right I've got I've got a very specific we've got a list all right excellent a little list because I wanted to um I wanted to ask you about this first before we crack into obsidian in in some depth I wondered if we could frame the conversation just a little bit and so I'm gonna I'm gonna pitch this idea to you and see what you think so I'm coming at this from a position of well a bit of background you told me about obsidian months ago and you said go and have a look and I went
and had a look and did a poor job of having a look tester he said but my immediate impression was has actually persisted since I've been doing more work on it so I come to the conversation today with quite a specific question now I I wonder whether it's not worthwhile if we're going to distribute this message out to people to say there are resources to go and look at on YouTube and maybe we can curate some links for people if you just want to get a flavor of what obsidian is and when you see the
screen share that hopefully you're going to see from you it'll make a bit more sense but we can do a bit of background stuff but rather than getting into the background stuff because the problem that I've had with obsidian so far is everything I've heard about has been about what I think is probably the first half of obsidian which is maybe in simple terms the kind of creative part of writing notes and making links and then seeing those links grow and this enormous Matrix built around all of these kind of ideas that you might have
I listened to Ingo and Jason's podcast you know on the rig which is a great podcast series although the last episode I think is two and a half hours long yeah so I mean there's quite a bit of chat in the first half there about what's going on in their lives which you can kind of I think you can skip through I do yes yes nice but but in Jason's case he was he's a real obsidian evangelist it seems he's come to it and he loves it and the example he gave was a great example
of doing in Australia what's called a Texa review which is I think if you work in higher ed every five or six years your whole university gets reviewed for its academic quality so it's everything from the highest level governance right down to the delivery of individual courses and all the minutiae so he's taken on this project for his university and it's an enormous piece of work and I've known people spend three or four years at the very high level building up rooms full of documentation to support one of these reviews so he's using obsidian to
find all of the material that he's going to need for this review but not just do it in a traditional kind of filing structure it seems but to create a 3D Matrix a map of the links between things so this is the point where I get to and I think yeah this is great although nagging in the back of my mind is this constant question about is this going to be worth it what happens then is where I start to become interested and where I think my barrier my obstacle is this is the threshold concept
for me I love the idea that you can make all these connections it sounds really creative that you can make these notes and you can pull all these things together it seems to me at that point then the whole project Falls over because instead of having something simple to turn into what's going to have to be a two-dimensional linear report for Texa or a PhD thesis or a book or something like that you've now got this overwhelming mass of swirling stuff with multiple networks and nodes and that seems to me to be exactly getting in
the way of actually doing something productive with it right so the conversation I would love to have with you today is about what you use it for and how you actually use this Matrix once you've built it yeah yeah that's how you filter through everything to make something actually useful to it so I think that's fine and I think the to start off with I would say that in obsidian you have the concept of volts which is it's like a folder um but it's a folder that's separated from other vaults within obsidian and so what
a lot of people tend to do when I've seen people using obsidian is they combine all of these things together so I have three different vaults for obsidian the one is called daily notes the one is called commonplace like a commonplace book which is the collection of ideas and then I have a writing Vault and those three things are separate and those notes don't talk to each other and they're not aware of each other so your question about how do you write and not have all those things get in the way of it well I
write in a writing Vault that's completely separate to the idea generating vault so I just start sharing my screen are you happy for me to interject the questions or do you want me to just let you flow for a while no you stop it what would you prefer anything you want can you just okay can you see my screen I can see me can you see that now yeah there you go right okay so straight away I've got a question which is that the stuff that goes into your daily notes if you then want to
write with it you've just said that that vault is completely separate and doesn't talk to the writing box so presumably you have to move it from one into the other no no because I'm writing so I'll write and I'll just write and then if I hit if I come up against the wall and I don't know what to write anymore then I'll go to my idea Vault and I'll query something from the idea Vault I'll go to the idea Vault for ideas not to write so what are you writing about if not ideas so I
feel like I need to show you um yeah um all right so okay so what you're looking at now this is my daily notes fault so just to give you an example I'll start a new note and I'll start it here on Monday the 21st says the file does not exist you want to create it so this is my daily note template so yeah because it's text you can create your own templates and these are all the things that I'm going to be doing for the day and I use this to um like if I
