The Rise of Obsidian as a Second Brain ft. Nick Milo

Obsidian is a note-taking app built to link your most interesting thoughts together. When I really look around at all the different apps out there, which one is the truest second brain? To me, it's Obsidian. Nick Milo is an Obsidian expert, and I've invited him to rate Obsidian on 10 key factors that any notes app needs to become a true second brain. The first one is searchability, the ability to quickly and reliably find the notes you need. How would you say that Obsidian does on search? If you want to search something, you have all the Boolean types of searches. You can search for one term, A-N-D, another word. You can also tag things, and the tags are very robust, and that ties into the superpower that we don't even recognize that's there, and it's autocomplete. How often do we know exactly what we want to find? I just say it's a coin flip, 50-50. Oftentimes, it's just a word or a phrase or something. So if I just start typing, then the software, it's smart enough, it will populate some ideas of what you're looking for. If you had a note called second brain, but you only typed in S and B, it would actually populate second brain as a result. It's blazingly fast to search anything, to see results immediately, and to click around. I have to give it a nine. Let's talk duplication or reusability. How would you say Obsidian does on the ability to reuse password? I think it scores pretty well. So you can use templates. It has its own folder. You put templates in there. When you hit the special add template hotkey, it will give you a list of all your templates. The other reusability way that's really caught on is being able to embed a note or a block of something. And best in class with that is definitely roam research with block references. For someone not technical, what is a block reference kind of conceptually? Yeah, so a block reference conceptually, if we go by dates, and we say that last Monday at lunch, one of your buddies said something, and you quote it. And so it's a few days later, and you want to type a Friday note, and you want to reference that quote. The old method that still works quite well is just you copy that and you paste it over. But the new method is you actually embed it. So you just look at that quote, and then you just put it into the Friday note. It still exists in the Monday note, but now there's a version of it in the Friday note. Copy and pasting is powerful in that it works everywhere all the time universally. But the whole point of a second brain is you have an idea, let's say emergence, one of your favorite ideas. You want a single place where what you know or what you've discovered about emergence lives. But as soon as you start copying and pasting different ideas related to emergence in different places, as soon as you have two versions of something, you update one, but the next time you find it, you find version B. And it's this feeling of like, wait a minute, didn't I add something to this? And you don't know, maybe you're mistaken and you didn't, or maybe you're just looking at the outdated or less developed version. So that's where just in general, link-based applications are nice because you can at least point to that other version. They're still the single source of truth, which is absolutely crucial for us to be sane. But then you can have your little tweaks for this audience or for this, whatever it might be. So what is your final score for duplication or reusability in Obsidian? Knowing that there's something that handles block references a little bit better and knowing that it takes a second to set up templates, I'm going to be a little harsh here and give it an eight. So how would you rate Obsidian's ability to give you access to a given note with as minimal hassle as possible? Sure. First, what is Obsidian on? It's on desktop and it's also on mobile devices. How is sync handled? So sync is awesome once you set it up. So there is a little bit of a hiccup from syncing your main desktop device usually onto mobile and making sure it's working, but you can find it on your phone, you can find it on your desktop, and the results are immediate. Nothing is faster that I'm aware of than Obsidian. And last one would be offline use. So one of the great parts about Obsidian's accessibility is that it's always available for you. So even if you don't have an internet connection, these files typically they live wherever you want them to. So it can be on your desktop, it can be on Dropbox, it can be wherever you'd like it to be. So you do not necessarily need an internet connection. Can you access Obsidian through a browser? Like if you don't have your own device, can you log into the sync server or something? I don't think you can access Obsidian through a browser. The access points would look like this. Your desktop device, the one that you have synced to your mobile device, which can be offline because it will just download all the tiny plain text files. The one alternative to that is they have a service called Obsidian Publish, which allows you to just click a button and you have a website with all your files. So you could give yourself that, but you won't have edit ability at this point in time. So with all that in mind, I'll still only give it a seven because I think the user experience is still going to improve. So a little bit more time and then it'll bump up to an eight or nine. Number four, the ability to share your notes, collaborate on them. How does Obsidian do? So speaking of Obsidian Publish, you simply click a button and you'll see all your notes be published online to a link. You go to that link and you can start clicking through them just like you would in your offline personal version. So that shareability is extremely powerful and it's really democratizing. If you have an idea and you share it, you can then reference that idea on the web. And so that's where the shareability of Obsidian shines now, where it doesn't and where it's not intending to