6 Reasons People Switch Away From Obsidian

And why I'm doubling down on Obsidian for my personal knowledge management

When I searched “obsidian” on Medium, five of the first six articles that came up were about people leaving Obsidian for another tool, or another set of tools.

Notion has about 100 times more users than Obsidian. Notion is a madly popular tool.

As others are flocking to Notion and other places, I'm actually doubling down on my Obsidian vault.

I have faith that it's going to make my content creation a lot easier, and I'm choosing not to jump tools for the time being.

Here are my answers to some of the most common objections to Obsidian.

Objection 1: To-do lists are a pain.

Not going to argue on this point.

I did try the Tasks plugin for a bit. It works, and has a lot of capability. I was able to figure out a few things.

It ended up being more than I wanted to take on to get rid of an inexpensive Todoist subscription. Try as it might, the plugin just wasn't as easy to use as Todoist. No shade at it though (or the nearly 2.5 million downloads it's gotten).

I may give it another shot at some point, but it's not a must-have.

Answer: Like any multi-use tool, there are likely single-use tools that are better, and you're free to use them.

Objection 2: The Obsidian plugins kept breaking things.

I don't use a lot of esoteric plugins, and I don't try to automate a lot of things either.

Most of my plugin capability revolves around search, tags, and templates, and they're vanilla capabilities at that. I also choose stable ones with a lot of downloads, which helps with support as there's a wide interest in keeping things working well for everybody.

Answer: Choose extensions wisely and use only what you need.

Objection 3: Syncing a vault across multiple devices costs money.

With the advantages of local-first storage, syncing with Obsidian is an add-on, not a core feature.

I don't personally need to sync a lot. I'm usually working at my desktop when I'm creating content.

However, I do store my vault in a backed-up Dropbox folder. This provides syncing across multiple computers as long as I keep the software versions the same.

I even figured out a way to sync the vault to my Android device for free. I rarely use Obsidian on my phone, though. If I'm out and about, I'll record what I need elsewhere and put it in Obsidian later when I'm at my desk.

Answer: If syncing isn't important to you, don't worry about it!

Objection 4: Maintaining things in Obsidian is time-consuming and a lot of work.

That's true. It is a lot of work. (But then again, most things worthwhile are a lot of work.)

Truth be told, I was a bit disenchanted with Obsidian for this very reason.

Then I decided to do the work and have faith that if I did so, it would make content creation easier for me.

Answer: I chose between continuing to struggle, coming up with new ideas, and doing the content creation in pieces as I go along, and then having the easier job later of putting the pieces together.

Objection 5: My vault is overwhelming. Too. Many. Notes!

True again. If you're looking at everything in your vault or looking at the graph view of everything in your vault, it is overwhelming.

There are a number of ways of viewing the notes, however, that are not only not overwhelming, they're quite useful.

My system in Obsidian for getting the work done involves the following, among other things:

• Showing a few random notes and then making it easy to connect a few of them
• Using a subset of the graph view that zooms in on a particular area of my vault
• Pulling up various filtered lists of notes so I can give them some attention

Answer: If your vault is overwhelming you, it doesn't have to be. Filter!

Objection 6: It's too complicated (AKA there are too many options).

Again, it's true that there are a lot of options. That's a selling point (even though Obsidian is free).

I've also tried to do all the things, and it's easy to get bogged down with multiple ways to do something.

I've begun to settle on a relatively simple implementation that matches the way I think. (This is what Obsidian is good for, actually!) I've started to templatize the kinds of content I'm going to put into the vault so I can get into a rhythm and develop muscle memory for putting things in the right place to serve my purposes.

Answer: Every moderately complex tool has some kind of learning curve to use effectively. Take the time to power through it.

This is an exciting effort! (Can you tell?)

I haven't been this excited about putting something together in quite a while.

Building up the body of knowledge in my Obsidian vault is actually fun! I was up until nearly 5 AM recently because I was on such a roll.

I literally watched the overview transform from a mass of unconnected dots to something with structure, connections, and more than a bit of beauty:

The key point is this: I'm using Obsidian for the core tasks it was designed to do well, and tailoring it so that it lets me do them easily.

Once I get things packaged in a way that's more useful for me to pass on to others, I'd love to let you know about it!

If you want to journey with me on this kind of thing, check out Solid Cash Tips for regular insights on spending less, making more, and living well!

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