have a meeting then I create links to meeting notes and and blah blah blah so this is the kind of just every day I make notes in this vault but also have this commonplace vault and that's obviously just from commonplace book and this is a place where I just dump ideas and you'll see it kind of looks the same here but it's a little bit different so I've set up the tabs um on this side the panels on the right and the left side a little bit differently so if I pick this one then you
can see that the local graph displays here so immediately I can get a sense of how many other things this note is connected to but that's only within the commonplace Vault this is only within commonplace so these notes are all very short they you know tags I connect to other notes I can see incoming links I can see outgoing links I can see unlinked mentions this is where I capture all of my literature notes so if I'm reading a book um like at the moment I'm reading this book on embodied Computing as I'm reading all
of this content everything that I highlight and annotate in that book gets pulled into these literature notes so that's all an automated process same thing happens with articles podcasts tweets um I've got conference notes going back 10 years those are all in here and this is just a place for me to play around with ideas I'll go through these notes I'll link to other notes and and so on so you feel fairly good with how that works and then I have a writing vault and if I want to I don't know there's a little thing
on citizen science this is for a course that I'm running at the moment so this is where I'll just write um and if I need to draw from an idea well then I'll go to my commonplace notes and I don't think I have anything on citizen science no so I've got no notes yeah so that might say to me okay well before I can start writing about citizen science I should go and do some reading on citizen science then I might go to my library which I use zotero for some people will pull their Library
into obsidian and I feel like you can get to a point where obsidian becomes this Hammer that you're going to use to hit everything with um and I feel like the the library um I think it can work and I think some people have made it work I prefer to use zotero for my library so I'll go to zotero and that's where I track everything that I want to follow up on and read and you haven't got anything on citizen science but let's say you were going to do a piece of writing on artificial intelligence
now I know you'll have tons of stuff so if you opened up a writing note um on artificial intelligence yeah show me how you'd go about drawing back on your um I suppose your commonplace folder or your or your what you call your daily notes folder how would you pull that material into what you're then going to be writing about I don't um so maybe this isn't a good example because it's uh it's just a simple definition so let me look for robots must adapt to Norms around interaction so this is a more detailed note
right um so I might look at this and the the concept here is that we need to have robots adapt to human Norms around interaction and in order to do that we are really going to have people who are building robots who are familiar with human psychology and sociology and all of these ideas about how humans interact because those are going to be the the social and cultural norms that influence the way that robots should behave what we're seeing is that um humans are adapting their behavior to fit around what robots are capable of so
what I'm getting from this note isn't so much the content but it's this idea so I'm trying to capture an idea which is that you know we need to design robots that adapt to our behavior and our sociology um when I'm writing I'm not looking to copy and paste information from this note I'm trying to find ideas within the commonplace collection of notes that give me inspiration or motivation or that help me make connections to whatever I'm writing about in the writing vault right but herein lies the Crux of the issue because of course you
could do that in any form you could do that in a Word document you could do that in a traditional file system you could do that in Evernote you could do that in Ulysses you've got many places you could do that in the point about obsidian is not that you want to look you're interested in that note but I look at the bottom for instance at the green related text yeah and the tags you've got that little icon seems to suggest that there are three four five six seven eight additional notes that are related to
that theme and each one of those might have eight additional notes related to them and each one of those might have it and it becomes exponential right so if you're talking about this just purely from a note by note basis then I don't see obsidian as being any different so how do you stop the Mania of the exponential increase information you've got linked all together here and then actually write something about how robots must relate to human Norms well because these ideas at the bottom here with their link they're related but if I'm thinking about
the way that um robots should relate to um to us to groups of human beings some of this is like yeah educational AI must adapt to learning science that's a related idea because it's talking about how technology needs to adapt to something that we value so learning science it's a related idea but it's not it's not going to be a part of what I'm writing about with robots so first of all not all of the links are necessary for me to follow um types of robots in clinical practice you can you know I can without
going into the notes I can just pull it up here and look at it well you know this also isn't really relevant this is a list of types of robot form factors and um not behaviors but the kinds of tasks that these kinds of robots might be called to do this also wouldn't really be useful for the article that I'm writing about you know robots and and human behavior um this might be interesting social and cultural norms dictate what information is appropriate so the point isn't just that I'm randomly following all of these links I
