Created: 2021-12-21 20:42

Outline of a presentation I gave about note-taking and Obsidian on an internal Unconference at Catawiki.

  1. Note-taking & digital gardens
  2. The Zettelkazten method
  3. Obsidian
    1. Plugins
    2. How I use Obsidian at work
    3. The community
    4. Obsidian for work
  4. Resources

Note-taking & digital gardens

Interests

  • How people learn and “cultivate” knowledge, specially outside of formal education.
  • Keep a sort of weekly journal
    • Reviewing it every now and then (yearly)
    • Lazy to write but rewarding to review xD
  • Informal knowledge sharing (of my learning)

The Zettelkazten method

Reference: Taking Smart Notes

Zettelkasten => “slip box” in German

Method => Single-idea notes, linked by topic & indexes

Niklas Luhmann method personal knowledge management

  • Extremely prolific with no formal education on his field
  • Published ~70 books and ~400 papers/scholar articles

One cannot think without writing

Obsidian

A second brain, for you, forever.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Plugins

Plugins are the killer feature of Obsidian.

WARNING: the rabbit hole goes deep

Core plugins

  • File explorer
  • Search
  • Graph view
  • Templates
  • Sync
  • Publish

Community plugins

  • Calendar
  • Periodic notes
  • Dataview
  • Advanced tables
  • Vimrc support
  • Excalidraw

Community

Obsidian for work

Notes for all the things !!! \o/

  • Weekly journal
  • Meeting notes
    • Take your own meetings notes as a habit
    • Use your brain for thinking not for remembering
  • Problem solving notes
  • Brag document A.K.A internal resume
  • Your own knowledge base (contribute upstream documentation when it makes sense)

Resources