Navigating College and Marketing with Obsidian: A Game Changer in Note-Taking

As a third-year Marketing major at Penn State, transitioning from the satellite campus of Penn State Brandywine to the main campus introduced me to a host of new challenges and opportunities. The shift wasn't just moving away from my friends and family; it marked a turning point in my education that forced me to rethink how I study. Obsidian has fundamentally transformed my approach to note-taking, organization, and even the way I perceived information management, and creative professionals who value efficiency and privacy should be taking notes.

The Obsidian Revelation

Before Obsidian, my note-taking was conventional and fragmented. Each course, project, and personal endeavor was siloed, making it challenging to see connections and leverage insights across different aspects of my life. Enter Obsidian, and the narrative changed. What captivated me was not just the unique approach to formatting with markdown, but also its unique approach to linking thoughts and ideas, akin to how neurons connect in the brain.

What in the world is markdown?

Markdown is probably my favorite park of Obsidian, and the main reason why I will never use Microsoft Word or OneNote for taking notes ever again. Imagine being able to format a word document without ever touching your mouse, and not having to spend a year learning shortcuts to do it. Thats how intuitive and helpful markdown is. To put it simply, it's an intuitive shortcut system that lets you write out plain text, and formats it automatically once you're done writing. You can use hashtags for headings, dashes for bullet points, and brackets for links, and everything will just be formatted properly. No dragging to select text or fiddling with font sizes and types, whats on a line is formatted however you format the line. Markdown has probably helped me save at least 30 hours of formatting documents alone at this point. Going from having to drag text boxes around in OneNote to effortlessly typing notes in obsidian has been a breath of fresh air for me that I cannot overstate.

Customization and the Multi-Vault Approach

The customization options Obsidian offers are a boon for me as someone wearing so many hats between student life and professional freelance marketing. Using the convenient "Vault" file storage system, obsidian lets me segregate my academic notes, marketing projects, and personal musings into distinct yet interlinkable spaces. This segmentation allowed for a clear definition between my roles as a student, a freelance marketer working with a variety of clients, and my personal development pursuits, ensuring that focus on one area didn't bleed into another uninvited. It also has another unique benefit I had never even thought about until I had began to use it, it was effortlessly secure where other applications I use daily will never be. Storing my files on my own device, syncing them direct from my phone to computer through my encrypted iCloud, and backing them up direct to a hard drive are all so much more convenient than dealing with a Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive when handling sensitive files. However, I could still format and send documents in traditional formats or via convenient links through plugins

Creating a Perfect Workspace

Plugins are another part of Obsidian that just FEEL right to me as a creative professional. Much like Notion, Obsidian can be customized to exactly how you want your space to be, but unlike Notion, you are free to code and inject whatever tools into Obsidian that you could need, including obscure and unique workflows.

For me, this meant that I could export my markdown files as fully prepped office docx files for emailing, and could even generate secure encrypted note links at no cost to me on a decentralized server. But more than that, there are an endless number of little plugins that make my day to day life easier.

Take "Smart Connections" by Brian Petro for instance. This one plugin alone will change the way you interact and think of your notes, and it barely scratches the surface of what Obsidian can do for you. Imagine if your notebook could talk back to you and tell you the things you've forgotten. Thats exactly what Smart Connections does. Using an embeddings model and your choice of local or hosted large language model, such as ChatGPT, you can ask your notes about any topic that you have written about, and it will find the best notes to answer your question and summarize your insights back to you.

Making Smart Connections to Lifelong Learning

Think for a second about how valuable everything you've ever written is suddenly. When I am writing notes for school, I am no longer writing to remember for a semester. I am writing to build a knowledge-base which I can use as a resource forever, which gets smarter as I feed it more. I feed it text versions of snippets of my textbooks, presentations, and every insights I could offer my future self. This singular plugin changed the way I take notes in a way that has allowed me to connect to my classes further, while also giving me more tangible future value out of my degree. Suddenly, everything I am learning is a long term effort instead of just a short term one, and every class I take is a new module of knowledge that I can interact with for years to come as long as I keep maintaining the files and backing them up.

This goes for marketing as well. What works, what doesn't, when have tools and strategies led to results. Now I can not only tap into my marketing classes insights as I work on real world projects, but I can probe my notes to see how I handled prior projects, retrieve brand guidelines, and collaborate with an assistant that can reason effortlessly within the bounds of the digital world I live in. Without Obsidian, everything here would be solely mine to re-compile every time I need to accomplish something, but instead, it is now all neatly organized into a relational knowledge graph

Conclusion

Obsidian has changed the way I approach note taking, writing, and productivity, and regardless of if you are an avid-notetaker or someone to play things by ear, it is worth giving a shot. After some time fiddling around with the different plugins, themes, and learning some basics in markdown, you too may find yourself re-inventing your note-taking strategy and unlocking a new world of productivity.