might look at this and say okay social and cultural norms dictate what information is appropriate to share with other people okay so how does this relate to my idea around robots adapting to our Norms um so I'm going to pause with with the note and say you know really reflect on it does this help me take my writing in a different direction does this spoken idea that I maybe wouldn't have got to if I was just writing um so I think for me the linking of the notes um if I just come here to edit
again um while I'm reading this um I don't know I'm just uh virtual Norm so if I come back here um it's suggesting our social network Theory is that something that I need to look at is social network analysis something that I need to look at do I need to because now that I've seen this maybe it's boxed the idea that you know what the thing that I'm writing about robots what it lacks at the moment is some kind of framework that it would you know give what I'm writing about a little bit more substance
maybe I need to go look at Social Network Theory maybe that's something that will help me better understand the interaction between robots and people so the way that I think about the commonplace notes is not so much that they're a kind of a source of information although they definitely are and and I do use them in that way but while I'm doing the writing I just dip into the commonplace and I sometimes will just write keywords out and see what the this Vault gives back to me sometimes it gives me back things that I'm expecting
but sometimes they're really unexpected notes that come back at me and that that kind of serendipity has been um really useful in generating some of the ideas that I've been thinking about lately when you're reviewing notes do you ever go back over some of the related notes that you've highlighted in there and think well I've never really gone in that direction with this so I'm just going to delete it I mean when you're writing the note and you're you're adding the your your prospectively trying to imagine how you're going to be using it in the
future so I'll put a tag in here just to link it to X Y and Z but you don't know in five years time or two years time that that's actually going to be the relevant link you're going to be making so do you have to go back and constantly edit the notes and the links I try not to preemptively imagine what I'm going to use the note for so with this note um I don't know if I just say yeah sharing the wrong information with the wrong people at the wrong time I can decide
that that might be a note worth making at some point even though it's not a note now so if I surround it with brackets now this becomes a note um you can see it's included now here um it's a note that doesn't exist that's what this icon means but now if I start and now I've got a new tab it's called Untitled and I just type some random stuff and I've got a template that I just used to add this in and now I start saying wrong information ah here's a little note and so I
click that and now these two notes are connected so I'm trying not to be too prescriptive about how I build the notes um and you know what I'll probably just leave this link here um because who knows maybe in the future I'll be I'll be trying to think about what is the wrong information mean um you know I don't know does that does that kind of give you some suggestion about how I might be thinking to be honest when I'm writing this linking the notes I'm not thinking about it too much I literally come here
to the related part and I start thinking so I might say this is about information uh information Theory so here's something about noise this is what the field is how do we think about error correction in information Theory so I might just add that as a keyword and then just scroll through the existing notes that I have this will also search this you can see a literature notes article I've got an article on Claude Shannon the founder of information Theory maybe this is enough for me to now say you know what I should actually go
and read this note so this is a note now I've got some highlights so at some point I've I've read this article um so I guess that's a very long answer to your question about yes the notes are constantly being edited adapted pruned um but I don't think about that too much in the moment when I'm creating the notes so your preference is to use three volts but you said that some people will just throw everything into one volt and then presumably for some people as well they will they will literally cut and paste from
one note into another as they're building a text document yes I actually I started doing that so I started with a single Vault that included daily notes commonplace notes and I I always found it difficult to write in obsidian when it was linked in with the daily notes and the commonplace notes so I've always written in something else and for a while I was using vs code which is just another text editor um I've tried loads of different text editors I used to write a lot in Evernote when I still use the Evernote I've used
simple notes um so I have tried to keep the writing process separated at some points I realized that combining the daily notes and the commonplace notes just wasn't working for me um because what I found is that I was using the daily notes typing up notes and just creating links to everything you know it's it's you know just because something it because it's so easy to link I was just linking everything whereas I'm far more intentional about creating links between notes um when I've got them separated out into this different Vault and then in my
