Why I was wrong about the Obsidian app, and you might be too

Obsidian sat unused in my app drawer for months. I tried playing around with it when I first set out to ditch big tech from my digital life, but I found it far too intimidating and clunky. I’d poke around in it every now and again, and then scurry back to Google Keep. Obsidian clearly wasn’t for me. Then, something subtle shifted that made me reconsider the purple app.

So now I’m doing something I never thought I would: singing the praises of Obsidian. Now, I no longer stare blankly at the screen and then close the app. Instead, that initial confusion has turned to genuine appreciation for all of its intricacies, and even some of its quirks. Obsidian has become an indispensable part of how I organize my digital life.

The name itself is intimidating compared to other note-taking apps: Evernote, Keep, and Samsung Notes. These apps sound helpful, even friendly. The name Obsidian sounds like a rock monster from a fantasy novel. Opening the app felt less like starting a new note and more like being dropped back into 1993 with only a DOS system and a blinking cursor waiting for input. It felt cold and unwelcoming.

I tried to use it nevertheless. I’m familiar with markdown, so there was no problem there. What turned me off was the app’s almost aggressive lack of structure. Unlike Notion, with its clear page hierarchies and thousands of templates, or the simple tagging system of Evernote, Obsidian was a vast, empty space. I dove into Obsidian’s plugins. The sheer number of extensions promised customization, but that led to a sense of overwhelm. Daily notes, Templater, Dataview, mind maps…each one fragmented the app.

Ultimately, the very customizability that is touted as Obsidian’s strength became its biggest weakness for me from the get-go. It morphed from a completely blank slate into a messy digital sandbox. My notes were practically impossible to locate in this mess, if I even knew where to start one in the first place.

I still wasn’t happy with using big tech. I appreciated Obsidian’s indie roots and that it was a Canadian-made app, so I forced myself to give it another try, but this time, I did something counterintuitive. I got rid of all the plugins. That endless tinkering had been holding me back from just using the app. I had been trying to mold Obsidian into something I didn’t need it to be, like some feature-rich behemoth to take on Evernote and Notion. Simplicity, I discovered, was the key.

Instead, I created a few basic folders to organize my notes, set up a master note outlining my hashtag structure, and stopped fidgeting with all the other bells and whistles. I signed up for Obsidian’s official sync service rather than mess around with building third-party cloud setups. Obsidian transformed from an intimidating mess into a powerful tool.

I appreciate Obsidian’s fundamental focus on content. The app allows me to concentrate purely on my thoughts and ideas once it is stripped of all those excessive options. The simplicity of writing in plain markdown means there are few distractions, with the text itself the primary element. This is a surprisingly liberating writing environment.

This simplicity extends to how Obsidian handles my content in the background. Unlike other markdown note-taking apps like Bear (over on the Apple side of things), Obsidian stores my notes locally. There’s no vendor lock-in, no walled-off ecosystems. My notes are easily accessible and, more importantly, portable. It also became surprisingly easy to navigate and find information once I embraced basic folders and a tagging system.

Obsidian’s web clipper extension is also useful. It works like Evernote’s web clipper, parsing the information and stripping away all the noise to create a text-only note, complete with related information like URL, site name, and date and time of capture. The web clipper is free and is available for Chromium browsers like Edge and Chrome, and as an Android app that appears in the share sheet.

Obsidian isn’t a flawless app. There’s a definite learning curve that can be a hurdle for newcomers. The lack of built-in guidance might scare off some of the less tech-savvy who first open the app. However, my simple, content-focused setup has truly won me over. It’s not the flashiest note-taking app out there. But it excels at organizing thoughts, connecting ideas, and capturing notes.

Obsidian has earned a permanent spot in my digital toolset. I was looking for a powerful yet simple way to manage information that wasn’t linked to a big tech conglomerate, and I can confidently say I finally found it in Obsidian.