One Year with Obsidian

I have always had difficulty with note taking. Most of my life I’ve attempted to just memorize what I need. That unfortunately started to become too hard as I entered my 30’s.

In my personal life I had a small collection of notes in Google Keep, but at work where I need the most support from notes I didn’t quite know what to use. I thought about going back to gel pens and composition books like I used for journals in college. That has some unfortunate limitations when copying down error information while debugging. Since my company had an Office 365 subscription and I saw others using OneNote, I decided to give that a try. That worked for a while, but I felt like organizational assumptions were getting in my way. Everything felt like it had to be structured into notebooks, sections, and pages. While I understand the metaphor, it just didn’t feel ergonomic and distracting me with unnecessary concerns about organizing my notes. I eventually abandoned OneNote.

I’m not entirely sure when I heard about Obsidian. It was probably some YouTube channel. I decided to give it a try. I started by converting my abandoned OneNote notebooks into DOCX files, and then used pandoc to convert the DOCX files to markdown. Then I started pulling the large markdown files apart into individual files for certain headers.

Where this immediately started to shine was with my old release notes. I had sporadically kept notes for each release including the deploy-able units, outstanding Jira tickets, and migration scripts that needed to be run. I was able to create articles for each deploy-able unit that I’ve shipped over the last four years and I could immediately see their relative importance and deployment frequency in graph mode. This was an incredible and thrilling new addition to my workflow.

Unfortunately over the course of the year I’ve been using Obsidian, I’ve found graph mode doesn’t really enhance my workflow. It’s interesting, and it looks really impressive. I just don’t really have a use for it. I feel like if I were regularly using my notes for research or learning like I did in school, I would probably use the graph to find where my knowledge base is missing information.

Instead I use my Obsidian vault as a work journal. I create a daily note every day with up to three sections: a bullet point list of things I did that day, a check box list of action items that come up during meetings, and collection of code snippets that I want to hold onto for later.

My bullet point list is usually organized by user stories and tasks with links back to Azure DevOps so I can quickly open the work item from my notes if necessary. Then under the tasks, I typically write some bullet point notes on things that I’ve tried, suggestions team mates have made while discussing our work etc. I’ve found that keeping this list has greatly improved my status reports during stand up, and if I miss a stand up due to meeting conflicts, I can quickly create a status report in our Teams channel.

I then usually under my bullet point list have an optional action items header with a list of check boxes. As I have meetings through out the day, or due to conversations with team mates, I will mark down quick to do items under action items. I try to get these done by the end of the day. I’ve found this mostly just helps by writing the item down. Even if I don’t get the item done by the end of the day, a better memory of the item by having it written down in my notes seems to lead to me doing these ad hoc pieces of work more often than not.

Finally, there’s snippets. This section is not always part of my daily notes, but if I have a SQL query, error text, or a PowerShell one-liner that I want to keep around. I write up a description of what the snippet does, and put it in a code block. This has helped my workflow by being searchable in two different ways. The first is that I can search for terms that might be in the description that I wrote. The second is that I can search for the language format (e.g. ```sql). Combined with sorting by date allows me to look at all the SQL queries that I committed to my notes in a give period of time.

To re-iterate, I want a note taking system that gets out of my way, and enhances my work. Thankfully in the course of the last year Obsidian has provided me with a flexible space where I can create periodic notes that reflect the work I’m doing. It records items that I do every day, every week, and every sprint. It’s my plain text work journal that just works.