I didn’t set out to become a “second brain” person. A year ago, if you’d told me I’d be writing an entire blog post about a note-taking app, I would have laughed. Notes were notes — scattered across Notepad++, Google Keep, sticky notes on my monitor, and the occasional scribble on actual paper. I had a system. It was chaos, but it was my chaos.
Then I started my Master’s in IT.
Suddenly I was juggling lecture notes, research papers, code snippets, project specs, meeting minutes from work, and the thousand random ideas that pop into a developer’s head at 2 AM. My chaos stopped being cute and started being a liability. I needed a real system — not another app to collect digital dust, but something that actually changed how I thought and worked.
That’s how I stumbled into Obsidian. And a year later, here’s what I’ve learned.
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What Obsidian Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Let me get this out of the way: Obsidian is a Markdown-based knowledge management tool that stores everything as plain text files on your computer. No proprietary database. No vendor lock-in. No “your notes live on our servers” nonsense. You own your files the same way you own a .txt document.
That is its superpower. But it’s also what confuses people.
Obsidian isn’t Notion. It’s not a project management tool pretending to be a note app. It doesn’t have a drag-and-drop database builder or a Kanban board out of the box. What it has is something more fundamental: a way to link your thinking together. You write notes, you connect them with [[double brackets]], and over time, those connections form a web of knowledge that’s worth more than the sum of its parts.
Think of it like this — and yes, I’m going to use a chess analogy because that’s how my brain works (I’ve written about chess and code before). In chess, a single pawn isn’t worth much. But when you connect that pawn to your knights, bishops, and rooks — when you see how it supports your entire position — it becomes essential. Obsidian does the same thing for your ideas.
The Good: What Kept Me Around for a Full Year
1. Plain Text Files Are Freedom
I cannot overstate how much I appreciate that my notes are literally just .md files in a folder. Last month, I migrated from my work laptop to a new development machine. I didn’t have to export anything, convert anything, or pray that some cloud sync wouldn’t corrupt my data. I copied a folder. Done.
As someone who has lost notes to abandoned apps more times than I care to admit — Google Wave, anyone? Evernote’s “upgrade” that broke search? — this matters. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have every single note, perfectly readable, in any text editor.
This is the kind of architecture decision that tells you the developers actually use their own product. It’s also why my ICT division team now uses Markdown-based documentation across our internal wiki. When the format is portable, you don’t have to think about exit strategies.
2. The Graph View Is More Than Eye Candy
Yes, the local graph looks cool. Every Obsidian user has probably spent ten minutes just spinning their graph around and feeling smart. But after the novelty wears off, the graph becomes genuinely useful in ways I didn’t expect.
Here’s an example: I was researching cybersecurity frameworks for a paper, taking notes on NIST, ISO 27001, and the Philippine Data Privacy Act. A month later, I was writing a guide on Linux server hardening, and the graph showed me that my DPA notes connected to a hardening concept I hadn’t considered. That connection existed because Obsidian let me link my research notes to my practical guides without forcing me to organize them into folders first.
The graph doesn’t tell you what to think. It shows you what you’ve already been thinking about — and sometimes that’s exactly what you need to see.
3. Plugins Turn It Into Whatever You Need
Out of the box, Obsidian is a Markdown editor with linking. It’s the community plugins — over 2,000 of them now — that make it whatever you need it to be.
For me, the essentials are: Dataview (query your notes like a database), Calendar (daily notes at a glance), Git (version control for your vault — yes, I version-control my notes, don’t judge me), and Excalidraw (hand-drawn diagrams inside notes). With these four, Obsidian transforms from a note app into a lightweight personal knowledge management system.
The key insight is that you don’t need to install everything. One of the biggest mistakes new users make is treating the plugin store like a candy shop. I did this too. Week one, I had 47 plugins. Week three, I was down to the 8 I actually used. Start small and add only what solves a real problem — the same philosophy I bring to managing Docker Compose stacks where one well-configured service beats ten half-baked ones.
