I find the idea of owning a personal knowledge graph incredibly intriguing, but I’ve had trouble getting started. To be frank, I’m not quite sure what to include. A lot of the information that I might feel like I would want to save is also readily available via Google and can be retrieved faster by Googling than by diving into my Obsidian notes. I’m focusing primarily on personal use-cases, so nothing for business or freelancing. What do you use Obsidian for? And how much do you use it? Tens of notes per month… Or hundreds? Or even thousands?
I started using Obsidian about a month ago. So far I’ve been treating it like a personal wiki. It took me a while to start really figuring out what to create, but now some of my primary subjects are technical notes (programming), ancestry, health, academic notes, etc.
I mainly feel prompted to create notes based on learned information. I might take an article found online with really interesting information, then convert it into my own words and save that as a note. The more concise I can make the note, the better. It’s preferable to try and get to the main point of a subject in a few sentences or less. Doing it this way makes future me spend less time retrieving the information I need.
One shortcut that has helped me a lot is CTRL + O. It will open a promp to find a note, or create one if that doesn’t exist. It’s important to give your notes basic tags as well for what topics they pertain to do that you can make searching easier.
As for how much I use it, currently maybe a couple times a day, but I anticipate my usage growing as my note collection becomes larger.
When you capture what you’ve learned from articles, how do you keep the information accessible in the future? My concern is that the cardinality of note topics is so high it will be difficult to find myself in a situation where I recall a note when I need it… But maybe I just need to give it a shot myself to see if it works.
I used to have this concern myself, but I think there’s nothing to worry about if you label notes properly, giving them full YAML, source links, tags, etc. Searching is an extremely powerful tool, but it’s only as powerful as the information you provide it.
Additionally, you could provide basic structure to your system if you desire. I personally prefer minimal structure, letting groups of notes emerge, which can later become MOCs (Maps of Content). These are the hubs where all my notes can connect together, which makes finding them later even more simple.
A lot of my initial inspiration for how I set up my Obsidian workflow came from Aidan Helfant. He has some great resources for how to get started and details about his own processes.
One more resource that I only recently learned about was Obsidian Publish. These are public Obsidian notes from people that have decided to publish them publicly online. This is Aidan’s for example. It might help you figure out what kind of setup you’d like to try.
Ultimately everyone creates a system based on personal preference and experimentation so don’t be afraid to try new things :)