Wandering Meditations

README

11 min read

A History of My Library

Like many of you (probably), I enjoy reading and have been reading for several years. I used to write down notes by hand, usually in the form of a sticky note within the book. Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked… sorry, I had to throw in an ATLA reference :) … everything changed when I discovered Obsidian.

I had already been familiar with digital note taking at that point, primarily using Google Docs as well as OneNote on my Surface Tablet (digital hand-written notes using the pen). But I was using these methods only for school and note-taking during lectures.

When I began my hobby of reading for pleasure/learning many years ago, I made the decision not to use Google Docs or OneNote because I was always told that hand-writing notes is superior to digital note-taking, primarily because it’s easier to remember the things you write down rather than type out. While this is in fact true (or at least I do believe it to be true, I’m sure there’s “experts” out there who would disagree), it doesn’t paint the entire picture.

In comes Obsidian. I started using Obsidian in April 2021 (which is apparently only a year after it was released, a fact I learned just now in October 2024). It was revolutionary. The idea of “linking” your notes together and building a literal “second-brain” was simply phenomenal. Yes, I gave up my practice of hand-writing notes, but I got something much greater in return. I got a system of organization and clarity. I got an upgrade to my own brain via a “second-brain”. I even got a cool looking graph that shows me all the connections I’ve made (yes, I know this is just a gimmick, but it still looks cool!).

I had to make a decision. Should I stick with hand-written notes and the potential memory-retaining benefit it provides? Or should I move to Obsidian? I decided to move to Obsidian. Here’s why:

  1. the ability to “link your thinking” is proven to aid with memory-retention, as per some of the scientific literature I’ve seen. Meaning, the more you use a “memory” and connect it with other things, the stronger it becomes. This is because you develop more associations with it.
    • Think about it: if you’ve been to place A 3 times, and place B 10 times, which place would you be able to remember more? Obviously place B. This is because you’ve experienced it more and have had more opportunity to link it to existing memories and to create new memories. Obsidian works the same way. Rather than just having a book note sit idle for years, you could revisit it and link it to something else you’re reading now or to some idea you are developing. Obsidian has a great built-in search mechanism that allows you to easily discover old notes without too much pain or effort.
  2. the ability to backup my notes. At the beginning, I would copy my notes to another hard drive so that I would always have a backup copy in case something happens. Then, I discovered the Github plugin which backups my notes automatically every few minutes to Github, meaning even if my house were to burn down (God forbid), I would still have my notes saved to the cloud. Whereas if I were still using hand-written notes, my notes would become ash.

I have to admit, at the beginning my Obsidian Vaults and the notes contained within it were a mess. They were unstructured and messy. You’ll notice “Vaults” is plural - yes, I was in fact using multiple, three to be exact (all for the same general category which should’ve just been one Vault).

It took years to really fine-tune my processes and system. I don’t remember the entire timeline of how my Vault improved, here’s the gist:

  • April 2021: started using Obsidian
  • November 2023: discovered the “Zettelkasten System” and started to use this within Obsidian. This was the birth of the “Idea” note.
  • December 2023: started using Github to backup my notes
  • March 2024: standardization, standardization, standardization
  • April 2024: began the process of deprecating my other vaults to merge them all into one
    • just a note about this: using multiple vaults is valid but only if they are about completely different things. For example, you might have a “work vault” and a “personal vault”, or a “journal/diary vault” and a “learning vault”, etc. But having multiple vaults for the same thing usually doesn’t make sense (key word: usually).
    • I am still working on this. I’m probably about 70% done.
  • May 2024: started writing more “formal” ideas = essays
    • I would say essay writing started back in December 2023, but back then essays and ideas were one and the same. Around May is when I created a new folder to put all my essays into. I also began publishing on Medium (all links can be found at the bottom of this page and every page on this website).

Looking back at this timeline, I was shocked to see how long I was using Obsidian in a very basic way (April 2021 to November 2023)! During this time, all I was basically doing was writing a summary and documenting my favourite quotes for each book I read.

November 2023 was a pivotal moment for my Obsidian Vault: I discovered the “Zettelkasten System”.

