Articles

Today I want to discuss some tools which can be helpful for keeping note-taking clean and consistent. I am using Obsidian for academic research.

I have a mixture of a Wiki-based approach, where I have a "Frontpage" which links into different surface-level topics which then link to even more detailed notes. I also have literature notes, notes with thoughts and summaries of different methodology, and so on, implementing some form of "Zettelkasten" approach. Then I have notes for certain people (e.g., students or collaborators), daily notes where I basically dump down thoughts during the day, event-related notes, and various other things.

I have written in the past about how I use the Dataview plugin in Obsidian to create tables and lists from content. Lately, I have also been looking into the DataviewJS functionality. Here, rather than SQL scripting, you can use the full power of JavaScript to create even more advanced automations.

In this article, I will discuss how to use DataviewJS to create multiple headings and tables in a row from a single Dataview embed.

Obsidian and especially the ecosystem around Obsidian plugins and themes is blooming. Therefore, I have been searching around Obsidian and have collected some materials around this ecosystem. In this article, I discuss a number of places worthy to look at (except my website, of course ;-)).

As I blogged recently I have been reading the book Atomic Habits and rethought some daily processes in terms of how I approach habits.

Recently I really got into non-fiction books. I picked up a couple of productivity/self-help kind of books along the way. One is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I won't go into a "full" book review, nor will I summarize the whole books. There's probably several websites which already have done so, so I'll keep this section short. I will split this article in half: First some initial thoughts on the book which stood out to me, and then how I implemented some ideas from the book into my daily life.

One of my biggest issues with many new productivity tools in the cloud is actually my data privacy when using them. While I would love to play around with fancy new tools like Craft or Roam, I will not put any real work related information in these tools.

I am using Dataview in Obsidian to create some light automation in Obsidian, similar to what you could do in something like Notion. There's an inline syntax for settings fields.

In our university, we have regular meetings with all students plus staff and faculty, where we discuss the progress of each research project. For this, I have been taking notes, weekly, summarizing the progress of each project I am co-advising.

The way I do so has changed a couple of times over the time. I used to use paper handwritten notes, but then switched to digital handwritten notes when I bought my iPad.

Recently, since I moved most of my note-taking to Obsidian, I moved most meeting notes to Obsidian. In this article I will discuss how to automatically manage them with the help of some plugins like Dataview.

For knowledgement I am using a combination of Obsidian and DevonThink. Why two apps? Well, I like to keep text notes (mainly "my own thoughts") and archived materials (both created by myself, but lots of literature, too) seperate.

Recently, one of my most valuable Obsidian plugins seems to be Breadcrumbs.

The idea is simple: You define a hierarchical relationship of your documents and it will automatically display a hierarchy at the start of the document.