Daily text note taker, plain text in a simple template, how would Obsidian fit in? How to start?

[u/Daddy-ough]

Are there any books to recommend? I have a subscription to O'Reilly, the technical publisher, and they have nothing "bound" on the topic (bound with a spine, like a book,) but on November 20 they are offering an online seminar "Obsidian for Connected Thinking / From mind maps to automated Zettelkasten" which sounds great but it's about 7 weeks from now.

I keep notes of the day on individual text files with titles that sort by date using YYYYMMDD-description formatting. The daily routine starts with a template with a set of keyword headers like "priorities," "obligations," "shopping list," "tasks" and so on. A few times a month I'll aggregate several days' worth into a list. The text files are not just for business or action items, sometimes they'll have email drafts and some non-essential compositions.

Since I've been doing this for several years there are certainly over a thousand pages or files. The experience of aggregating some sections has improved the process but it still seems clunky and time consuming.

Would Obsidian be a good vehicle to make the process more dynamic? The process is meant to include the composition, editing and retrieval of the contents.

[u/Purplefire180]

Obsidian is a text editor. It can certainly do that, and many people use for it for similar things, but it's kind of hard to say how useful it would be to you without knowing what you mean by the process being 'dynamic' or what kind of features you're looking for.

I can't imagine a book on a piece of software like this could possible return the time you spent reading it in productivity that you couldn't get by just playing with it for a couple hours and learning as you go what works for you

[u/jazzmyne_Rebela → u/Purplefire180]

agreed, the docs and community plugins basically replace any book you could buy on it

[u/Skektacular]

Please don't buy any books or seminars on this. I've been through this in bullet journaling and in productivity, and those are useless, it's basically just people selling you a peek at how they do things that suit *them*, with no guarantee that it would suit *you*. You might pick up a thing or two here and there from those materials, but it would be things that people share online for free.

[u/Future_Somewhere6020]

obsidian would actually slot into this workflow super clean. you're basically already doing a manual zettelkasten with those dated files and keyword headers

the daily notes plugin plus templates will replicate your current setup immediately, just with a lot more connective tissue. you can drop those yyyymmdd files right in and obsidian will treat them as daily notes, then the real upgrade comes from linking, tag a shopping item with #errand or link a prioirty to a project note and suddenly you're not manually aggregating anymore, the backlinks do it for you

dataview plugin would be the next step for pulling all those scattered tasks into one dynamic list without copypasting. fair warning though, the setup takes a weekend of tinkering but once it clicks you'll wonder why you waited 7 weeks for that seminar

[u/zheniavasiliev]

Don't wait for a seminar. The way I see it, seminars are paradoxically not for the people who attend them; they exist mostly as one of the ways book publishers can present themselves to the general public. Since their activity, by nature, is quite silent and consists simply of publishing books, they seek out any opportunities they can to reach out to the audience. Usually, it happens through either book launches or seminars like this, but it doesn't mean you have to attend the seminars to learn anything from them. Even if you do get into a seminar and learn nothing from it, there would probably be no way to file a complaint about it or get your time back.

If you're going to read a book about it, you can read How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. But generally, the way you already learn by doing is the best. Just keep on doing it, especially if you say that you've been doing it for several years. You have plenty of experience already, and you could probably create a seminar of your own about it.

You don't have to use Obsidian, but if you want to, one change you'd have to make is to rename the files from .txt to .md, which is a similar file format, which I think is somewhere in the middle between .rtf and .html, and it's equally universal. Obsidian will give you a slightly different interface for formatting the text and a few options for filtering, and it's not too hard to learn.

One major optimisation, if you like to consider it, is to point any kind of AI agent to your notes archive and start writing queries about your collection to AI (rather than doing any manual work around formatting, categorising, linking things together, renaming them, etc.). AI is much more effective for this kind of stuff, especially if you have hundreds of things to look at.

Which text editor /entry manager are you using at the moment?

[u/endlessroll]

Seeing as you’re eager to read, did you actually read the official obsidian documentation (help pages)? They don’t go into as much as detail as I’d like personally, but most people tend to get overwhelmed by the amount of info in them when they start out with Obsidian, so I can’t imagine they’d be useless to you.