Where do I start when it comes to talking about the variety of apps available for every kind of PKM purpose? A new software is released seemingly every day at the moment, all promising to be the one app that replaces all others, solving all your productivity problems.
These new programs and systems always attract me at first but, without fail, they’ve never proven to be all that they claimed that they would. Now I’ve spent the best part of a year building a productivity system that simply works how I want it to, based around Obsidian, an app that I believe is the best possible fit for my use case. Just the other day I bought the Obsidian Catalyst licence, further motivating me to lock into an app that does the job quietly and efficiently, without distracting me outputting real value.
This article is all about Obsidian, and why I believe that it’s the best app for anyone who wants a functional, no-frills system for productive work.
Shiny Object Syndrome
This syndrome is the tendency to become distracted by new or exciting opportunities or ideas. The danger is that the excitement of the new object might mask the fact that it might not serve a purpose as well as the original system that you were using. This can affect you in all areas of life, but I wanted to discuss how it plays out with reference to productivity and the systems that we use to get work done. You can save a considerable amount of time by investing into making a single system work for you.
An example that I can draw from in my own life is when I first heard about Tana, an outliner-based notes app that claimed that it was going to become my ‘EverythingOS’. I was very excited to try out this revolutionary new tool and take my work to the next level. After a wait, I was granted early access to the software to try it out. After wasting several hours trying to work out how to create a system within the app, I realised that it wasn’t even close to being as functional as Obsidian was, so I deleted my account.
Another good example of when I fell for Shiny Object Syndrome was when Notion released Notion AI. I spent a period of time trying out the functionality of this new feature, but held my nerve and kept my system and content in Obsidian. Before long, Obsidian plugin developers created AI tools that far surpassed the functionality of Notion’s software, and I was rewarded for staying loyal to a system that works.
How to minimise Shiny Object Syndrome
You have to become less open to the idea of adopting a new software. The easiest way to do this with reference to Obsidian is to spend time building a bespoke system that allows you to create work in a productive and effective way. There is a psychological benefit to this investment — once you have put an amount of time into building a system that works and is perfectly functional, you are less open to the suggestion of moving all of your work to another system that you are going to have to spend time learning how to use. This is the main premise behind me investing in the Obsidian Catalyst licence as well. Monetary investment has the same effect as time investment, and they compound to make sure that I don’t get tempted by all the new tools being produced. It’s just a bonus that this gives me access to Insider versions, with early access to new features.
If you truly think that a different tool has become a better option for your workflow, spend some time thinking seriously before you adopt it as a full-time tool. Cal Newport explains very well how to do this in Digital Minimalism — have a ‘philosophy of technology use’ that prioritizes ‘long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction’. What this means is that you should only use a tool if there is overwhelming evidence that it’s going to improve your work. If you are unsure, stick to your current system until you have evidence one way or another to make a decision.
Why Obsidian?
If this question had to be answered in one word, it would be ‘extensibility’. Obsidian can very easily be moulded to any productivity system because the plugin library offers a very large array of integrations with other productivity tools outside of the app, such as Anki, Readwise and Zotero, all of which integrate with my own workflow. Whatever your preferred workflow or system is, Obsidian can conform with it and help you create better work. It does this without pressing upon you any features that you don’t want to use — you can disable even the core plugins in the menu, leaving you with a bare-bones markdown file editor if that’s what you require. On the other end of the spectrum, I have over 30 community plugins that enable functionality from AI integration to querying vault files to colouring links to importing references from a reference manager.
Because of the extensibility of Obsidian, it’s easy to create the kind of content that you want to output. You can connect the Pandoc plugin for rendering academic documents in whatever format you like, or you can connect to any number of web services to directly share your work with the internet at large. As well as this, all of your documents are saved locally on your device, giving you control over where they’re shared and how they’re synchronised. This is good for privacy, and makes sure that in the future, if Obsidian has to be shut down, you still have access to all the files that you invested time into creating.
Where does Obsidian fall down?
Collaboration is difficult when files are offline. Perhaps, if collaboration is essential for you, explore some of the other options (I recommend Notion – I was a user for a while and probably would still be if Obsidian didn’t exist). As well as this, Obsidian isn’t as seamless when it comes to embedding images and content — you have to store images in your vault, and link them using markdown links and syntax, which is slightly less intuitive than the editors that many other online tools have. Despite these shortcomings, I still believe that Obsidian is the best PKM software for the majority of people — the benefits of using a software that just works seamlessly for whatever purpose you have in mind far outweighs the program falling down on a few minor functions. A lot of the time, there are plugins that you can add to Obsidian to help you to solve these problems anyway. Think of base Obsidian as a foundation upon which you can build your own bespoke suite of plugins into a system.
Conclusion
I have said before that the best tools are the ones that stay out of your way, so that you can focus on creating work and providing value to other people. Obsidian does this very well, and can be a simple or complex as you want it to be. With Obsidian, I passed my A-levels, and now I manage my university work, writing, YouTube and other side projects in tandem, without feeling overwhelmed. Of course, having a paper task management system for simplicity helps, but I think that this is vastly to do with the configurability and customisation that Obsidian has, allowing me to set up extensions and workflows within the app, automating the tasks that take up my time, allowing me to focus on higher level work, such as writing content and revising facts for university.
As well as this, Obsidian is a free tool and the vast majority of the plugins are open source. The community is very helpful, with a lot of resources on various websites, including YouTube and here in the Obsidian Observer on Medium. The function of these articles that I’m publishing is to create resources that I would have liked to have when I was learning how to use the software for myself.
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