I've always struggled with note-taking applications and productivity apps, which has led me to some interesting solutions for my daily life planning. From messaging myself on services like Facebook Messenger to leaving things out of place so I'd question why they were there and then remember what I had to do that day, I've tried them all. I have a pretty efficient system these days for keeping on top of things, but it's not exactly reliable, and my notes while I'm working can be strewn about the place.

I've tried to use Obsidian before, but for whatever reason, it simply didn't click. Recently, a friend of mine showed me it and the notes that he used for work, and it made sense to me. Since that moment a month ago, I've been using Obsidian daily to help me track tasks, plan my days, and aid me in my work. Now I can't live without it, and I'm honestly disappointed that I didn't just... get it sooner.

Obsidian has made managing my work significantly easier

For someone who struggles with organization, it really helps

First, a little bit about me: I have ADHD, and suffered for years with it as a result of going undiagnosed. I always struggled with organization, and to be honest, it's a miracle I passed university overall. Assignments were tough to keep on top of, I'd be incredibly forgetful, and even when faced with an assignment it felt like I was bashing my head against a wall to get it done.

Since then, I've been diagnosed, I have better coping mechanisms, and I manage to keep on top of things a lot better. I still struggle with dispersed notes, but I have systems that I've built up myself over the years to keep myself in a kind of organized-chaos stasis. I figured now was the time to try and work with something significantly more centralized, and as a result of our ongoing coverage of Obsidian here at XDA (shoutout to our very own Parth Shah specifically, who has consistently put out banger after banger), alongside a friend of mine who showed me how he organizes his notes, I settled on Obsidian as the tool of choice I would try get to grips with.

As it turns out, it really wasn't too difficult. While it forced me to get comfortable with some semblance of organization, I was surprised at how simple it was. There are different ways to store notes depending on what you plan to do with the data in them. If you want to just take down information and call it a day, you don't need to think about this too hard, but if you want to retrieve data for processing or other uses, you'll want to find a system that works for you. There are lots of these systems out there that you can find online, but what works for one person might not necessarily be the best for you.

The same goes for the plugins that you install. You might not need a lot of plugins, but again, that depends what you plan to use Obsidian for. I installed the Advanced Tables plugin to make it easier to create tables, but you could need a different plugin instead. From there, I enabled the Daily Notes core plugin, so that I can make new notes every day. By default, these will just be named after the current date in ISO format so that they're sorted alphabetically, and you can modify the template it creates by creating a "Daily template" note.

Finally, I have different folders for different aspects of my work, so that I can be organized. I date these too in ISO format, so that they're shown in alphabetical order. My vault for work is separate to my personal vault for my personal notes, just to keep a healthy work-life balance. As well, I don't necessarily need the same plugins for both; I use tables a lot in my personal notes, for example, but haven't needed them for my work notes. Finally, I back up my vaults using Google Drive.

I wish I used Obsidian sooner

But I'm glad I finally did

Given how much I've struggled with organization, I wish I had gotten to grips with Obsidian sooner. It has a lot of powerful tools that you can find in its official documentation. One feature I discovered that I hadn't really seen mentioned anywhere was support for Mermaid. Mermaid is a JavaScript-based diagramming and charts tool that you can use to make graphs in your notes. This can be incredibly useful, depending on what you're working on.

As an example, I was working on an architecture diagram for a development project I'm working on. It visualizes the service from where an end-user starts interacting with the service, how that reaches the front-end, then the different services that handle back-end processing. You can make these as complex or as simple as you like, and Mermaid's syntax is pretty easy to get to grips with.

On top of that, there's the centralized repository to store my notes, so that they aren't dispersed across multiple locations. Obsidian's Markdown editor is incredibly powerful when it comes to formatting, with features like internal linking and tagging making it possible to organize your notes and make them easily traversed if you need them to be more complex.

There are a lot of note-taking apps out there that I've tried, but Obsidian is the first to have finally captured me. I don't need overly complex notes, I just need something to help me keep track of my day-to-day life... and this finally does it for me in a way no other app has before.