Comment by kouru225
20 hours ago
A post on Obsidian and a post on Roam today?
I don't know about you guys, but I'm an Obsidian lover and that's not gonna stop anytime soon. IMO the big problem about what this guy is saying can be boiled down to this:
>My most common behavior is to Actually Write the Notes. That’s why Roam needs to help me with the thought, ‘I don’t know where to put this.’ If it does that well, it makes the vast majority of my time spent in the app a breeze. If it does that poorly, it makes my experience so painful that I want to switch systems.
The lesson of Obsidian for me has been that organization is creativity. If what you want is to have an ideological maid that can organize all your thoughts for you, then you're gonna have a bad time with any note taking service (although I'm sure you can develop llm plugins to do this in a way that you personally enjoy now.) What's beneficial about these note apps is that they put this issue directly in front of your face. Either rise to meet it or go back to pretending like organization doesn't matter and avoid the responsibility of creativity.
Using Obsidian goes through stages much like a growing business. You start and you have personal relationships with all the notes so you can remember them, but once you get enough notes you realize it's too much to manage just using personal relationships and you need to start implementing a system. As you get better, your system changes, leaving a paper trail of notes with different systems. That's why the only thing that I think these note apps need is a deprecation system, but otherwise IMO they're perfect.
I like Obsidian.[1] For organization, I like the PARA method.[2] I do also have my addition on top such as "0-Inbox" where un-sorted files lands. Otherwise, search and opening files directly via the keyboard shortcut in Obsidian works most of the times. But that would be just me, I'm known to be pretty organized (people told me many times). Wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me where something is and I'm likely to tell you exactly where to find it. I learned that trick from an uncle growing up.
Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, has a nice article on how he uses Obsidian.[3]
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/
2. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
3. https://stephango.com/vault
How can you organize stuff in obsidian? You have folders and search and that's it. I was thinking of switching from Word docs and putting my faith in backlinks to keep everything together, but now I'm not sure.
> How can you organize stuff in obsidian? You have folders and search and that's it.
You can use folders, tags, properties, links between notes (exporable through the links panel per file or the graph view), and there are extensions that let you add more advanced functionality. In the end, any system will require you to come up with your own system of organization.