0:00 I've been using Obsidian all day, every day for over five years now, and I've learned a lot of things the hard way. If I could go back in time, there are 10 things I would tell my younger self that would have saved me countless hours of frustration and helped me get more out of my notes and ideas in my PKM system a lot sooner. Some of these are about Obsidian specifically, but a lot of them are about personal knowledge management in general and the mindset you need to have in order to unlock the creative potential of the notes inside your PPM system, regardless of the app that you use. If you're struggling with Obsidian setup, feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities, or wondering if you're actually using it the right way, then you're in the right place. Because today, I'm going to save you years of trial and error and share the 10 most
0:45 important lessons that I've learned and that I believe have the power to completely transform your PKM system. All right, so here we go. First tip is to develop your workflows one at a time. I have to be honest, the first time that I tried Obsidian, I opened the app, instantly felt overwhelmed, and I immediately decided it wasn't for me. I uninstalled the app entirely. And that happened not once, but actually twice. It just seemed way too complicated for me to figure out, but that was largely because I honestly wasn't quite sure how I wanted to use it. It was just the shiny new app that everyone was talking about. And it wasn't until I gave it another shot with a specific workflow that I wanted to build. That's the key. That's when it actually stuck for me. Now, the workflow I wanted to build when I was first starting in Obsidian was a
1:31 cross reference library for all my sermon sketch notes. I take these sketch notes of all the messages I hear. And then I knew that if I could build a system that let me see which messages mentioned which verses, I would be able to use that in my own personal study. Now, the specifics here for this video aren't important, but this one thing is. So, make sure you catch this. Building a single useful workflow is what helped me go from this is way too complicated to this is amazing. Building a single workflow at the beginning of my Obsidian journey made all the difference in the world for me. It's really important that you get clear on a specific way that Obsidian can help you in the beginning. You need to know how the time that you spend building something is actually going to help your current productivity
2:17 and creativity workflows. and you'll likely discover ways to layer things on top of that foundation once you've built it. But if you try to do too much at once, you're going to feel overwhelmed, especially if you're just getting started. The second tip is to not split your vault unless you absolutely need to. People often ask me if I split my notes into separate vaults based on the topics because I use Obsidian for so many things. So, for example, I mentioned my cross reference library previously, which adds tens of thousands of notes to my vault, but I also have a collection of notes from all the books that I read for the Bookworm podcast. And on the surface, these two things don't look like they're related. So, I get asked all the time if I separate those two inside of Obsidian. And my answer is an emphatic no. Personally, I
3:05 believe there's a ton of inspiration to be gleaned by having things all in one vault where I can make connections across these different domains. That's actually how my own creative journey got started. I started reading a lot of productivity books around the same time that I was asked to teach a Bible college class on personal management. And I began to see overlap between the books I was reading and the syllabus that I was using to prepare for the class. And I saw how the principles I was studying were being applied in the productivity books I was reading just in a different context. And as a result, I started to understand things better because I could see them from multiple perspectives. It's kind of hard to explain, but I believe that connecting those dots across those multiple domains, that's actually what led to a deeper level of understanding and that's what enabled me to make meaningful
3:51 lifestyle changes because I had a stronger why behind the projects that I was committing to. Some of my greatest personal insights and revelations have come from connecting things that didn't appear to be related at all. Unfortunately, you lose the ability to do that to some degree, especially with link notes if you decide to split into multiple vaults. So, while there are certain instances where a separate vault can be useful, like if your vault gets so big that it's slowing down your ability to use the app, I generally recommend keeping everything in one vault, which allows you to make those connections between your notes and ideas in ways that you couldn't otherwise. and ultimately enhances the usefulness of Obsidian as a tool for thought. The third tip is to embrace the idea of atomic notes. Before I switched to Obsidian, I was using Rome research,
