A Simple System for Long-Term Learning with Obsidian

Digital note-taking is a crucial skill for every academic as it expands the limits of our minds. But starting with effective, long-term note-taking is not so simple. Highlighted PDFs and loose notes get forgotten over time, or we think of a system that is so complicated that it overwhelms us with too much organization. This article presents a simple system you can apply to learn any new topic and store notes so you can easily find and use them for years to come.

The system to learn anything is based on three key ingredients that we are going to implement:

1. A central note will automatically gather all you know on a topic.
2. Different types of sub-notes to store the information.
3. Source notes and papers to track where you learned it.
4. The Note Gallery plugin that creates an automatic dashboard with all notes on a topic.

From these bare-bones, you can expand and use additions like visual thinking diagrams to find a research gap or boards and maps to organize tasks if your topic is a research project. Let’s get started!

Groundwork: Install Obsidian and the Plugin

To implement the system conveniently, we will use Obsidian, a note-taking tool perfect for academics. If you need to be convinced that this is a good idea, check out “Why every academic needs to use a note-taking app” and join the free quick starter course to learn how to use Obsidian.

Using Tags to Cluster Information

Obsidian offers the ability to give each note one or more tags and easily display all notes with a specific tag. To make tags easier to remember and reuse, you can create nested or hierarchical tags:

More than three levels of hierarchy is probably overengineering. Usually I end up using just two. One main tag to identify the topic or project this note belongs to (e.g. #vcp in the example above) and the other one describing the type of note. Typical note-types are:

• note: For any non-descript note containing some information on a sub-topic or concept. You could also call it a “subtopic”.
• meeting: For notes on meetings with others regarding this topic (example above).
• progress: If the topic is a long-term research project, I tend to document my progress and thinking process in so-called progress notes.
• person: If my topic involves talking to stakeholders or mentioning key authors in the field.
• idea: For any ideas or questions I have concerning the topic.

These examples are personal and you will undoubtedly come up with your own system. Feel free to experiment. The key takeaway is that you define one main tag for your topic and add a sub-topic as you go. Make sure that your main tag is short (e.g. “vcp”) and that the secondary is reused across all topics. These two things make it easy for you to remember the tags and avoid thinking too hard about what tag to add to a new note, possibly mistagging it.

Creating notes with subtags

To give a practical example of how to leverage tags to cluster information around a topic, we will create one note called “Range Shifts” (this is a complex topic of my research) and give it the tag #rs. The tag is short and easy to remember. Then we create a related note on a subtopic, for example on tree line dynamics (a subtopic to “range dynamics”, our main topic). This note will get the tag #rs/note. In other words, it is a generic “note” inside the range shifts (#rs) topic.

Tags in Obsidian can be created by just adding “#tagname” anywhere in the note or creating a property to the note and adding the tags there. The examples above follow the latter idea. I prefer not to add tags to the main body of the text because they are for organization rather than content. Lastly, you can click on the tags the side panel will show all notes with this tag.

Notes Can Have Multiple Tags

You can add as many different tags to a note as you like. This allows you to create parallel structures of organization and assign a note to different topics. Typically, I tag papers that I store in my vault with “#paper/category” (e.g. paper/review for reviews), but at the same time, the paper can be assigned to a broader topic like “range-shifts” in the example above. This is where adding multiple tags to a note becomes handy:

Add as many tags as you need and as few as possible. Remember: More tags is not better. The less structure your notes have the easier they are to handle, but some structure is needed to find them. Try to only add new tags as they become needed and ask yourself do you really need this tag.

Taking Good Notes: The Six Cs

What makes notes good will be different from person to person. But I find that it always involves certain properties that I call the 6Cs:

• Cumulative: Make notes on topics and grow them over time as you learn more about certain topics.
• Connected: To discover notes and have more ideas you should interconnect them. Always make sure to include 3-5 links to other notes in your note.
• Concise: Over time, you will have a lot of notes; try to be concise so you can re-read them quickly. Avoid copying and pasting large chunks of paper.
• Contextual: Provide a context to every note you make. Assign it to a larger topic or project you are working on. Give it a home.
• Clear: Use clear formatting and templates to make it easier for yourself to understand your notes intuitively.
• Consistent: Keep at it. The magic of note-taking unfolds over time. Develop love for the process of note-taking itself.

If you are serious about using note-taking to boost your academic career, take a look at my digital note take course.

Bringing it All Together: The Central Note

Now you have created different notes around a topic, maybe added a few papers to this topic, maybe even meeting notes. How do you access all of this easily? There is a very little known plugin that can help you to achieve this with almost no effort: Note Gallery. It is currently in development but hopefully will mature over time as it is a great idea. Go to Settings > Community Plugins and search for “Note Gallery” by “Pash Shocky”. This plugin allows you to display multiple notes in a nice multi-column layout.

You can repeat this with the other types of notes your topic has to get an automatically updated and really nice dashboard displaying all the notes around a topic. The plugin has a few settings that you can check in the documentation. The most important ones are:

• fontSize: Allows you to change the size of the preview. “6pt” is small “16pt” is rather very big.
• sortBy: Set to “mtime” to sort by last modified time (e.g. the last notes you worked on will be at the top). Set to “ctime” to sort by creation time, which does not change anymore as you edit the note or set to “name” to sort alphabetically.
• breakpoints: The defines the number of columns in relation to the window’s width and is cumbersome to set. It is much easier to set it to a fixed number, regardless of the window width. Here is how to do this:

You might notice a few things not looking perfect, but that is because the plugin is still new. You can also use Dataview, but it will only display the notes as text, not as nice preview boxes. A third alternative is the projects plugin, but this will require you to add thumbnail images for each note individually.

Summary

To learn a new topic, start by creating a topic note and giving it a short, easy-to-remember tag.

1. Create a central dashboard note for a broad topic. Give it a short tag, such as an acronym like “#rs.”
2. As you learn about this topic, create notes on subtopics and tag them by adding the type of note behind the topic: “#rs/note”, “#rs/idea”, or “#rs/question.” Reuse the types of notes between topics to remember them more easily.
3. Good notes should follow the 6Cs: Cumulative, Connected, Clear, Concise, Contextual, and Consistent. Learn more about this through my note taking course or the free starter emails.
4. Use the Note Gallery plugin to create a dashboard in your central note.
5. Expand your dashboard by adding checkboxes for todos, reading lists or anything else you need to organize your learning journey.

Start your day by checking in at your dashboard and following up on loose ends since the last learning session.