4. Daily Notes Changed My Workflow
I used to start my day by opening a dozen different tools — email, calendar, task manager, code editor. Now I open Obsidian. My daily note template has a section for today’s meetings, a quick task list, a “working on” block, and a space for random thoughts.
The magic isn’t the template. It’s that after a year, I can scroll back to any day and see exactly what I was working on, what decisions got made, and what was rattling around in my head. For someone managing an ICT division while pursuing a Master’s degree, that kind of continuity is invaluable.
The Bad: What Still Frustrates Me
I’m not here to sell you Obsidian. There are things about it that genuinely annoy me, and you should know about them before you invest your time.
1. Sync Costs Too Much for What It Is
Obsidian Sync costs $5 a month — or $48 a year. For what is essentially encrypted file synchronization, that’s steep. Yes, there are workarounds: you can use iCloud (Mac), Google Drive, Syncthing, or a DIY Git-based approach. I use the Git plugin and a private repo, which works perfectly and costs nothing.
But here’s the thing — the official sync is good. It’s end-to-end encrypted, it handles conflicts gracefully, and it “just works” across devices. If you’re not technical enough to set up your own sync solution (or you just don’t want to), you’ll be paying. And I think that price point keeps a lot of people — especially students and freelancers in the Philippines where $5/month isn’t trivial — from adopting the tool fully.
2. The Mobile App Still Feels Like an Afterthought
I do a lot of reading and quick capture on my phone — catching ideas while commuting, reviewing notes between meetings. Obsidian’s mobile app works, but it doesn’t feel great. The plugin ecosystem on mobile is inconsistent. Some plugins work perfectly, others break entirely, and troubleshooting on a phone screen is not my idea of a good time.
The startup time is also noticeably slow if you have a large vault with community plugins. My vault has about 1,800 notes and takes 8-10 seconds to fully load on my phone. That doesn’t sound like much until you’re trying to jot down an idea before it escapes.
3. The Learning Curve Is Real, and the Community Can Be Intimidating
Go on YouTube and search “Obsidian setup.” You’ll find people with vaults that look like mission control — dashboards, progress bars, automated workflows, color-coded everything. It’s impressive. It’s also completely overwhelming if you’re just trying to take better notes.
I spent my first month trying to build the “perfect” vault structure before I’d written twenty notes. That’s backwards. The structure should emerge from your thinking, not the other way around. My advice to anyone starting: write 100 notes first. Then organize. Don’t optimize what doesn’t exist yet.
Who Should Use Obsidian (And Who Shouldn’t)
Obsidian is for people who think in connections. If you’re a developer, researcher, writer, or student who regularly needs to link ideas across domains, you’ll love it. If you’re an ICT manager juggling multiple projects, standards, and teams — like me — the ability to link a meeting note to a project spec to a compliance document is genuinely transformative.
Obsidian is not for people who want a polished all-in-one platform. If you love Notion’s database views and team collaboration features, Obsidian will feel bare-bones. If you’re not comfortable with Markdown syntax (even basic stuff like headers and links), the friction might outweigh the benefits. And if you need real-time collaboration — Google Docs-style — look elsewhere. Obsidian is a personal tool first.
The Verdict: A Year Later
Here’s what I didn’t expect: Obsidian changed how I think, not just how I take notes.
I’m more intentional about connecting ideas now. When I learn something new, I ask myself — what does this connect to? What existing note should link here? That mental habit, more than any feature, is what made the tool stick.
Is Obsidian perfect? No. The sync pricing annoys me, the mobile experience needs love, and the plugin quality control is hit-or-miss. But none of these issues are dealbreakers, because the core experience — writing in plain text, linking ideas freely, and building a personal knowledge base that grows with you — is rock solid.
When people ask me whether they should try Obsidian, I tell them this: don’t download it because you saw someone’s beautiful graph on Twitter. Download it because you have ideas worth connecting. Start with five notes and three links. Do that for a week. If it clicks, you’ll know.
For me, it clicked. And a year and 1,800 notes later, I can’t imagine working any other way.
Bottom line: my chaos has a structure now. It’s not perfect, but it’s mine — plain text files and all.