It’s a controversial feature of the popular note-taking app. It’s also great thumbnail content if you’re making work about the note-taking app.
But is the graph view in Obsidian actually useful?
For a long time, I didn’t think so. However, my mind has been changed somewhat as I stepped back from the hype and thought about how the feature could be used productively.
Here’s my opinion on the Obsidian graph view, starting from my own experience with it…
For almost two years I was writing content into a Zettelkasten and creating links between my ideas. During almost all of this time, I thought that the best way to follow these links and navigate between them was by clicking them in the document and moving through your notes one by one.
One day, however, I decided to start looking into the graph view. To start with this didn’t seem like a good idea to me. I wanted to create a graph that I actually used, rather than one with loads of arbitrary notes that just looks good on a social media post.
Anything that’s part of your vault should be useful, not just a tool for vanity.
So here is my working graph view — something that I actually use, day in, day out:
In the rest of this piece, I’m going to give you a bit more detail about it…
I made a few customisations to the files that are displayed in my graph view. The nodes you see in red are inside my Zettelkasten — they are notes containing individual points of my own insight. This makes these notes the most important, hence the colouring that I’ve chosen for them.
Most of the other content in my vault is hidden from the graph view. I do this using Obsidian’s ‘excluded files’ feature, where you can specify certain folders whose files you don’t want appearing in the quick switcher or the graph view. I have a lot of files in my vault that aren’t really linked to anything because they’re part of different work, such as lecture notes for university as well as chats with AI. These aren’t useful in a map of linked thinking, so I hide them from the graph view.
I also hide orphans for the same reason. These files don’t have any links to them so they’re obsolete when it comes to the function that I have for the graph view, which I will cover later in the article. Tags are also hidden — I want the shape of the graph to originate through connections between ideas. My tags connect categories rather than ideas, which is not as useful for connected thinking.
This leaves me with only the files that are important supplementation to my thinking. It’s mainly evergreen notes from the Zettelkasten, although there are others such as book notes or notes from other sources, that I’ve gone on to reference throughout the notes in the Zettelkasten.
The large clump of notes that you see is from the notes that I use to run my website. I don’t want to add them to the excluded files because I like being able to search them in the quick switcher, but they’re not really important inside the graph view.
So now that I’ve gone over many features and notes that I remove from the graph view, the question that remains is what do I actually use it for?
When creating regularly on the internet, you need to be able to generate ideas to write about. This is what I use the notes in the Zettelkasten (the red nodes) for. They contain personal ideas so anything in there is fair game as original content. I used to simply navigate the links within the notes themselves, but then I realised that I could do this more quickly by using the graph view. I can see any note, all the links it makes and by extension all the links within ideas that I’ve externalised from my own brain.
I also use the graph view when I’m making these permanent notes — I can see the best points of entry into the web of knowledge for the note that I want to write. This allows me to save time and create higher-quality links at the same time. This benefits me when it comes to the usage of the graph that I mentioned above, in making content to share on the internet.
That’s how I use the graph view in Obsidian. If you want more pieces like this then the best way to show me so is to clap for the article. That way I know that it’s popular amongst my readers.
As always, thanks for reading!