Despite being my app of choice for notes, Obsidian is not an intuitive program when it comes to comparison with some other options available. By default you have to get used to editing and reading views, markdown syntax and storing images separately in your vault. There are ways to make the process of learning how to navigate these features less painful, which is what I’m going to be going over in this article.
When learning Obsidian, you must bear in mind that it’s not going to feel the same as using another notes app. It might take some time to wrap your head around some parts and some other parts might feel more intuitive than the offerings of your previous notes app.
With this in mind, here are some tips to help you overcome Obsidian’s learning curve quickly:
1. Don’t over-complicate things
You’re looking to learn how to use a notes app, which makes me think you have a reason for taking notes. Perhaps you’re a researcher who wants to track notes from the literature that you read. Perhaps you’re a student who wants to take and link lecture notes. Perhaps you’re a creator and you want somewhere to manage your ideas and writing.
Whatever your use case, this will require you to use a certain set of features and functions within Obsidian. Learn how to use these first. Learn well and for now avoid attempting to learn about features that aren’t strongly related to the work that you need to be doing. The beauty of Obsidian is that it is, at it’s core, markdown files in a folder. It doesn’t need to be any more than that. This means that you can get up and running having only learned the basics of markdown.
Once you have learned how to use all the functions relevant to your use of Obsidian, you can start to extend the capabilities of the software, making your workflow more powerful. Again, only do this with functions you think relate to the work that you’re going to produce. This might be a citation management plugin if you’re a researcher, an example where adding the same plugin for a content creator likely wouldn’t have much effect.
Have the outcome you want to create in mind at all times, which will reduce the time taken to learn to use the software because you aren’t bothering to learn about irrelevant functions and capability.
2. Take your time
Although a counterintuitive point for learning quickly, taking your time to learn only the required functions of Obsidian is effective. This links back to Obsidian being essentially a folder of markdown files. You don’t need to add any more to this to have a functional tool for any use case. Of course there are going to be one or two features that massively improve the leverage that Obsidian gives you but beyond this, take your time when learning about other features of the software.
This relates to a digital minimalist philosophy of technology use. There is only value to be found in learning about a function in Obsidian if it’s going to greatly benefit your workflow and justify the time spent learning by increasing the quality of work created. If you take it slow you are less likely to find yourself sucked in to creating complicated vaults and customising your graph view, which will likely take away from creating content in a time-effective way.
3. Be wary of consuming content (take what you need)
You can easily make Obsidian complicated. There are hundreds of plugins and themes that add every function imaginable to the program. There are people on the internet who know how to use them all as well.
This is why I warn against watching too much content on the internet. People’s use cases differ and especially for a beginner I believe it does more harm than good looking too deeply into what people have built for themselves.
Internet experts often have a lot of experience as well, having built a system that works over many months using the software. These configurations aren’t recommended for a beginner because of their complexity built up after following step two and taking time to create them.
On the other hand, I love the community. When you need something for Obsidian there’s no doubt somebody already out there who’s figured out how to do what you need. You again need a sound philosophy of technology use here. The most effective way to learn Obsidian would be to watch a walkthrough of a vault or demonstration of a feature and make a purposeful decision about whether it’s worth the time of learning how to put it in place in your vault.
4. Ask for help
As I mentioned, the Obsidian community is exceptional. There are a lot of committed creators making informative content. this is because of the investment that everyone puts into building their own bespoke system in the app. Once you’ve invested like this to create a vessel for your work that is effective and enjoyable to use, you want to remain faithful to that software as well as teach everyone else how to do the same.
There are plenty of places to ask these people for advice on the internet. By far the best ones are the forums on Obsidian’s website as well as the Obsidian Member’s Group Discord server. You can ‘ask questions’ of YouTube if you think that someone’s turned the topic of your query into a video — this was how I learned most of what I know about Obsidian.
Much of the complexity of Obsidian comes from community plugins — these provide extra functions to the app. Because of this, a lot of the plugins have very good documentation, which is another place where you can look for help, examples and links to other resources.
There are newsletters that are good collections of resources and up to date information about the community. I like Obsidian Roundup by Eleanor Konik. This newsletter covers Obsidian updates, plugin additions and updates, theme updates and additions as well as other tools and links to do with Obsidian. The publication Obsidian Observer here on Medium is a new place to find the best Obsidian content too!
I will once more bring up having a minimal philosophy of technology use when reading publications such as this — they are great for generating ideas, but don’t implement unless they’re going to bring significant improvement to how you’re going to work in your vault. They are great resources for expanding your horizons on what is capable in Obsidian though, so worth investigating once you have your very basic functions sorted within the app.
If you don’t feel confident yet, spend some time with what you’ve built already before branching out to other ideas and resources.
5. Enjoy the process
Continue to create. This is where the fulfilment comes from when using a system like this. You could spend all the time in the world creating a system that’s as close as possible to perfect for all the uses you have, or you could create something that works and then proceed to use it to provide value to others.
By doing this and achieving fulfilment through it, the focus is away from learning Obsidian and geared more towards doing what you must to create output. The learning will occur through use over time and you won’t have to make any extra effort to actually go about the learning process. Motivation to work will come and so long as you bear in mind the above tips you’re now equipped to overcome the Obsidian learning curve as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
Obsidian is the software that I’ve used for the last year for nearly all text-based work, including university and content creation. Learning came much easier when I realised the goal was to create output rather than to build a system that’s nice to look at. If you want to read more about Obsidian then give me a follow; please clap if the article provided you with value. As always, thanks for reading!