In my post I Thought I Loved Obsidian, I listed my problems with Obsidian. Too complex for me, I thought at the time. I need something simple. Files in folders or a simple program. That’s what I thought back then.

The files-in-folders approach wasn’t very successful. Synchronization was a huge problem, especially with my smartphone. It was a struggle on Android, but virtually impossible on the iPhone. That’s why I reinstalled UpNote. Fast, simple, reliable. It has the essential features: formatting, folders and subfolders, and synchronization (unfortunately unencrypted via the Google Cloud). But somehow, the tool didn’t motivate me at all. So, my documentation of personal, and sometimes professional, matters just fizzled out.

Until we started a series in our team: Self-Organization. So far, two colleagues have presented how they organize their tasks and notes. One relies heavily on pen, paper, and the Outlook calendar. The second uses Microsoft ToDo and UpNote. During the last session, a new colleague mentioned Obsidian. And a memory sparked within me.

A few days later, I installed Obsidian again, this time with the plan to use it for both personal and professional purposes. Since I didn’t want to pay for the official sync service, I wanted to reactivate my old setup with the LiveSync plugin. Stupidly, I had completely removed it from the server during a cleanup. After some difficulties, CouchDB is running again, and I’ve created two databases: personal and professional. Both are end-to-end encrypted to satisfy data privacy requirements.

And what can I say? I’m back to diligently taking notes and building a knowledge base. The graph view is extremely motivating. You can see your knowledge grow and, at the same time, it points out gaps in your documentation. Great for me as a reminder. And the notes look beautiful, too. Linter ensures that all my notes shine with the same consistent format. Worrying less about formatting lets me focus on what’s essential: the notes themselves.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Obsidian to everyone. Give it a try, maybe test out the official sync service. Or set up your own synchronization. I’ll explain how to do that in a separate post.