Obsidian is my current personal knowledge management tool of choice. It took me a little tweaking to get it set up in the way that I want, but it offers the most flexibility and customization of any tool that I've used, and I love that all of my files live on my computer. ## Organization - I'm still fine tuning how I plan on using and organizing my Obsidian directory. For now, I'm really building on this idea of the folders structures. My daily notes go into a daily folder, my notes on people go into a people folder, and I don't have any other folders in place yet, but I can see myself building those up. I also do like the idea of tags, and I may end up switching towards more of a flat structure and really taking advantage of tags, but I found tags to be a little frustrating to use in Reflect, and so I'm shying away from them for now. It's very possible that I'll have a bit of a hybrid system in the end. ## Features - I am so happy with the amount of access that I have to my raw notes when I use Obsidian. Being able to open my folder in Visual Studio Code or any other editor is incredible. Being able to do find and replace on bulk files is amazing. Having the option to use custom search tools or do other bulk modifications to my files is something I am really excited about. - I'm still playing around with it, but I do really like the idea of Obsidian's paid publishing features. Having a subset of my notes that is public is a really appealing idea to me, and I can see this being a little bit of an in-between place where I can put raw thoughts that don't have a huge amount of editing to them, but aren't fully formed blog posts. This seems like a pretty cool in-between place, and I'm excited to see if that ends up being - I'm definitely planning on creating my own plugins. This is one of the big appeals of Obsidian to me, is I can build something that is much closer to my ideal knowledge management tool. I want my knowledge management tool to be more of a central place where everything that's happened to me in a day lives. So ideally it has voice memos, it has handwritten notes, it has written notes, video journals, it has the links that I was interested in that day, it has photos that I took that day. I can track my behavior, my mood, the people that I've talked to that day. I want it to be a central place for all of these things, and I don't think I'm necessarily going to store all those things in markdown format, but being able to have a central place to look them up through plugins is really exciting to me. - I'm looking forward to having total customization over how I take my notes, and how I view them. Already I've been really happy with little things, like just how much control I have over how bookmarks are stored. That was a big pain point for me with Reflect. They have a fantastic bookmark manager and clipping manager, but it does things in one way, and if you don't like it, you're out of luck. - I love the idea of properties for notes. I already do this with my blog posts and it's such a powerful concept, especially when you start putting into templates and you have common properties for, let's say, people, for example. I think this is killer. ## Plugins - I'm still getting started on my journey using Obsidian, so I don't have too many plugins right now, but I think this is going to change very quickly. - Web Clippings - I use the excellent [Obsidian Web](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/obsidian-web/edoacekkjanmingkbkgjndndibhkegad) chrome extension and its sister plugin, the [Local REST API](obsidian://show-plugin?id=obsidian-local-rest-api). - This plugin gives you so much control over how bookmarks and clip-links are handled. You can create new files with them, you can add them to your daily note, you can add them to your currently active note, and this is done thanks to the benefits of the local REST API which gives you a huge amount of control for remotely adding things to Obsidian which is incredibly powerful. - Voice Dictation - This isn't a plugin per se, but I use the amazing Super Whisper app on Mac to dictate up paragraphs that are automatically inserted into Obsidian. - I use a lightly customized version of the Whisper plugin for mobile. - Handwriting support - This is probably my biggest missing feature outside of the core functionality that I just don't see happening in Reflect anytime soon. I do a ton of handwritten notes using a whole bunch of different tools actually. I have some in Samsung Notes on my Z Fold 3. I have a ton written in the Apple Notes app. Increasingly I'm using Notability on the iPad as well. I also have a bunch of old notes from handwritten journals. I would probably use a ton of more handwritten journals if that was a good way to get that data into digital format. I haven't played around with this at all, but this is one of the first things I want to really tackle and experiment with to find a good solution. - Search - I haven't played around with search all that much. The default search seems pretty good, but I'm excited to try custom search plugins. - AI insights - Also something I haven't played around with yet, but could be incredibly powerful. ## Voice Recording & Transcription - When I'm on my computer, I use Superwhisper. It's really powerful and fast. - It took me a while to find my dream voice recording solution on mobile. Obsidian has built in voice recording, but I find it a little finicky. - In the end, I settled on the Whisper plugin for Obsidian. There's a lot that I love about it. - It works on iPhone, Android, and iPad, and it's built directly into Obsidian. - It can handle anything from a 5 second voice clip to a 20 minute long transcription. I don't feel pressured to record everything into one file, to stop recording when I reach a pause or follow between a thought. - I can use my voice to dictate bullet points in whatever note I'm currently in, rather than have them stored as a separate file. - Here's how I've configured the Whisper plugin. - I've configured it to insert the transcriptions directly on my cursor, which makes it really easy for me to dictate individual bullet points. - On my desktop, I use the built-in shortcut key to quickly start and stop transcriptions - On mobile, I've configured the mobile quick action bar to add a new shortcut command. This allows me to start and stop transcriptions with one press, which is exactly the workflow I was looking for.