I’ve been experimenting with different forms of note-taking for quite some time now. From simple .txt files on my desktop to OneNote and (god forbid) pen & paper. But nothing really clicked with me. OneNote was too sluggish, Notion is to restrictive and paper is, well, paper. Everything seemed lost but one fateful day when I was browsing the internet looking for inspiration for my next D&D session I stumbled across this article by Nicole van der Hoeven: [https://nicolevanderhoeven.com/blog/20210809-dnd-obsidian-player/](How I use Obsidian for D&D - Player’s Edition).

After some more duck-duck-go-ing (really doesn’t work as well as googling, does it…) around I found out that I did in fact live under a rock. Apparently everyone and their grandma already used the excellent, albeit closed source tool Obsidian to write plain text notes in markdown format. I was astonished by how easy to use and powerful the tool was and, naturally I jumped onto the bandwagon.

So safe to say the next few days were spent with a hyperfocus-binge-session of diving head first into the abyss that is ‘self optimization through note taking’ and the weird subculture that surrounds this pocket of the internet.

After emerging on the other end I was a changed man. Obsidian had become my go to tool for everything. Just like always when I find a new toy to play with, when I find a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I started the tedious process of moving everything I do to Obsidian. Calendars, contacts, journal, activity-tracking and, of course, notes.

After a not so long time in productivity-optimization-heaven where I thought I was super duper productive came the inevitable conclusion that I was not in fact productive in doing anything BESIDES optimizing my Obsidian templates all day.

So I admitted defeat and got back to using a REAL calendar and contacts and all that stuff. But Obsidian did stick around as my go to app to write notes in. I still did not find “my way” of actually writing notes however. So my notes aren’t as structured as I would like them to be.

I’ll keep trying different methods however. Maybe something clicks like Obsidian itself did.

Thanks for reading 💎