A Case for More Tools

When I discovered Obsidian a year ago, I was immediately smitten. I loved how fun it made note-taking and how intuitive it all felt. It felt like this software, more than anything I’d used before, was going to change the way I worked and lived.

I spent hours migrating parts of my existing workflow to Obsidian: Tasks would replace Todoist, the the Obsidian app with the Excalidraw plugin would replace Notability on my iPad, and an iframe Google Calendar embed meant I would never need to leave the app.

That was not smart.

I ended up spending more time tweaking my new todo list’s logic and structure than actually tracking tasks. The mobile app was frustrating to use; Where adding a todo item was near-instantaneous with Todoist, my Obsidian workflow was always a bit janky. Obsidian, even with Excalidraw, is not meant for handwritten notes and pencil support was nowhere near as fluid as Notability. using Google Calendar within an iframe meant frustrating responsivnes bugs and dimension restrictions. In short, it just didn’t work that well.

Diehard fans of Obsidian might argue that I wasn’t using it right, that if I had just spent more time setting things up properly, it would be more efficient than my previous workflow.

I attempted to use Obsidian as my central jack-of-all-trades tool for just over three months. I spent hours and hours adjusting. But in the end, the note-taking tool I was so thrilled to make the center of my personal, professional, and academic worlds, was just a very very good note-taking tool. That’s it. Forcing it to do more and discarding purpose-built tools like Notability in favor of a single app just wasn’t worth the productivity dip.

I still use Obsidian for my notes, but that’s where it ends. I’m now back to using Todoist, Notability, etc. and I’m very content knowing I’m using the best tools available.