daily notes which is just my you know what did I do today with you know meetings and random thoughts sometimes I'll be in a meeting and I'll have a thought about something somebody says something and I think oh that that's an interesting point I'll make a note of it in my daily note and then after the meeting I'll go and recreate that note in my commonplace I won't link I won't try and link to it um and then I might just you know keep the quote there and then just leave it and I might only
come back to it in six months time when it gets surfaced as part of my kind of serendipitous search for other ideas you know it may be something I've completely forgotten about so I leave a lot of notes in kind of half-formed um you know just I don't know it it clearly isn't a real thing um it's got no connections it's gotten the links and I do have a lot of notes that are orphans so they're not connected to anything else which also is fine I mean it's text so who cares you know if if
that note never ever comes up again and it remains in orphan for the next 20 years who cares I'm not going to go and try and prune it so that it looks pretty in the graph View and there's definitely some things about obsidian that I know probably resonate with you very strongly you've talked about this before with me about the fact that I mean I think it's still free um the software I think Inger and Jason mentioned that that it was free for the time being and while they would expect it at some point it's
going to be monetized at the moment it's free it's completely open source um all the information is stored on your local computer so it's not in a cloud anywhere and it's all written in markdown language and again this might be something that people who are not familiar with that stuff wouldn't maybe not know about but is a really useful thing to use if you could just open up a note which has got some markdown on yeah so here's my commonplace fault and here's my daily notes fault so that's stored on your computer yeah yeah so
if I go here to commonplace like these are all in plain text yeah um categories of distraction costs got no idea what's in this note but you can see um oh well weird this is a very old note because this template is not something that I've had for a long time so I'll just go here and I'll say hi Dave and if I save this note and go back to obsidian and I go open transaction costs so we go to categories of transaction costs it says hi Dave yeah so the fact that you can yeah
just edit you can edit the plain text um so you don't need any fancy there you go there's the markdown language those use of hashtags and brackets it's basically four or five little keyboard keys that just allow you to do everything yeah obsidian isn't actually open source um oh okay it's uh just hang on a sec um but they've they promised that it will always be free um however because all of the notes and all of the links between notes it uses these square brackets and this now is the de facto standard for internal links
there's probably about five other platforms that you can use that you just basically install this other program you point it to your folders um and you know off you go I've I've experimented with using something called dendron which is another type of I guess note taking personal knowledgement app and it works perfectly well so if obsidian goes away tomorrow there's three or four options that I can choose from some of which are open source um and so I'm not worried about um you know whether or not they start my they actually are monetizing already so
you can pay for obsidian sync um which is where you can sync between devices so you can install the mobile app on your phone and then it'll sync the data between the mobile app and your and your desktop I just use Dropbox to synchronize notes across all my devices and you know the number of times I am ever out with my phone where I absolutely have to capture a note it's really rare and then I tend to use a simple note-taking app for that has this has this answered my question okay so one of the
one of the barriers then that I think a lot of people have when they hear about obsidian and they see people's vaults libraries is they think oh my God it just looks daunting to document all that stuff I mean you're a very disciplined very productive academic in this respect you're very conscious of the ways in which you gather information store information manage how you do your personal academic acknowledgment I think you're very you're very disciplined in that respect now how long have you been using obsidian uh probably about a year and a half um and
in that time just ballpark how many uh days during that year and a half have you not used it well I use it every day now I live in it now every day um I've been wanting something like obsidian for almost as long as I've been an academic I've been collecting notes I've been collecting uh presentations uh articles um you know anything just collecting a lot of things and never really knowing exactly what to do with it I used to have I used to have hundreds and hundreds of notes in this simple note folder okay
this is AI and Society these are notes that I I could have made five years ago I could have made it seven years ago I have no idea but I have these notes I try to if not daily then at least on a semi-regular basis I try to go through these notes and move these notes into obsidian I'm trying to work through all the articles that I've ever written and move Concepts from those articles into obsidian my conference presentations are all going into obsidian um where I'm trying to extract what is most useful the kinds
of things that are most meaningful to me the kinds of things that I keep coming back to um so I've my PhD is now almost 10 years old I haven't done it yet but at some point I need to go through my PhD and pull out all the pieces of information that I still refer to because what I do now is I go back to the PHD and I have to do a keyword search and those but it's not about you actually is that about you actually putting that material to use or is it an