4:36 which basically doesn't have individual notes. There's just these nested bullets and you can open up any bullet as its own note. TANA is very similar. And there are advantages to this approach for sure, like being able to keep drilling down as far as you want to go without any thought to where one file stops and another one starts. But Obsidian doesn't work this way. And at first, it was a real struggle for me because I didn't want to have to make individual files for each and every Bible verse I wanted to link in my cross reference library that I mentioned earlier. But after a bunch of back and forth on the Obsidian forum, it just seemed like linking to bullets was just not going to be possible. That's actually changed a little bit over the years, especially with the assistance of the Strange New Worlds plugin by TFT Hacker. And honestly, if that plugin had
5:22 been around at the beginning, I might have just used it instead of wrestling with the limitations of having those individual notes. But that's actually the strength of Obsidian I've discovered, too, in a way because ultimately Obsidian just sits on top of a folder full of Markdown files. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, I'd still have all my notes and I could open them in pretty much any markdown based text editor. True, a few things would be broken that rely on community plugins, but it's all plain text and all my text would still be readable. So eventually I came to the point that I was just going to accept that each note was its own thing. And that meant that I would need to create individual notes for all of those verses that I wanted to link. Now, fortunately, I had a friend who wrote a script for me that took the public
6:08 domain file for the King James version of the Bible and broke it into those individual notes. Now, I discovered that breaking notes down into those smallest component pieces was actually perfect for linking things together. So, I started calling these atomic notes, which was inspired by the book Atomic Habits, where author James Clear defines atomic two specific ways, and I like both of these. First, as an extremely small amount of a thing, the irreducible unit of a larger system, and two, the source of immense energy or power. So when we apply that to personal knowledge management or PKM, I believe the more you break your notes and ideas down into smaller component pieces, the more you will discover new and interesting connections between them that you hadn't
6:53 seen before. It's kind of like having a bunch of little mental Lego bricks to work with. And the smaller those pieces are, the more flexibility you have in making something new out of them. The next tip is to use a separate capture tool. Obsidian is great at a lot of things, but quick capture is not one of them. And honestly, at this point, even if it was, I don't think I'd recommend capturing things directly into Obsidian because I found personally that in order to get maximum value out of your notes and ideas, I need to carefully curate what I keep in Obsidian. And one of the best ways to keep a high signal to noise ratio in your vault is simply to use a separate capture tool to insert some space. You see, I believe that you
7:38 really don't know what an idea is when you have it. It all seems important. It all seems life-changing in the moment. But when you insert some time between capturing things so you don't forget them and curating them into your PKM system, you can see much more clearly what you really have to work with. Now, personally, I use drafts to capture things, though funnel is also very good. And whisper memos on the Apple Watch is also a great option. All of these are only available on Apple devices, though, and I like it because I can capture things on my phone as well as via dictation when I'm out for a run. It's kind of crazy to me how often I get good ideas when I don't have my phone accessible or on me. But the important thing here is simply to have a separate tool where you capture things and then you periodically bring those things over into your Obsidian Vault, but you only bring over the best of the best. In
8:24 other words, you get more out of your notes and ideas if you carefully curate the things that you capture and bring into your Obsidian vault. In fact, I estimate that only about 10% of what I capture actually ends up in Obsidian, which means that my Obsidian vault only has the best of the best stuff in it. And ultimately, that makes it easier to get value from my notes and ideas. Now, if you want to dive deeper into this, I have a separate video here where I walk through my whole creativity flywheel framework. It explains every part of the creative process for me. So, check out that video if you want a better understanding of how capturing to a separate inbox can actually help you be more creative. The next tip is to keep what resonates, but not what might be important. We're sort of conditioned to just collect and complete tasks without