currently is with collaboration. So Obsidian is not trying to be a team collaborative tool because right now you can't collaborate. You can't have multiple people edit the same thing. You can't have permissions at anything more than a global one password level. So I'd say it's almost unusable in a realistic team scenario. So with this one, I have to give it a five. Did you hear that? I think it points to that everything is a trade-off. You want total control. You want to be able to save them anywhere. You want the modularity. You're either on this side of the trade-off or that side. There's no perfect point along that spectrum. It kind of just depends on your needs. I have been finding recently a really nice divide between my personal knowledge and then my collaborative knowledge between two different apps. Obviously Obsidian. The other one might end up being something like Notion. But I find that divide wonderful. Ease of use. I also have called this editability. I think editability is a really fascinating one. It takes a little bit of training. Microsoft Word for all of us at one time was new. And we didn't know what that formatting bar was. We didn't know if you hit B that that meant bold. We picked it up. It became second nature. So there are a few things to pick up when you transition to something like Obsidian. Currently it uses something called Markdown. So if you want to make something bold, you'll typically add two asterisks before Word, two asterisks after Word. But what this means is even if you no longer use Obsidian, you still have your notes in a human readable form. They can be read by other applications that read Markdown. And so you don't lose too much of your time. When you're working in plain text, one, the files are tiny. So you can work blazingly fast. You can like start moving lines of text. You can highlight chunks and then you can start moving those around. When you do that, then the keyboard becomes an extension of yourself. So when it comes to editability, you're actually working faster than ever before. The formatting's not getting in your way. That is like one of those unlocking moments for me. Recognizing that I could work at almost the speed of thought was remarkable. And then other things like autocomplete with tags. So let's say you have a tag called books, but then sometimes it's book and you're trying to decide which one's which. Well, really with one plugin, you can quickly change all the books to merge with book. And immediately like that, you've made an edit across 100 different notes. Very powerful. So I won't give it a 10 because you have to learn a little bit, but I will give it a 9. Let's talk the ability to upgrade. There's a beginner note taker. Our goal, especially since we're both teachers, is to have people advance and become intermediate and maybe even advance an expert. How would you say Obsidian does in giving people almost this learning path? The path with Obsidian starts as easy as you download it, you hit the button that says new note, you start typing and then you can save your notes. Eventually you get to the point where one of those notes you think might connect to a different note. So you learn how to link by hitting a couple buttons. Okay, so now you have notes that link to other notes. And that's where you can really go crazy. I don't know if there's anything more upgradable in the app space. There are over 500 plugins, community designed extensions of the core Obsidian feature set. So if you do want one app to rule them all, you could make it work through Obsidian. Like the extensibility is there. Right now, tons of people are tracking tasks and projects within Obsidian. We got people who are doing insane things with a plugin called Data View and they're taking it to levels where they're getting, in some ways, more robust databases. Yeah, I noticed this too. Even something as simple as having the plugins, they have two sections in their preferences, core plugins and community plugins. An advanced user doesn't care, but a beginner, when I saw that, I was like, yes, thank God. Having the permission to ignore everything else is a tremendous benefit to me as a novice user of the app. If you have a problem, there is a plugin for that within Obsidian. So upgradability is a 10 out of 10. There may come a day that you need to move your notes to a different app. What's your confidence level that you would be able to move all this knowledge you've gathered in your second brain in Obsidian to a different app? It's fairly high. It depends on how advanced you are as a user. I didn't start with Obsidian in plain text. I just had these plain text files. I took those notes and I threw them into Obsidian and it worked just like that because it's plain text. That's transferability. Now that they're in Obsidian, something interesting is happening. If you decide you want to upgrade to a million different plugins, some of those plugins are going to make you less able to easily transfer your information. Interesting. Now for the novice user who's just using the core plugins, 100% easy transferability. The reason that we're using Markdown is so we can future proof our notes. So knowing the core of Obsidian, I have to give this a higher score. So I give this a nine. Just have to be careful not to do too much with extensibility without being too aware of the cons. Let's talk connections. Linking. You might have something to say about this. How would you rate Obsidian's linking ability? Compared to any other tool except maybe a couple, it's a clear 10 out of 10. I won't give their rating just yet though because I'll talk this one through a tiny amount. When I look, when I really look around at all the different apps out there, which one is the truest second brain? I mean, to me, it's Obsidian. Like it's the truest second brain. You can actually start to mimic the way the brain works. Clustering ideas together. If you just remember one idea, the whole Synapse network lights up. The associations of that. All you have