The Obsidian journey, embracing customization

I’ve tried to use Obsidian for a couple years now. My main aim has been to use it to set up a nice Zettelkasten system, which I’ve always hoped to do after reading “How to Take Smart Notes” years ago. Frankly, I’ve always struggled to get into a good rhythm with it, even though it’s clearly something that will be very useful for the way I work (I’m a heavy notetaker).

Earlier this year, I read the fantastic book “Duly Noted” by Jorgé Arango, which re-energized my interest in really figuring out my note-taking system with Obsidian once and for all. It’s made me think more deeply about why it hasn’t worked out for me in the past and become more sensitive to the friction points in the workflow that could be preventing me from using it more often.

I’ve identified a few friction points on both the levels of the tool and my own mental model for note-taking. One breakthrough I’ve had recently is in the area of customization.

Initially, I’ve been reluctant to customize Obsidian and add a bunch of plugins like many do. The plugin ecosystem is arguably the best thing about Obsidian.

But I was reluctant about customization because I’m generally a fan of using vanilla tools out of the box. The more customization you do, the harder it is to migrate to new systems down the road, and the harder it is to use a tool across multiple systems at once. Previously, my primary note-taking system was Notion, and it’s a fairly opinionated tool that doesn’t invite or even necessitate a whole lot of customization.

I’ve now realized that applying this mentality to Obsidian is wrong. Because it’s based on the file system and doesn’t really have a strong opinion about how you create notes, the tool itself is too simple from the beginning to allow for an easy workflow. For example, with Notion, I never had to think about where images are saved when I add them to a document—it just becomes a part of the document. In Obsidian, however, I did have to make decisions about this, otherwise the default option caused my vault to become cluttered with attachments immediately.

I’ve found that this willingness to customize and break Obsidian out of its defaults is a really important step for actually making it a useful tool. With an open-ended tool like this, it’s more important to prioritize utility (through customization) first, rather than preserving the optionality that would come with using the out-of-the-box configuration.