9:10 much thought as to why we're doing them or where they came from. And this is the problem I have with the getting things done or GTD framework. It's hard for me to tell what I should be focusing on in the moment. The question of is this important can become hard to answer. Those lines become blurred, especially when the urgency of others requests masquerades often as false importance. And that's one of the big reasons that I created the PKM stack, which is a framework that helps me create the motivation to follow through on what's really important. And it gives me the clarity to cut the things that aren't. I've got another video here which dives deeper into that framework as well. But the important thing for right now is to recognize that when we work backwards from our vision and values, we can flip the script on the default life and live a life of intention and meaning instead. And when we do this, pretty much
9:57 everything in our relationship with the information we manage in our PKM system changes. For example, we no longer ask, "Is this important?" Because that question just feeds the FOMO and we squirrel things away in our digital filing cabinets in case we might need to find those things again later. But if we focus on what resonates, we ask a different question. Is this useful? So in other words, does this thing align with my vision and values and will it be useful in helping me create the kind of life that I want to live? The best way I can sum this up is to ask this question a little bit differently and that is does this resonate? Now I grew up playing the violin. So the idea of resonance really clicks for me. When something resonates, it causes a reverberation in your soul. It feels a
10:43 little bit like an echo and it acts as a cue that there's probably something here. The advice that I would give me from 5 years ago would be this. Don't capture the things that might be important. Capture only the things that resonate. Next tip is to consider the role of your devices. Even though Obsidian provides pretty much feature parity between desktop and mobile, I wouldn't recommend you try to use it the same way everywhere on every device. There are some things that certain devices are better suited for. There are certain things with Obsidian that are better on a big monitor and a full keyboard, and there are some things that are better suited for, well, whatever the phone is better at. Seriously though, what the phone is good at is quick capture. And unfortunately, Obsidian really isn't, which is one of
11:29 the big reasons I decided long ago to use a separate capture tool, as I mentioned earlier. But the key here is to recognize what mode you're going to be in when you're using your devices and then optimizing your workflows to support that. For example, I use Obsidian on both my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. However, the computer is where I do 95% of my work in Obsidian because the form factor is better suited for what I need to do. For me, the computer is where I do all of my actual work. And when I'm using Obsidian on my mobile device, I'm mostly just using it for daily journaling at the end of the day. Because I'm only using Obsidian on mobile for journaling and occasionally referencing a note. I can optimize my Obsidian setup for this. I call these device modes, and they're extremely
12:14 helpful when you want to be more intentional about the way that you use your tech. By having these different device modes, it means that when I'm using Obsidian on my phone, one, I don't need to sync my entire vault, and two, I don't need the majority of the plugins that I have installed on my computer. So, by pairing things down on my mobile device, it drastically improves the experience, and it helps funnel me down intentional paths whenever I use my mobile device because I'm clear on what I want to use it for. And this means I'm much less likely to spend time unintentionally scrolling endless feeds or dipping my toes into the infinity pools. The next tip is don't try to make Obsidian do too much. Obsidian can do anything. That's kind of the problem. That doesn't mean it should do everything though. In fact, everything
13:01 apps tend to be pretty bad at just about everything that they try to do is it's a very common path that people tend to follow when they start using Obsidian. I've followed this path and I've seen hundreds of other people follow this path as well. The first step in the journey is that you feel it's just too complicated. This happened to me when I first started using Obsidian. As I mentioned earlier, I actually quit and deleted the app the first time I tried it. If you stick with it, you watch a few YouTube videos, maybe you figure a few things out, you start to eventually feel like you're getting the hang of it. So, from there, you start to explore the edges a little bit, and it's common to consider, is there a way to do this crazy workflow? always wanted to, but I couldn't figure out a way to build it anywhere else. And thanks to all the community plugins that are available, you'll probably find that yes, you can build that dream workflow, which is
13:46 really exciting. But if you take it too far, then you try to use Obsidian for everything. You end up cramming things into Obsidian that actually add more friction than they remove because Obsidian just isn't the right app for the job. you optimize for the wrong things, things become hard again, and you're back at the place where it just feels too complicated. So, to help overcome this tendency to make Obsidian do everything, I use a framework I mentioned earlier. It's called the PKM stack. The TLDDR here is that understanding how information flows into and out of your PKM system is vital if you want to get more out of your notes and ideas. But this goes way beyond obsidian. You need to get clear on what jobs there are to be done in your PKM system and what roles you're hiring each
