (a very edge case here)

I just prefer the workflow of keeping random finds in Pocket and more in-depth information/research in Zotero, for most people this would not be the case.

… and everything still ends up inside Obsidian in the end and is fully readable and searchable via AI.

There are obviously a ton of tools that you can use to do what I have done but I find keeping everything inside Obsidian when I sit down to work is the best way to remain focussed. You can even set a pomodoro timer right in the app.

Now this was just my content creation workflow, you can get more complicated with it, or to be fair, simpler. In the next article I will list my complete plugin setup and also show you some interesting ones to make the most of your time and leverage AI to the max.

As for hosting, I am still using Notion for now, but I am looking at getting rid of that this month. I have tried a few solutions but have not been happy with them so I am playing with a few options at the moment.

I hope this was interesting, if so leave a like, and if you have any questions then please leave a comment and I will try to help.