How I Actually Use Obsidian Instead of Just Installing It
I've been running a second-brain setup with Obsidian for about four years now. The software itself is free, which is why people get excited. A markdown-based local vault that links notes together instead of forcing everything into folders. It does one thing well and nothing else poorly, which is more than I can say about Notion or Evernote. The actual workflow starts by accepting that you will spend more time organizing than actually writing. I learned that the hard way. My first vault had over two thousand disconnected notes after six months because I was capturing everything without any structure at all. It became completely useless. I had to delete the entire thing and start over with a simple system. Here's what works. You create a daily note template using the core Templates plugin. A plain markdown file in your vault root folder with {{date}} and {{time}} placeholders. When you click the template button it auto-fills the current date and time. That takes about thirty seconds and it stops the blank-page problem that makes people abandon the tool within the first week.
The linking mechanism is called backlinks and it's the whole reason this tool is different from a basic note app. When you put double brackets around something like [[project Phoenix]], Obsidian creates a clickable link and automatically tracks every note that references it. You can see these links in the right sidebar by default. There is no database backend. Everything lives in plain text markdown files on your hard drive. That means you own the data forever and can open it with any text editor if Obsidian disappears tomorrow. I hit a wall with this setup around month eight that took me three weeks to solve. I was linking notes using inconsistent naming conventions sometimes writing [[meeting with Sarah]] and other times [[Sarah Chen Q3 Review]]. The graph view showed these as completely separate nodes even though they referred to the same person. I ended up writing a small Python script using the Dataview community plugin to find all duplicate-ish names based on similar patterns, then manually merged them. The workaround was establishing a single naming convention early: [[Lastname Role or Project]] and sticking to it religiously from day one. I also added the Linter plugin to enforce consistent formatting automatically on every save, which cuts down on the sort of inconsistencies that snowball over time. Community plugins are what separate people who use Obsidian from people who actually get value from it. The core app comes with basic linking and search built in. Everything else requires installing from the community repository. Dataview is the most important one. It lets you query your notes like a database using a SQL-like syntax. Without it you're just reading markdown files. With it you can build dashboards that show all your open tasks across every project, list meetings by date, or generate reading lists filtered by tags.
Templater is another essential one. It runs JavaScript before inserting a template, which means you can pull in content dynamically. I have a meeting note template that automatically pulls in yesterday's daily note and any open tasks from my task management note. It saves me roughly ten minutes per meeting compared to manually copying that information over. The graph view gets mentioned everywhere as a feature but honestly it's not very useful for daily work. It looks impressive in screenshots and helps you see high-level connections between major topics. It becomes noise quickly once you pass about three hundred notes. I use it maybe twice a month when I'm doing a structural review of my vault. The daily note calendar is far more practical for actual navigation. Here's the part most tutorials don't tell you about. Obsidian syncs are expensive if you want them official. The paid sync service runs about eight dollars per month per device, which adds up. iCloud or Google Drive sync works fine for casual use but you will occasionally hit conflicts when you edit the same note on two devices at once. I use Obsidian Git instead. It's a community plugin that pushes your vault to a private GitHub repository every time you save. It's free and version controlled so you can roll back if you mess something up. The setup takes about twenty minutes the first time and involves creating a GitHub account, installing Git on your machine, and configuring the plugin to push automatically. After that it just works without any monthly fees.
Get the Full Details
The main downsides to be aware of. Performance degrades noticeably past about five thousand notes depending on your hardware. I run Obsidian on a 2021 MacBook Pro with sixteen gigabytes of RAM and it starts to feel sluggish around that threshold. If you have a massive vault you'll want to consider splitting it into multiple smaller vaults rather than trying to maintain one giant collection. The interface also looks dated compared to modern apps. It hasn't changed much since the early days and some of the defaults are frustrating, like the lack of a native calendar view until recently. You'll spend time customizing the appearance to make it usable, which is fine if you enjoy that kind of work and annoying if you just want something that functions out of the box. Mobile support exists for both iOS and Android but it's not as polished as the desktop experience. Mobile Sync costs extra and the community plugins don't all work on mobile. If you plan to do most of your note taking on a phone this might be a dealbreaker. I use Obsidian on mobile mainly for quick captures and it handles that function adequately. For serious composing I stick to desktop. The software downloads from obsidian.md and installation takes under two minutes on any platform. There's no account required to use it locally. Everything stays on your machine unless you choose to sync somewhere. The free tier gives you access to every core feature and all community plugins. The paid features are only sync and publishing, both of which have free alternatives as I described above.
I stopped using Notion about two years ago. The main reason was that I needed my notes to be permanently accessible without a subscription or internet connection. Notion works fine when everything is online but the moment you lose connectivity or your account gets suspended you have nothing. Obsidian gives me peace of mind because the files are literally just on my computer. I can boot into any operating system and open them immediately. If you're considering this setup the realistic timeline is about two to three weeks before it feels normal. The first week is pure friction. You'll question whether the effort is worth it. That's normal. By week three you'll have built enough habits that the system starts saving you time instead of costing it. The investment is steep at the beginning and pays off slowly, which is why most people quit during those early weeks and never experience the actual benefit.
