I’ve been using Obsidian as my go-to note-taking application. Moving from Evernote and from Roam back into the habit of writing local markdown. I wanted to write about one of the biggest benefits I’m experiencing, and it’s about interacting of systems which where previously disconnected.

The systems I’m talking about are CRM’s, time-tracking, personal knowledge management and others like creating a fountain for intersecting ideas.

Years ago I started out with a home-grown CRM, allowing me to keep everything by myself, but the burden of developing an entire interface just for managing stuff took me for long way around…

Since moving to Obsidian I’ve been writing little scripts, utilities & shortcuts with Keyboard Meastro to connect those systems together. And the solutions for getting data into Obsidian are often way smaller and the interface (markdown) is easy to tinker around with…

To me, Obsidian is an abstract system that allows me to knead different systems together and link them to create new interactions… From highlights from PDFs, straight into suggested links for persons that have related tags… Or automatically discovering persons that might be relevant for knowledge you’re currently looking at.

Previously all data was siloed away into it’s own application and only targeted development could set it free for one specific purpose… Now, interacting is just a (missing) bi-directional link away. This is one step further than just managing your knowledge, namely the emergent factor of discovery from these interconnected systems. Curious what it looks like? Here’s the graph:

Right know I have around 1000 notes into Obsidian, split around 500 persons, 100 daily notes, highlights from 300 books and around 50 projects and other misc files… Exploring links between those all (which where previously disconnected) is one of my main focus points now. As might be writing some fiction….