Obsidian is first and foremost a Markdown editor with first-class support for internal links between notes. But just because it wasn’t built as a to-do app, doesn’t mean it can’t become one. Community plugins and external tools have made Obsidian work just as well for me as any task management app I’ve used in the past. As an added bonus, because I’m keeping notes about my day and what I’m reading, it’s easy for me to keep tasks in the context of the thoughts that spawned them.
This is the first part of an in-progress series on the Obsidian knowledge base. You can find all the articles with the obsidian tag.
I’m not an organized person by nature. I tend to try to just commit important things to memory rather than write them down in any systematized way, which means I end up forgetting things about 20-30% of the time, and just hoping I remembered the most important things in some kind of implicit neural priority queue. I’ve tried a bunch of different task management and notetaking systems before, but nothing really stuck. At the end of the day it’s because I always struggled to organize my thoughts in a single hierarchy. Even a regular paper notebook is organized implicitly in a timeline, with older notes in the front and newer notes in the back. I always spend way more time thinking about where my note should fit in the hierarchy than I do actually capturing my thoughts.