Eric J Ma's Website

Amidst COVID-19, I decided to take a break from work. I was definitely in need of a bit of personal rejuvenation after hitting hard on the accelerator at work, mostly to get things wrapped up before our first baby girl was born. During this personal rejuvenation time, I stumbled upon Andy Matuschak's notes, which are famous amongst the "personal knowledge management" community.

At the same time, I also saw the rise of Roam Research and Obsidian, and I was looking with envious eyes at those who had early access to Roam. I was a bit turned off by the subscription and lock-in that characterized Roam and was much more attracted to the Freemium + "respect your data rights" model embraced by Obsidian, so I dipped my toes in. The result is this learning journey building my own "personal knowledge management" system from which I've never turned back.

Let me explain.

For a long time, I've known that the way that I think is in a "linked" fashion. I rarely entertain a thought on its own in isolation. Instead, I will jump and hop from one idea to another in my brain. Sometimes, I joke with others that my mind is effectively a random graph: nodes are ideas, and edges are relationships between them. The unfortunate thing is that I don't have the right tools for externalizing the relationships that I uncover. As a practicing data scientist, as I continuously learn and discover new model classes that may be useful in my projects, I also see connections between models, their components, and their applications.

My previous notetaking tool, Evernote, is better described as an archival tool. In there, I would dump and collect everything and anything that I thought might be of marginal value. After all, Evernote's mantra is to help us store everything and make it searchable to us. It's a great tool, and I still use it in that fashion. However, using it as a tool for developing and understanding ideas is a bit like treating a flea market as a museum. Yes, it's a collection of items, but a flea market has everything and anything in there, while a museum is intentionally curated. Intentional curation is the key to internalizing insights from the external knowledge we gain.

All of those points above brings us to the problem of tooling. Evernote is a tool for collection, not curation and linking. Tools that help us actively curate a concrete representation of an idea -- a note -- and help us link them together will also help us intentionally curate these ideas together. Obsidian gives us the necessary tooling to be such a curator.

How Obsidian Helps

There are at least three features of Obsidian that help with this.

Markdown files

Firstly, Obsidian treats individual notes, implemented as Markdown files, as the unit on which linking happens. When you want to create a wiki-style link to another page, you use a double square bracket ([[...]]) and start typing the name of the note that you want to link. A pop-up display will show the note titles, which can help you if you have a fuzzy or approximate notion of the idea you're trying to link. If you use "imperative tone" ideas to name your note files, then linking becomes even more natural.

Graph view

Secondly, Obsidian has a graph view. This graph view is nothing more than a node-link diagram, likely implemented using d3.js, with note titles overlaid. Yes, it is fascinating to explore our ideas' connected structure, but the more significant value proposition is quickly identifying every note file that exists as an unlinked singleton. Why? Because one of the goals of linked notetaking is to search for linkable ideas and then explicitly connect them. The visual graph view also helps me surf through concepts; each time I trace a path between the thoughts I've recorded down, I reinforce the link in my unreliable internal store.

Random notes

Thirdly, Obsidian has a "show me a random note" feature. This feature helps me ruminate through ideas. It's the digital equivalent of me jumping through concepts in my head, except now I have a reliable external store for ideas (Obsidian) rather than an unreliable internal store (my brain). Surfacing up random notes is an extremely excellent way of hopping through my knowledge graph to surface up ideas in a spaced repetition fashion, allowing my mind to uncover and create connections between ideas that I might not have made otherwise.

Plain text

Apart from those three key features, one other notable feature, pun intended, makes me trust Obsidian over other notetaking services. That feature is Obsidian's choice to rely on simple Markdown files as the unit on which linking happens. This choice stands in contrast to Evernote's expanded XML syntax, which, though open, is not plain enough to have a low barrier to parsing. The choice also stands in contrast to Roam's and Notion's choice to link individual blocks of text, which requires additional tech that, almost by definition, requires specialized data structures - again, being not low enough of a barrier. Effectively, with Obsidian, I own my data, stored using the lowest common denominator of computing: text files.

Tips for using Obsidian

I've now decided to change up my notetaking systems and go the "whole hog" with Obsidian. For the rest of this post, I'd like to share some of the tips that I picked up that made the system click for me.

Each Markdown file as a single unit of thought

The first tip I picked up was to treat each Markdown file as a coherent and atomic unit of thought. This tip is something I picked up directly from Andy Matuschak's notes, and I believe this is the most crucial tip to making a system like this work. In doing so, we are nudging ourselves to compose a coherent and atomic unit of thought, to which we can establish relationships to other similarly-constructed ideas. Writing them down takes effort, so this mode of notetaking not for the "collector" type; instead, it is for intentional curators.

Actively connect ideas

The second tip I picked up was to intentionally try to establish as many connections between ideas as possible. Andy Matuschak calls this "linking densely," and this action is essential: it is how we construct our knowledge graph! A way to make these links is to think of ideas as imperative statements that we make; inside the note, we elaborate on the concept with, say, supporting evidence. As an example, this paragraph would be given the title Notes should be linked densely. I would then link to it inside a list on an overview page or as part of textual prose.

Tend to the knowledge garden regularly

A third tip that I uncovered through experience is to treat the knowledge graph as a garden that requires regular tending. For me, tending implies:

1. Leveraging the random note feature to find old ideas buried beneath the more recent things I have been thinking about,
2. Browsing through Obsidian's graph view to locate singleton notes and trace paths through them, and
3. Ruminating over the notes at a later date using the random notes feature.

My notes made public

I've written a lot about how I've used Obsidian to help me organize my knowledge. However, you might be wondering, can I see an example? In line with the principle of working in the open, of course! I put my notes online, available for others to see, and so that I can reference them when I interact with others. In case you want to see the note(s) that backed this blog post, look around for my "blog drafts" on the index page, and follow the knowledge graph from there. :)