A PKM Revelation - Obsidian Local Graphs
A lovely new discovery to help with seeing connections between notes
This may be old news for any of you who are veteran Obsidian users. If this not old news and you are not familiar with Obsidian, it’s a note taking app that is especially popular with people who are embracing personal knowledge management (PKM), and the ideas behind “Building a Second Brain” and “Linking Your Thinking”. Said much better, at Obsidian.md:
A second brain, for you, forever.
Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.
I’m still very much a novice at using Obsidian, just a few weeks in, but I’m already appreciating some of its core features - including its speed while creating and interacting with notes, end-to-end encrypted sync that appears to work in very close to real time, and most notably how helpful it is in creating backlinks and visual ways to connect notes and thoughts and ideas. Becoming that extensible knowledge base and a big part of my efforts to get better at PKM.
This weekend, while cheating on Obsidian :) and getting back to using another note taking app I tried out a few years ago, I watched a great video on that other app and Obsidian. It was while watching the Notion vs Obsidian video that I had an “Aha, let’s rewind that” moment when local graphs in Obsidian were mentioned.
I knew about the Graph View in Obsidian, and it’s a cool feature in its own right. But … as I accumulated more and more notes in Obsidian, it became a little more challenging to navigate and make the best use of the graph. Since then, I’ve started trying out the local graphs, and they feel almost magical.
I know this is going to be my preferred graph view going forward. I hope it is also going to be useful when I’m learning and thinking.
Big thanks to Sergio at the FromSergio YouTube channel for doing this video that lead me to discovering local graphs. There was a second Aha moment for me later in the same video - on a different topic / tool - that I have a feeling I’ll be writing about soon.