archival project that that you you expect never to use some of that stuff but you want it in one form no if I go through a presentation that I've given in the past and I mean I already have all of that stuff archived it's all in my library it's all in zotero so there is an archive of it and I can find it and I can go through all of that stuff really easily what I'm trying to do is pull out pieces of information that maybe I refer to regularly or maybe I haven't thought about
it since I submitted my thesis um but I want I want it to be useful and you know I've got notes that I haven't looked at so after I made these notes on AI and Society I haven't looked at these notes since I made them because it's really difficult to go through you know this long document and find something useful because this is not from a single Source this is all pulled out from multiple sources but in reality in I mean this is get better the Crux of the issue with obsidian if you started reading
just the notes you got on obsidian never mind the ones you've got in Evernote and one note in zotero and wherever else you've stored them over the years if you're anything like me you'll write a lot of stuff all the time oh series just wants to interject here hang on let's shut that off they'll be millions of words of notes already in there and of course every day that you are using obsidian and writing more notes you would have to read 10 notes that exist for every one that you write just to get through them
all so the likelihood is you will never read some of those notes many of them perhaps most of them so you're generating a ton of material of which only the tiniest fraction you're ever going to use and so I guess obsidian helps in the sense that on the one hand it would help you find the stuff that you want in the moment much faster more much more efficiently than if you're just doing a hand draw I get that but there's an enormous amount of work involved just on the off chance that you're going to be
wanting that note in the future yeah it's worth it I mean just to like go back to the Ingo and Jason conversation there was a sentence in there that struck me really strongly that resonated very much with my kind of state of mind about this anger said to Jason this she was looking at this rotating three-dimensional map that he had of his vault for this Texas review and she said it's beautiful to look at wouldn't it be great if the reviewers could just have that and of course her point was similar to me I think
that the kind of knowledge that's implied in a Texas review is three-dimensional you would want to review it to pursue a link that goes in that direction or possibly that direction or Texture in that direction and to be able to then track back and then go that way in this way of course that's not the document that they ask for what they ask for is section one is on standard one how does the University manage its governance to ensure the quality of academic delivery chapter two is about statement two so she's saying it's lovely to
a point I think this is what she's saying it's lovely to a point but at some point you're going to have to turn that three-dimensional map into a two-dimensional document and that's where I think a is all of that work worth it and B does obsidian just make the task more difficult rather than making it more straightforward yeah so I I wouldn't use obsidian to create the kind of documents that he's talking about because that kind of document and that kind of process in my opinion is inherently hierarchical and very structured obsidian is really good
for things that are unstructured like the thoughts that bounce around in your head and connect to other ideas you know without you really thinking about it too much so I think obsidian is really valuable for that I you I might write that other documents using obsidian because you can still use folders and separate notes and you can still create links between the documents so that it's easy to go from one to the other but in that case it would be more like a cross-referenced Word document um and so obsidian can be used for that kind
of writing as well and I think just using it as a plain text or markdown writing editor works really well for that so if I was going to write a long structured hierarchical document that's all about sections and chapters I'd still use obsidian but the internal links wouldn't be about connecting ideas it would be about internal references so if you want to see the policy documents that this chapter is informed by well then here's a link to that policy document that might be worth doing um but I was less enthusiastic about the way that he's
using it for that project so if there was um this is a very binary kind of image but on a line that goes from fully creative Innovative um messy thinking through to the kind of productivity so creativity to productivity at this end where productivity is the most mundane quotidian every day much of the work we have to do in Academia um the actual production of an article or production of a book or production of a report or production of a class schedule or something would you say that obsidian for you sits closer towards the creative
messy end of the scale no it fits it fits in multiple places that's why I have three votes right so you have a vault for different kinds of yeah so it like the create the creativity side of things is my commonplace fault and that's where I dump ideas and that's where I'm trying to extract information from things that I've done in the past or I see a picture or a cartoon I put all of that stuff in there those are things that make me happy and give me delight and you know just the world is
an interesting place and I want to capture interesting things about the world so a quote that I come across I've got poems in there you know it's just a place that give me joy when I come across them again and I may not have other opportunities to come across them again and so there's that part of it it's common placing and that's why I like the commonplace name for it um it's just this collection of things that I think are wonderful in the world um there are definitions and and that sort of thing in there
