Building a personal knowledge base with Obsidian

I have tried every note-taking app. Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, plain text files in a folder. The problem with most of them is that your notes become a graveyard. You write something, file it somewhere, and never find it again.

Obsidian changed that for me because of one feature: bidirectional links.

What makes Obsidian different

Obsidian stores everything as plain Markdown files in a folder on your computer. No proprietary format, no cloud dependency, no database. Your notes are text files that you own.

The key feature is linking between notes with [[double brackets]]. When you link from one note to another, Obsidian tracks the connection in both directions. Over time, you build a web of connected ideas that you can navigate and visualize.

How I organize notes

I use a simple structure:

vault/
  daily/          # Daily journal entries
  projects/       # Active project notes
  references/     # Things I have learned
  ideas/          # Random thoughts and ideas

Within each folder, I do not stress about hierarchy. The links between notes matter more than the folder structure. A note about PostgreSQL indexing might link to a project note, a daily entry where I debugged something, and a reference note about database performance.

Templates for consistency

Obsidian's template plugin lets you create reusable note structures. My project template:

# {{title}}
 
## Goal
 
## Tasks
- [ ]
 
## Notes
 
## Links

I trigger this with a keyboard shortcut when starting a new project. Consistency in structure makes notes easier to scan later.

The daily note

I write a daily note every workday. It captures what I worked on, problems I encountered, and decisions I made. These are invaluable when I need to remember why I made a particular technical decision three months ago.

The daily notes plugin creates a new note for each day automatically. I spend 5 minutes at the end of each day writing a quick summary.

Sync

Since notes are just files, you can sync them with any file sync tool. I use Syncthing to keep my vault in sync across my laptop and desktop. On mobile, Obsidian has a paid sync service ($8/month) or you can use iCloud/Google Drive.

Plugins I use

• Calendar for navigating daily notes
• Templater for more powerful templates
• Dataview for querying notes like a database
• Git for version-controlling my vault

The Dataview plugin deserves special mention. It lets you write queries against your notes. Want a list of all project notes tagged with "active"? One query. All daily notes that mention a specific topic? Done.

Why not Notion?

Notion is great for teams and structured databases. But your data lives on their servers, in their format. If Notion goes down or changes their pricing, you are stuck. With Obsidian, your notes are Markdown files that work with any text editor.

For a personal knowledge base that you want to maintain for years, owning the files matters.

Sources

• Obsidian