I had a long weekend here in Pune owing to a holiday on Monday on the occasion of Eid. I spent my Sunday afternoon trying to learn the fundamentals of EMACS. I was trying to see what I would like to use to set up my note making stack. I wanted to learn EMACS to try and set up the EMACS Writing Studio.
I learnt a lot of key bindings. I took the effort to learn about key bindings (or keyboard shortcuts) for the various programmes I used. I learnt that I needed to spend some time to learn programming so that I could better understand what I was doing.
Obsidian has held a strange attraction for me because of its purple coloured logo. I love the colour purple. If you visit my blog’s URL, the purple coloured hyperlinks are a dead giveaway. I decided to give Obsidian another try.
I had tried setting up Obsidian twice before this. The first was Nick Milo’s Linking your Thinking system. I do not know why I abandoned that practice but I moved to Roam Research after trying it.
Last year, I gave Obsidian another try after reading Binny V A’s Zettelkasten and the Art of Knowledge Management. I knew I wanted Obsidian to have a place in my note making stack. This time I tried Odysseas’ system.
I added only a few notes in the last one year. I did not seem to have used Odysseas’ system. I continued the practice of adding notes to Roam Research and also set up Readwise to export its highlights to Roam Research in this period. This pushed my use of Roam Research.
My wife asked me what I had got in my life out of consuming social media, videos, books, etc. She said that she saw no return for all the time I had invested. I wanted to start consuming in a way that it showed a return for the time I invest, if not for entertainment. This is the role that I want Obsidian to play.
In the aforementioned consumption binge my wife accused me of, I remembered a channel I came across called Wanderloots. I remembered a sentence he said in one of my videos. It will allow me to measure my productivity in terms of “permanent notes” I wrote and not in terms of the input.
He has a playlist that shows how he sets up his Obsidian with a mixture of mixes Zettelkasten, CODE by Tiago Forte, and Obsidian’s system of tags and topics to set up his digital garden.
I plan to tweak his system further so that I can use Obsidian as a place to read, think, and write. I plan to use discretion in dumping things into Obsidian for now.
If you visit his YouTube channel now, he is talking about setting up an AI locally on your machine to work with your notes. I am presently enjoying consuming his back catalog of content.
Parallel Spirals 