Keep your notebook close to the heart

Hey.

I bet you had something in your head earlier. Something brilliant, something insane. Something you would definitely bring to life, if you didn't forget it.

Maybe, good ideas constantly hammer your head at certain times. You are spreading yourself thin, trying to do everything everywhere all at once. Shit, there is even a movie about such person.

I believe I found my way out of this hell. Slowly, surely, I converged on a specific setup. The secret is simple - just fucking write it down. Where? That's the fun part. You are going to find it out yourself. Upon success, you will be addicted to writing. It will become your habit.

So, where to write?

You may like Notion. You may like Google Docs. You may fall in love with good old pen and paper. There are some insane people who use Obsidian or even Neovim to manage their entire life. And you are talking to a person who attempts this at the time of writing.

The moment you search "notion getting started" or "obsidian for starters", you will get hit with gorgeous and flourishing configurations, look at your empty space, and get terrified . Please, don't. Don't search anything about Notion, don't try to learn every Google Docs tooltip, just don't. Write your idea down and maybe read about Markdown. Start simple.

It can be a silly thought. It can be anything your soul desires. Then, try to expand on it.

Shopping list? Try to justify every purchase you plan. Perhaps, you don't need a third croissant today.

A random thought? Try to make it more coherent. Spend some time refining your grand unified theory of rubber duck conspiracy.

Try it. Go close the browser tab, open Apple Notes/Google Keep/Obsidian/whatever, and write what you think. Be raw in your thoughts, coherence will come later. As you write more and more, you become more confident. You will know how you want to express yourself.

I'm still fearing the blank page. Where do you write?

Well, that's the question. Until recently, I was writing everywhere I felt like.

If it was related to code, I wrote it in an issue, in related GitHub repo - I thought I would come back to it since I visit GitHub often. (Spoiler: I rarely did.) If it was an article, I used a separate Obsidian vault (aka folder) - Obsidian is the best for long-form texts in my opinion. School? Copybooks. A daily todo list? Sticky notes below the monitor.

At some point I thought, "to the Void all of that", and just mashed everything into a single Obsidian vault, with minimal organization. TODO's, ideas, articles, personal knowledge, silly thoughts - all in a single, flat folder of Markdown documents. Embrace the Chaos.

I tried to over-organize everything. That stopped me from writing efficiently. Now I rely on search like I rely on fuzzy finder when I code. I just forget about the organization of all notes at once. I only think about the structure of a current file. For example, there is some metadata in this file that tells my website "don't publish this article yet", or "this article is written at a certain date".

For structure, I use links. I weave a graph of concepts and look back at it. If something is missing, I fill it in. This forces me to explore a certain topic deeper or face the guilt. The whole internet is built on links, and they work well with notes, too.

At some point, the simplicity became a bottleneck. You are not going to remember a ton of search queries and hashtags just to find the shopping list. That's where plugins and more advanced Obsidian features came in handy. But I am NOT going to give out the list of plugins here and now because I know what you are going to do with them.

I, too, once asked such question to my friend. That was way before I merged everything into Obsidian. He told me that he used Dataview, Excalidraw, a custom theme I don't remember, and other stuff. I gradually lost myself - this system works for him, but not for me. That's why I tell you to start simple.

Now, go. You know enough to know that note taking is a rabbit hole. Whatever you choose as your notebook, keep it close to your heart. Keep it simple.