14:32 app to do. Only then can you pick the right tool for the job. So, for example, I do all of my task management inside of Obsidian. I've got a YouTube video here on how I set it all up, but that's because it's easier for me to have everything together in Obsidian for the type of work that I do there. I use my task dashboard to give me recommendations. I select the tasks I'm going to work on and then I block time for those tasks in my fancy notebook and work off of that the rest of the day. I don't need to be reminded to attend meetings very often and this workflow frees me up to do my best creative work. But if your work is different and if you rely on something like location-based reminders to alert you of what to do when, my system is absolutely terrible for you and that's perfectly fine. Your
15:18 system should be personal. It should be optimized for the things that are important to you. But here's the key. You need to understand how your systems work before you can effectively try to optimize them. As Peter Ducker once said famously, "Nothing is so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." The next tip is to consider your sources. I was at the Craft and Commerce Conference a few years ago and I heard creator Sahil Bloom say something very profound. This was before he wrote his excellent book, The Five Types of Wealth. He shared that everything you create is downstream from something that you consume. As a creator, that means it's important for me to curate the sources of information that I feed on. But even if you aren't a YouTuber, podcaster, or author, I
16:05 believe it's important to understand that the quality and the quantity of the ideas that you have are directly correlated to the quality of the information that you consume. The higher the quality, the more useful that information is. I like to think of information as food for your brain. Unfortunately, if you've never considered or curated your information sources, you're probably consuming the equivalent of information junk food a lot of the time. The really useful stuff tends not to just find its way to us. We have to go looking for it. That's one of the reasons I love YouTube, by the way. I can make the best quality content that I can, and YouTube is incentivized to help it get in front of the people who are looking for it. Now, not every video I make ends up being amazing, but I do my best to make something that is both useful and helpful every single time. In
16:52 other words, something I wish I had seen when I was starting on my own PKM journey. Now, if you want to apply a filter to the information that you consume, I have three questions that I use for my own information sources like podcasts, newsletters, YouTube videos, etc. that I think can really help you as well. Now, full credit for these questions goes to the late Jim Ran who shared them long before the internet was a thing. But that actually makes them even more important in my opinion, not less. So, here they are. First, who am I allowing to speak into my life? Every YouTube video I watch, every podcast I listen to, every newsletter I read is someone that I've opened the door to. So, I want to make sure that I'm letting in the good stuff and keeping out the bad. There's too much information out there to keep up with it all anyways, so
17:39 I might as well just focus on the good stuff. Second, what effect is that having on me? Nothing is neutral. After I get done consuming something, I pay attention to how I feel. Am I glad that I invested the hour and a half to listen to that podcast? Or did the discussion make me more nervous and anxious? And then the third question is, is that okay? because if it's not, I have the power and the ability to just unsubscribe to those voices that really aren't helping me live a life of intention and meaning that is in alignment with my vision and values. So, personally, I believe that simply considering these questions regularly is a net positive that makes me more likely to focus on the good stuff. While you don't necessarily need to learn something new from every piece of
18:25 information you consume, sometimes it is perfectly fine to consume something just because you enjoy it. Too much junk food will leave you feeling overwhelmed and unproductive. I guarantee it. You are what you eat. So, make sure you find a healthy balance between what's fun and what's functional. The next tip is to make your PKM system useful, not perfect. It's easy to look at what others have done and feel imposter syndrome. This is especially true about your own PKM system. The truth, PKM is messy, and that's okay. So, full disclosure, my personal vault is often a complete mess. When you watch my YouTube videos, I clean things up because if I showed you everything that was in there, it would be really hard to understand what's actually going on. But the only way to keep your Obsidian Vault
