How Obsidian took over my brain in less than a week

I started drafting this post in Obsidian.

That alone says a lot, because I only started using it last week. In tech years, that’s practically “remarkably late.” I’ve been aware of Obsidian for ages—from Reddit, the YouTube tours of elaborate vault setups, the “this is my second brain” evangelists. But I always shrugged it off. I had Apple Notes for quick stuff, iA Writer for longer stuff, Trello for structured stuff… what else could I possibly need?

Turns out, quite a lot.

What Obsidian actually is (and why “second brain” isn’t just hype)

If you haven’t heard of it—and you somehow missed the internet’s obsession with networked thinking—Obsidian is a note-taking app. But calling it just that is like calling a Fender Jazz Bass “two pieces of wood with strings”.

The magic isn’t in the typing. It’s in the connections. Every note can link to every other note. That means ideas don’t just sit in folders; they weave together into a web you can actually navigate. It’s the closest I’ve come to an externalised brain that isn’t just a chaotic folder of half-finished documents.

In the background, it’s all just local markdown files. Plain text. No proprietary format, no platform lock-in. You could open them in a text editor from 1998 and they’d still work.

That’s huge. Because most “note-taking” tools live in their own little cloud ecosystem. Which means if the service dies, your notes either vanish or get exported into some archive that might be tricky to actually use.

The sync situation

If you do want your notes everywhere, you’ve got options:

• Obsidian Sync, their own encrypted service.
• iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Syncthing: these work because, again, we are talking about just files.

I went with iCloud for now. It’s not glamorous, but it works, and it means my phone and laptop are all staring at the same vault without me having to think about it.

The almost-acquisition that wasn’t

You might have heard Obsidian’s name pop up when Bending Spoons—the company that now owns Evernote—reportedly tried to buy them. The Obsidian CEO Steph Ango said absolutely not.

And it was a good call. Bending Spoons has a reputation for reshaping the products they acquire—sometimes in a “buy-fire-milk” model as someone once described it—but don’t always land well with long-time users. That’s a very different philosophy from Obsidian’s, which has always felt more like a craft project built to serve its community rather than a portfolio asset.

My new setup

Obsidian didn’t replace everything. I’m not trying to be some productivity purist. My Trello boards are still my big-picture to-do hub: I’ve successfully managed big personal projects on it (wedding planning, house purchase, various job hunts, etc.), I’m currently managing the MBA dissertation, and I have a personal kanban with my goals and priorities. I see no reason to switch from there.

Quick-and-dirty notes still live in Tot, the tiny, gorgeous scratchpad app that’s basically a digital napkin.

But Obsidian did kick two things out of my workflow: Apple Notes, which never really clicked for me, felt like a junk drawer I avoided opening, and iA Writer, which I still love as a clean markdown editor, but its navigation is clunky if you want to move between dozens of interlinked notes.

Obsidian merges both: it’s a powerful editor and a living map of your thoughts.

Why it clicked so fast

A lot of people get scared off because the YouTube “Obsidian tour” videos are like watching someone show off a cockpit. Hundreds of plugins, complex folder hierarchies, graph charts that look like art.

That comes after years of using it. Those setups evolved naturally, not on day one.

My first week was literally make a note, make another note, link the two because it made sense, repeat.

You don’t need a system before you start. I’m growing mine by accident.

Where it fits in my life now

It’s now where I keep my drafts of blog posts (like this one), lists of books, films, music albums, random ideas for side projects, AI prompts, bulleted meeting notes from work, and little fragments of thoughts that might grow into something.

My brain has immediately started to trust it. That means when I have an idea, I don’t second-guess where to put it. I just throw it into Obsidian, knowing I can find it later—by search, by link, or by stumbling across it in the graph view.

It’s not perfect. Nothing is. But it’s mine. And if Obsidian disappears tomorrow, I still have my notes as plain markdown files. Which is about as future-proof as digital life gets.

If you’ve been circling Obsidian for months thinking “maybe later”, consider this your nudge. Start small. Don’t copy someone else’s elaborate vault—just make a note about something you care about. Then another. Link them.

Before you know it, you’ll be writing your own “how Obsidian became essential” post… probably in Obsidian.

(featured image credit: nickmilo)