to do is remember that one on the edge, the boundary, and then you're there. How fast can you link in Obsidian? As fast as you want to. I mean, it's just, you hit bracket, bracket, you start typing your notes. Select that note. Boom. You hit enter. You've made a link. You can link note to note. You can link block to block. You can link paragraph to paragraph. It is truly remarkable how much you can do with links. I wanted to give this a nine because I look at Rome Research and Logseek to a degree. They're a little bit more competent with tiny one-line links. They're really good with those blocks. Like linking to like a bullet point. Yes, Obsidian is kind of right there. I'd give it an eight. But when I look at it as a whole, even with that caveat, I think I have to push it to a 10. I just have to say it is a phenomenal linking tool and never disappoints me. In tools like Rome, there's no more concept of a note. There's no document. This is a note. And there's no folders. But it's almost as if Obsidian saw that, but then stepped one or two steps back. It's like a midway point between the old way and the new way, kind of combining the strengths of both. I would agree with that. And the funny thing about these developers, they give you a sandbox, but the sandbox happens to include folders. It happens to include notes, files, same thing, and tags. And all of those can serve a different purpose. Some of them overlap, but some of them are quite unique. And when you flex each one, it unlocks all this power. Software developers love to be unopinionated and just give you options. More options, the better, right? Well, but then that creates this vacuum of people wanting just instructions, just a step-by-step guide. And that's why our courses exist, is we have strong opinions. And we have things we think you should not do, things you should definitely do. Different methodologies, philosophies, approaches, techniques, this incredible cornucopia of different ways of doing second brains in PCAM. Number nine, capturing can be text, images, videos, hyperlinks, attachments, PDFs, Word documents. Can Obsidian take that full variety or are there some formats that it's not well-suited to? That's a really good question. And out of all of the categories, this is the most difficult one for me to answer. And the reason is because I'm not using Obsidian to capture all the different file formats, like maybe we'd more naturally do with Evernote. Now that being said, the file formats that are supported by Obsidian are really robust. You can put PDFs in there. I believe now you can even link to specific parts of that PDF. MP3s. You can have audio recordings in there. I'll give slideshows based on a note. Our attachments, where is the server that they're being stored on? I mean, it's just on your desktop. It's just a local folder. But then Obsidian will read it for you. For those people that want to have a collection, images and video and slideshows, PDFs, and store that within a folder that Obsidian looks at, you absolutely can. So with that in mind, I give this one a fuzzy seven. Number 10, organizing. What tools does Obsidian put at your disposal to organize and shape content you've kept there? You do have folders. You have a typical left-hand sidebar set of folders. On the right, you have tags. In the middle, you have your notes. So you have these three forms that are kind of a paper, rock, scissors. They're kind of a triad. Folders. Tags and links. Right. But there's a fourth one, the database. Okay. And it's kind of like the cousin who's invited to every, you know, other wedding. But it turns out that they're extremely powerful. You can slice and dice data and get results. It's beautiful. And the one advantage to the Obsidian way is that it reads the entire folder. All your notes are right there being read as a single database. The massive disadvantage, the metadata that you add, you have to add it. The best way that I accomplish most of my metadata is by using a tag. Because I don't have to remember all that. I have a tag that starts with note. And then right after that, it might be note develop, note refactor. So all I have to remember is note. And then I'm good. A power user scores much higher. If I have to combine them all together, I'll give it an eight. Bonus. We have a bonus factor, which is security. How would you rate the security of Obsidian? I mean, it's a 10 out of 10. It doesn't have to be. And there are ways that you can make yourself less secure. But if you want to be secure, Obsidian is a 10 out of 10. The big reasons why is that it's local. So you're saving it on your computer. Now that means you are also in charge of how you back it up. So, right? You know, there's a give and take. The trade-off, yeah. If you use Obsidian Sync, which is their syncing solution, it's a zero knowledge solution, which means that even they can't read it. And I know that there are a lot of other note applications out there that if you lose your files, you can ask the company to help you recover them. Well, if they can recover them, they can read them. They have access. The developers can't look at it. No one can if you want it to be that way. As far as I know, there are three options. iCloud, Dropbox, and then Obsidian provides their own syncing solution, which is the smoothest and cleanest by far. But it puts the extra burden on the user to know how to back up effectively. If someone has heard all this and they're thinking, I'm the kind of person you're talking about, how would you recommend they get started learning Obsidian? I'd say go to YouTube and just type in Obsidian. I do have some videos on there. I think they're pretty good. They're awesome videos. It's the linking your thinking channel. Our final score combining all of Nick's extremely thoughtful and reflective answers is 92 points out of 100 points. An A, maybe an A minus, but still an A, which is pretty fantastic. Nice work to the developers. To see how we rate other apps as a second brain, click this video next.