Watching all of the amazing videos by Vicky Zhao, I decided I wanted to start playing with a note-taking system that I can link and interconnect into a sort of ecosystem. Thinking I could just easily use WordPress to do this, I setup a new website but quickly realized that WordPress is way too slow, tedious, and not optimized for taking quick notes at the speed of thought (especially with the slow page loading off of a server across the country).
Deciding to checkout Obsidian, I was dumbstruck to find out that it is completely free to use, so I set it up and started adding some notes to it. While I found it much faster and easier to use to take notes, the key difficulty I’m experiencing is really just unlearning my current blogging mindset (i.e. long sequential posts) and switching to a note-taking mindset (i.e. short, highly linked posts). It’s harder than it sounds but I think that if I do end up writing longer notes at first, I’ll just break them down into smaller notes later, if need be.
Oh, one other interesting thing that I noticed after getting Obsidian was that when reading or watching a video and noticing something that I wanted to record a note on it, the secondary issue was that I couldn’t link that new note to something already existing within my note-taking system. This immediately reminded me of my feeling before of not having a solid foundation for my work to stand upon. In effect, for me to link new things within my note-taking system, I really have to go back and lay all of the foundation of what I already know. Only then will it feel like I’m actually standing on solid ground.