How to Use Obsidian for Writing and Productivity Leave a comment

I am fairly dangerous at being an worker. I brazenly despise conferences, I say precisely what’s on my thoughts, and I sincerely imagine that many managers exist solely to waste the time of in any other case productive folks. I additionally couldn’t be much less serious about how my work impacts quarterly projections—I wish to write issues that folks discover useful and entertaining.

So, yeah, I am a freelancer.

I write for 5 publications, together with the one you are studying now (clearly my favourite). The upside: I am by no means in conferences. The draw back: There’s rather a lot to maintain monitor of. I’ve to handle relationships with 5 editors. It is a problem, and I’ve tried a full array of techniques over time, from spreadsheets to index playing cards, apps like Trello, and means too many to-do listing apps.

None of them fairly did the trick, till I found Obsidian a few years in the past. This utility has slowly gone from being a bizarre app I did not perceive to at least one I can not think about functioning with out. It is the place I do all of my writing, sure, but in addition how I preserve monitor of my ongoing articles as they transfer from brainstorming to pitching to publication.

This is not a overview of Obsidian (I already wrote one). That is an overview of how I exploit this software to get issues finished. Hopefully studying it provides you some concepts for a way you would use it.

Every thing Offline All at As soon as

To start with, what’s Obsidian? The applying payments itself as a “second mind,” however you would it put in the identical class as note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote. Not like these purposes, although, Obsidian shops every part—notes, attachments, and even plugins—as easy textual content paperwork in a folder in your laptop. This implies you should use the applying totally offline or sync the paperwork utilizing the cloud storage service of your alternative.

This has a number of benefits. For one, your information are totally in your management: If Obsidian stopped present tomorrow, I’d nonetheless have entry to my notes. For one more, every part works offline. My favourite factor about Obsidian, although, is the in depth plugin ecosystem. There are over a thousand Obsidian plugins, and I rely on a number of of them. There’s Kanban, which lets you create a board of playing cards you’ll be able to transfer between tiles. There’s Extract URL, which may seize all textual content from any web site and switch it right into a notice. I may listing plugins for a very long time. However the level is that you may customise Obsidian to work mainly any means you need it to. I’ve finished this to create an ideal setup for my workflow—one that enables me to do my planning and my precise writing in the identical utility.

My writing course of has a development: brainstorming concepts, pitching these concepts to editors, researching, writing, enhancing, and invoicing. Here is how I transfer by means of these steps in Obsidian.

Brainstorm

Each article begins with an thought. I get these from all types of locations. Generally I am simply utilizing my laptop, discover one thing that annoys me, endlessly analysis an answer to that situation, after which resolve to write down about it. Generally I discover a cool-looking app whereas studying the information or shopping Reddit. And generally I simply spend a number of hours brainstorming concepts. Regardless of the case, I compile my concepts in a devoted Kanban board on Obsidian. Each card on the board hyperlinks to a devoted doc the place I embrace any related hyperlinks, increase on the concept, and notice a bit about doable angles for the article.

When it comes time to take these concepts into the world, I resolve which of them I’ll pitch to which editors and drag them to a column for that publication. If the pitch is authorised, I drag the cardboard over to my “article queue” board, if not, I think about pitching it to a different publication or put it in my “thought jail” to doubtlessly revisit later.