_Introduction

The purpose of this lesson

obsidiancourse

We are going to cover the basics of using the interface of Obsidian. Why the app may be useful to you. Some common note-taking and organization methodologies that Obsidian is suitable for. How to use some common community made plugins that will expand its functionality, and how to find plugins that will expand its functionality to suit your own personal needs. With question and answer sections at the end.

What is Obsidian good at?

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Obsidian is primarily a note-taking app that is well suited for creating a knowledge base. It has a thriving community of people creating free plugins that expand its functionality, and It can be adapted well to task management, or journaling as well. It is not the only application of its kind, but it is very versatile and adaptable.

Obsidian is especially well suited to those doing knowledge–work and creative–work

Are you trying to¹

• Better remember the things you learn?
• create an output?
• are you just organizing your own thoughts, not necessarily for output?
  • reviewing and curating content you’ve consumed?
• Are you just trying to get ideas out of your head, so you can better focus on parsing through them or focus on tasks?
• Track habits, journal, etc.?

There is a common thread “Ideas are visitors—you need to capture them if you want them to stick around.”

To do that you need a system to capture your thoughts, ideas, tasks that fits your goals and that you can always retrieve.

Expand to see some use cases

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Taking notes on reference material for:

• writing non-fiction

  • articles
  • blog posts
  • content scripts

• writing academic papers

• creative writing

  • novels
  • world building
  • character building
  • Tabletop Role playing games
    • both as a player and a game master
      • maintain maps
      • manage player character information
      • manage non player character information and interactions
  • other game-design related writing tasks
  • screenwriting
  • playwriting
  • poetry
  • daily creative writing prompts

• compiling reference material for whatever your pursuits might be

  • students
  • IT and software development
    • create your own documentation that can be exported and hosted online
    • codeblocks with syntax highlighting
    • embed links and snippets

• Journaling and Task management

  • use of plugins are highly recommended to streamline this use case.

All of which can be compiled notes into many formats of long form text for exporting to other apps, to create content for the web, or to be delivered in other formats.

The Zettelkasten

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A Zettelkasten is a method of personal knowledge management

The name just stands for “slip-box” in German

The Zettelkasten system has four basic pillars

1. Write all the time.
2. Everything is knowledge.
3. Permanent notes are irreducible, complete thoughts.
4. Knowledge is the connections between these notes.

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method

Similar systems have been used in some way or another by many throughout history. A somewhat well known example being Niklas Luhmann.

Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann was a German professor of sociology who kept a set of notes in a series of wooden slip boxes. He maintained the library of over 90,000 note cards, which he would use to reference, or link, to other notes in his collection when ideas were related. He used this collection to help him write over 50 books and over 500 articles throughout his career, including his work in the field of systems theory that described the Zettelkasten method itself.

Luhmann’s prolific body of work was a testament to his system and with the help of modern software and tools to automate the process, the work needed to maintain a system like his is becoming ever more accessible and appealing.

This method can be very ADHD friendly!

A ZK or any kind of PKM creates a low friction environment for externalizing your thoughts and provides a framework that mimics the way our minds relate topics and ideas. This is an extremely potent way for those of us with ADHD to reduce cognitive load and offload into system that we will always want with us and have it be retrievable.

moving on to using the app!

Use the second link in the web version of this vault. The following will work only if opening this vault directly in obsidian from the releases page. Using Obsidian
Using Obsidian - Web link

Footnotes

1. some points courtesy of Bryan Jenks - youtube ↩