I’m having such a hard time deciding if I want to stop trying to use Obsidian. In my last post, it was clear I was struggling. Now I’m stuck in this place of having some important notes in Obsidian and a lot of notes still in OneNote, and I don’t like this feeling of half in and half out.
I really need to commit or bail.
I can’t stop thinking about this, so there you go, brain worm. Clearly, I’m conflicted or it would be easy to let this go.
But as I was thinking about this issue (again), I remembered so many of the things I really like about OneNote.
I’m really not sure if I should continue trying to fit myself into Obsidian after all, despite some of the potential benefits of using it. Those benefits evaporate when I start to think them through.
A few days ago, I realized the sidebar and folders in Obsidian were making me crazy. I couldn’t find anything. I was scrolling all the time. I knew I needed to find a way to deal with both. It was nothing like how easy it is for me in OneNote to see my sections in the sidebar and my pages right next to it.
In Obsidian, folders and files are all mixed together and it creates a lot of visual clutter for me. Admittedly, this is probably a me problem. It’s still a problem.
So I gave it what I said was going to be my final try, thinking I might really end up with a hybrid system where I use OneNote for some things and Obsidian for others.
I flattened the structure a bit. Although my folders for upcoming, in progress, and future writing projects seemed nice, there really isn’t a need to have things broken down to the point where there are only two or three or even four or five things in each folder. I have these as sections in OneNote and it works great, but because the view in Obsidian seems to be mirrored after a file explorer, it’s just a lot more visually messy.
So now all my books are in a folder called stories. I don’t have all of them there. I can’t imagine how busy it’s going to look once I have so many titles as subfolders, and if I don’t do subfolders, I’ll have to do tags (probably won’t remember to put them on there) or links or properties or something.
Yeah. Why is it so hard? Because it’s something else to remember and type and I just don’t want to do it when sticking them in a folder (section in OneNote) gives me all the structure I need.
Flattening the structure didn’t really reduce the depth, but it did reduce the number of subfolders I had to have open at one time to see all my stories.
Basically, it just created a little bit of a cleaner visual. I also did this kind of flattening for some other major folders.
Some people will say I should be using fewer folders altogether and stick to search.
Sure.
No way.
This is one of those things that you have to hear to know: some people don’t think like other people.
This has shown me where there’s a fundamental difference in the way I do things compared to the way a lot of other people do them: I do not like to search.
I prefer to go straight to my folders in explorer, or OneNote (notebooks and sections, technically), or Obsidian, open the folder I need, find the files or pages I need, and that’s it. I’ve found what I need.
I almost never use search on Windows or on Android, because I’m not a searcher. I mean, there are places where I do use search, of course, and I’ve actually built a few workflows around it when it comes to finding information I need from previous books in my series. I use it for my writing work because that’s a very specific use case in my hunt for information, but as a general rule when I’m working with information, I don’t search.
And honestly even within the document I search for my series information (I’ll link a post about this so you know what I’m talking about), if I kind of have a feeling I know where something is, I always go directly there first and check for it before I start searching.
Because that’s just the way I think.
It seems as if Obsidian is really optimized for people who prefer search.
Something else I miss is OneNote’s section colors and notebook colors, because all that stuff provides visual information. And the folder structure in Obsidian just doesn’t do that for me.
I might just refocus on leveraging the benefits of OneNote more even for the phone drafting. There are benefits that could definitely outweigh an autoclose of quotation marks.
Selecting text in OneNote in the Android app is a breeze, and in the app I can make a copy of a note quite easily, too. Just a few clicks and I can make the copy and even move it into a different notebook and section if I want. Even though I really like the autoclosing quotes in Obsidian, in OneNote I can easily copy and paste unformatted text into Libreoffice Writer without having to switch into a different view mode just to try to preserve real paragraph breaks, which is a BIG issue I’ve been running into with Obsidian, which seems to only copy as line breaks that mess up my formatting unless I specifically copy from reading view.
And let’s get into the trouble I’ve been having copying text from Obsidian on both the computer and in the Android app. It’s glitchy as hell. Since I use OneNote as an intermediary landing spot for text I’m moving around between apps, the web, documents, etc, it really is a big deal to me that I keep running into these text copying glitches.
Not everything can be perfect. I know that. In OneNote, my notes are in a proprietary format, but I do have the ability to export to a word DOCX that I can open in LibreOffice Writer and resave as an ODT, so it’s not impossible to get my data out, by far. And I can do entire sections at a time in OneNote so it’s not as labor intensive as you’d think—or maybe for you it would be, but for me, I don’t like section groups so I don’t create what I think is an excessive number of sections for my notebooks. I use subpages when I need deeper organization and I like that.
In the end, I’m asking myself: what benefit is an MD file that can’t contain images over an ODT file that can if you can save that ODT file as something else at any time? ODT is a pretty robust format and is probably going to be around long enough for me. I can also save my notes as HTML files from inside Writer and keep all those images attached to the notes if I want an even more open text-based format.
Sure Markdown is a text-based file format that’ll be easy to recover if I ever need to do that. But I don’t know that I care. In one case, I’ll have a bunch of MD files sitting on my hard drive, and in the other, I’ll have a few ODT files or HTML files that hold all the notes for the sections in my OneNote notebooks instead (and I already do export my OneNote sections in the DOCX format and resave as ODT as backup so…)
I can use Obsidian for my series knowledge base with links (it’s a thing I’ve been thinking of doing), but I really need to stop making regular notes in Obsidian. I should definitely stop writing in it on my phone. Copying text out of it for Libreoffice Writer and when using it on my phone is just too much of a hassle.
That’s why I decided to put together this post in OneNote, since I knew I needed to copy and paste some comments I made elsewhere and put them into a form that makes sense as a whole.
Just putting together this blog post made me realize a few things: OneNote is excellent with pasted text. Like just really great with it.
To be honest, I found pasting into it a bit of a relief after using Obsidian for a week or two. It’s not that Obsidian is bad at that (it’s the copying that lets me down), it’s just that OneNote is better.
I’ve given this a few days and I still can’t make up my mind. I have no clarity.
I told myself yesterday to just use OneNote from now on, and yet I’m still using Obsidian.
Why?
And I still hate the copying. It was a nightmare this morning on my phone.
I really have to stop.
Honestly, and let’s be honest here, I don’t even need Obsidian for a knowledge base. It’s not the way I write. If I can take the time to find the info I need from the source material I wrote (I’m a discovery writer so most of the things I know about a character or location, I learn while I’m writing it, not before), I should be adding that (with reference to story by acronym and chapter) to my series notes file in Writer under a heading for character info. I mean, once found, it’s found, and what do I need to set up links and the like for?
Ah, to be human.
It’s like you see something you want, but you have no use for it, and you end up buying it anyway and realizing eventually it’s not only not making things better for you but getting in the way.
I have to let go of Obsidian. I know I do. It’s just getting there.
This post helped.