Do you want to garden your notes or not?

As I’ve shared before, I’m all-in on using Obsidian for my note-taking right now. I’m very happy with how things are set up, and it’s working very well for me.

As I’ve used various note-taking platforms over the years, I’ve grouped them together in different ways. One way I recently shared was Sync vs Saas (essentially cloud-based vs local on your computer), but another way to split them is with systems that require tending and those that don’t.

At some level, this question doesn’t really matter. With any system you can choose to carefully garden it or not, and that will affect your level of results. However, I think certain tools simply need a higher level of care.

Evernote, for example, doesn’t. You can just dump notes in there, sort them into folders, and search when needed. Some care and feeding is helpful, but less important.

With Obsidian, though, that care and feeding is much more essential. It relies on those inter-note links, and without those the value drops quickly.

I enjoy tending my notes

In the last week I’ve had conversations with two different people regarding Obsidian in this manner, one on each side.

One person I had coffee with with thought that tending your notes like that sounds tedious and boring, which I can respect. The other other thought it sounded like a great way to gain insight, and might be kind of fun. Both were right, as we’re all different.