19:11 perfectly clean is to never use it. A while back, Bob Doto did a session for the library, which is my paid membership community, and he described Zettoen in his workshop as a system of anarchy for leveraging chaos. I love that definition and the truth is that it applies to more than just PKM. I've interviewed some of the biggest names in productivity for the focus podcast that I do with David Sparks. The truth is that most people, even the productivity experts, have messy systems that still manage to help them get the important stuff done. It's not perfect, but it's functional. So, several years ago, I used to be scared about people finding out that I struggled with this stuff, just like everybody else. Now, I like to think of it like we're fellow travelers on this
19:57 journey together. That's actually the tagline for the Focus podcast. I don't profess to know it all. I don't think I have it all figured out, but I have tried a bunch of things. I've learned a bunch of things, and I'm willing to share what I've learned. So, this doesn't mean that we should just keep things a complete mess, but it does mean that we don't have to stress out when things aren't exactly the way that we want them. We need to embrace the chaos. Things don't have to be perfect in order for them to be useful. And when it comes to making sense of your notes and ideas, that process is often pretty messy, and that's okay. The final tip is to keep creating. One of the most common mistakes people make with PKM, in my opinion, is that they collect things, but they don't create anything new out
20:44 of them. I like to think of the notes and ideas that I collect into my PKM system as individual mental Lego blocks. As I mentioned earlier, now the pieces may not look all that unique or special individually, but when you combine them together, you can end up creating something completely new and original. So, I'm always on the lookout for good pieces so that I can build something new with them. But the pieces themselves aren't entirely original, which can sometimes lead to this belief that we're not really creating something new. And I want to dispel that right here, right now. You are just as creative for recombining the component pieces as the person who seems like they just got this divine revelation, just dropped something miraculous into the world. The truth is that everything's a remix. And
21:31 the trick is to have the good pieces to work with. Once you have the pieces though, then it's up to you to make something out of them. Which is why I believe a good PKM system needs to have both an input and an output. Without the output, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by everything that you've collected. In fact, without an output, the more information that you collect, the more overwhelmed you tend to feel. And that's because you're looking for something that's going to help solve the problem that we're facing. And we think it's a lack of knowledge that's keeping us from doing the things we need to do. For most of us, it's not a knowledge problem. It's a lack of action that keeps us from getting more out of our notes and ideas. That's why I believe that one, everyone is creative in their own way, and two,
22:16 you need to create something new out of the pieces that you collect. If you don't, you're missing out because the act of creating something new from the component pieces that you've collected is a critical part of the sensemaking process. There's a saying that goes, "Thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips." And I would add to that, and also clicky keyboards. Writing is a great way to distill the information that you've consumed. The quickest way to gain clarity for me is to create a new note and just start typing. The act of codifying my thoughts helps me synthesize my own thinking on a topic. And it also makes it easier to capture things that are useful. Hence that flywheel that I mentioned earlier by opening up loops in my mind and peing
23:02 my curiosity. The act of writing is how you gain clarity on something. It doesn't have to be published. It doesn't have to be a blog post, a newsletter, YouTube video like this one. It could just be an opinion note where you codify your thoughts on a topic, but you do need to have an output if you want to get more out of the notes and ideas that are in your PKM system. So, there you have it. 10 tips that I learned the hard way from using Obsidian every day for the past 5 years. And hopefully these can help save you from making some of the same mistakes on your own Obsidian journey. And if you made it this far in the video, I want to say thank you. I know this video is a bit longer than normal, but I tried to keep it as tight as possible while still giving you some of my best advice for avoiding the common PKM pitfalls that myself and so
23:49 many others have fallen into. Now, if you could use a little more help on your own Obsidian journey, you should check out my free practical PKM Obsidian starter vault. It includes a bunch of Obsidian tips and resources to help you organize, create, and optimize your notes like a pro. You can download it for free right now by going to vault.practicalpkm.com.
