If you think Obsidian can improve your productivity or allow you to learn faster, you got fooled. You don't need anything else than your brain, a piece of paper and a pen.
Introduction
In January of this year I've posted about my Obsidian template, guiding on how to keep your Obsidian simple and efficient to do what the software really promises. Since then, I've been compressing all the tools I've used to be smaller, and smaller until the point I've realized that I don't even need some of them in the first place.
Let's recapitulate what my template was all about, and how I've been using it for the last three years.
The Minimal Template
"Obsidian barebones is great enough to give all the necessary tools to level up your note-taking. Can I list all the Obsidian features that make this possible? Sure! Here are them: Bi-directional linking, tagging, properties, bookmarks, outliner, fuzzy finder search, templates, preview edit and vim. That's enough for a minimal experience." - Me (2025-01-22)
The way I used Obsidian the most, was to capture some lectures presentations and create a massive database of information. The more data that I stored there, the most difficult it was to organize and connect things together. Obsidian can trick you by making you think it can allow you to see all things quickly. That's not true, you are totally dependent on yourself to do it. I've had enormous notes with thousands of words, and from time to time I've wasted hours atomizing my notes to be as tinier as possible, therefore more digestible.
I've used to tag things in a general way, since going all in for specific tags was messing everything, and I've no longer be able to apply meaningful tags that properly describe each note. I've had many templates for different "types" of notes, so I could, potentially, save time. I was creating conventions, folder structures, frontmatter styles and conventions to supposedly make my notes more organized. Not forgetting to mention the plugins that enhanced Obsidian to make it more "usable".
The Shift
This workflow translates to hours of typing and writing notes. This is a waste! If all my notes burn, what would I do?
In the last year, I started to slowly move towards Mind Mapping. I had some lectures that were simpler, so I've decided to study only using Mind Maps to see how would it affect my performance. The results surprised me. I went very well, without paying so much effort. So, then, I decided to use just it in the last semester. The results, very subjective to me, were excellent. I can pretty much tell you, I've cut my studying time by 90%. A little bit, and I already knew what I've should know, and then I could freely do something else.
I never thought that I could replace Obsidian, that was supposed to be engineered to improve my productivity, to be beaten up by a piece of paper and a pen. This translated into a very meaningful thing:
Trust in yourself. A tool could never make you more productive or smarter, than your own effort. Essentially, what matters into learning a piece of information efficiently, is the way you think. Dot.
I'm not a professional developer of any kind, but something I see across these professionals, is that they mostly know how to learn, in a way I've never seem before. They would search, read, understand and put their hands in action straight away. And by making part of developing CLI tools, I've started to get this and generally improve my learning capabilities about everything.
Today
I don't use Obsidian. I don't use any note-taking tool. When I need to take notes, I usually write everything in a single file, when I'm done I trash it.
I'm more interested in actually learn something, and learn just what I need instead of consuming books, videos, and any other source of information one upon another. This way I have time to practice, and I do consolidate what I've learned. I shift from a learning modal of learning everything and, then, practicing, to learn just what I need, and possibly learn the other things, once they show up necessary. This saves time, and builds some sort of a reliable foundation.
I'm aware that what works for me, doesn't work for everyone, and the results may not translate in the same way to you, than it did to me. However, it's just a pleasure for me to share this discovery that, in fact, could improve my productivity.
Conclusion
I do surely prefer to know something without a digital assistance, to learn things faster, to learn enough instead of everything, rather than rely on a digital tool, keep typing for hours, and poorly understand what I'm studying. I always say that, and I'm gonna say it again: Less is more.
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.