as well um but I'm in a very different mindset when I'm working in that compared to when I'm in a writing when I'm in the writing Vault and both of those mindsets are very different to where I'm at when I'm in the daily notes fault when I'm in Daily notes I'm in meetings I'm in emails I mean the administrative part of higher education and I spend most of my day in my daily notes fault unfortunately but it's given me a structure and a way of managing what can sometimes feel like the overwhelming chaos of everything
that's going on around me in the part of my job that um maybe is a little bit less structured so my daily notes gives me structure and it allows me to plan out my day plan out my week plan out my month I set objectives I allocate time to those objectives it's as you say it's the mundane kind of daily operational stuff that allows us to make progress um so that's my daily notes and I spend a lot of time in Daily notes but for about an hour a day if I'm reading an article and
I see a passage that resonates with me I'll pull out that Passage in the whole article I might pull out five passages Maybe they resonate with me I saw the article in zotero and that's my library it's now there and I take notes and but I may only pull out five passages with a little bit of a note about what those passages mean to me they may be completely disconnected from what the auth from what the author meant but when I read this it made me think of this I pulled that into my commonplace I
put the quote reference it and then I write a little thing when I read this it made me think of this I'll link that to other notes it's a way of trying to for me stimulate a creative process that I don't feel when I'm writing when I'm writing I'm trying to move an argument from A to B sometimes I get stuck sometimes I refer to the commonplace but not always I'm actually mostly referring to zotero because I'm looking for support for arguments and I'm getting that out of zotero so I'm using excuse me so in
in Practical terms you do your writing in a different app it might as well be for the longest time I did my writing in a different app so that I kept it separate from um you know the creativity the operational stuff and I've used vs code um to do quite a lot of writing in the past as I say I've used Evernote simple note um and then I realized I just had this app you know I can do the same thing in obsidian and with obsidian with a few keyboard shortcuts I can strip away all
the Chrome so that it really is just a cursor on a blank screen and that that's what I'm going to be writing in I'm just wondering you know where we go next because I love this conversation it was really cool I I've already started looking around for something that I can pull into obsidian that's going to surface notes for me um when I need it I want you know you kind of touched on this idea um am I am I just recreating in obsidian something that looks a little bit prettier is maybe a little bit
more efficient than trawling through some of my existing notes I don't think it is and and maybe I don't have a good reason for that but I do know that when I saw obsidian I felt like I I saw the solution to a question that I've been asking for more than 10 years and Jason said the same thing to me in the podcast really um yeah yeah yeah so for me it was you know I I saw it and I thought my search is over I've I've found the thing that I've been looking for maybe
that says more about my personality and my need to gather things control things um I I don't know um but I I can definitely say that I I feel a sense of of delight and joy when I'm putting things into obsidian and it triggers off sometimes a series of connections that maybe I would have had anyway um but I really do find that I have I feel this is I mean completely subjective obviously but I feel like I have come up with more creative ideas since using obsidian than before and maybe the same would have
been true if I was making notes on a piece of paper maybe it's not obsidian maybe it's the fact that now I'm spending half an hour to an hour a day thinking about things maybe that's what has led to me feeling like I've got more creative ideas but for me there there has been enormous value in in the process well I've got one more offering for you before we go and I've been away after I saw you but we met in the UK I went to Italy as you know and I went I started working
bologna and in the bologna Museum of Modern Art they had this see this uh yeah so it's a 3D printed guy yeah and in Bologna they have local slang for this kind of thing it's called umalil okay and it says on the box here the hardest thing to do is to work hard when nobody's watching you so they have these like in probably most cities men retirement in older men who stand outside usually building sites where the grill where the wire meshes around the building site and they stand there like this and they look and
they kind of comment on the fact that they shouldn't be doing it like that and they stand there for hours so this has been made as a 3D printed thing increase your productivity with your personal email just place it on your desk and let him watch over you that beautiful I love it I love it do you know so I have my own personal email I I love that I need one of those because something one of the earliest things that I put into obsidian was a little quote um that uh I just think about
all the time it says somewhere someone is working harder than you and I always think of that and I always think ah damn it paranoia I need I need to I need to do more I need to be better yeah Marx would be turning in his grave cool all right if you have any other questions about obsidian come back to me I know where to come I I enjoyed this conversation it was good took us into different places it certainly did