  • Simply speaking, the Zettelkasten System is a note-taking system that was originally designed for hand-written notes (this was before computers were a thing). It involves writing small notes on a very specific idea or concept. Each idea note has an address that can be used to link other idea notes to it. Eventually, you’ll have a very large web of inter-connected ideas. Obsidian is the perfect tool for a Zettelkasten System since it has a built-in way of linking notes together. In fact, this is the main draw of Obsidian and the reason (in my opinion) why it became so popular. I’m not sure if this is the case, but it wouldn’t be far fetched to say that the developers of Obsidian had Zettelkasten in mind while developing the application.

Anyways, November 2023 is when I created an “Ideas” folder and started to create ideas based on the books I was reading. But, by that point I already had tons of book notes sitting in my vault. I felt that it wasn’t right to leave those “idea-less”, so for the next several months I went back and reviewed each note and extracted as many ideas as I could from them to create idea notes and/or to add to existing idea notes.

March 2024 is when I really started to get serious about standardizing my notes, especially my old notes that were incredibly messy. There’s a few different things involved with note standardization:

  • note structure (templates)
  • use of links and differentiating between outgoing and backlinks
  • rating books

I began by creating several templates:

  • non-fiction
  • fiction
  • video / lecture
  • idea
  • essay

Anytime I would create a new note, I’d import the appropriate template and use that as a starting point. That said, sometimes it makes sense to deviate from a template or make modifications to it, it just all depends on the specific note. I then developed a detailed note-taking system that would inform me on the rules of linking and writing ideas. This is absolutely paramount as the entire Obsidian/Zettelkasten system relies on linking and ideas. I have a detailed explanation of this below. Finally, I developed a (somewhat) objective rating system, that way I can rate each book in an objective manner so there’s at least some consistency between ratings. If you’re curious to see how I’ve rated a book, please visit my StoryGraph profile.

That wraps up a timeline of my history with Obsidian. I’m fairly happy with how it is now, but as you can tell it took a while to get there. My one piece of advice would be to not worry about getting all the processes, systems, templates, and workflows figured out right away, rather let it come to you naturally. Experiment, try out new things, eventually some things will stick and others will prove themselves useless.

Now, flash forward to early October 2024. A friend told me about a project called Quartz where people can easily turn their markdown content into fully functional websites. He told me this in passing and I quickly looked it up to see what it was all about. I spent the next few hours reading through the documentation and came to the conclusion that this is exactly what I needed to take my Obsidian Vault and my library to the next level. It all relies on a concept known as a “digital garden”, a concept I have heard about in the past when watching Obsidian-related content on YouTube, but I never really put much thought into it.

I started this website so I could have a centralized place where I store all my publicly-facing content, such as my Medium articles and Tweets on X/Twitter. It also acts as a ‘digital garden’, as mentioned above, so you can see my raw notes for some of the texts I’ve read. Eventually, I do expect the scope of this website to expand.

Structure of the Site

The site has three primary folders where notes are stored:

  • Library: notes taken from books and other content like online videos or lectures
  • Ideas: notes written about books, or rather, notes written about the ideas, themes, and messages within ‘Library’ notes.
    • Currently I have no plans on adding any of my idea notes to this website.
  • Essays: long-form writings based on ideas or books from my library. These are published on Medium There are two other folders as well:
  • Topics: contains a list of my topic notes. A topic note is a note that contains all the books that relate to that topic. This is a good starting point for those who are new to my library.
  • Wanderings: a folder where I can put random notes (like this current README note)

Library Notes

Most of my book notes are structured as follows (not all notes will have all sections):

  • Favourite quotes
  • Summary
  • Analysis and/or Notes & Quotes
  • Main idea(s)
  • Reflections

The summary section varies from book to book. Some books are summarized in significant detail, others are very surface level, and I even have some book notes that don’t have a summary at all.

My summary section may also contain sub-headings within chapters that are not from the author but rather my own creation. When this happens, I usually call it out at the beginning of the summary section.

For many of my book notes, especially non-fiction, the analysis section is either non-existent or very minimal. That’s because I save most of my analysis and “idea-extraction” for an idea note.

Methodology for Linking

Obsidian provides two types of links: outgoing links and backlinks.

Outgoing links are links found within a note that leads to another note, like this (this leads to a non-existent note because I don’t have a note called “this”).

For ‘Library’ notes, outgoing links are used to link the current note to another ‘Library’ note.

  • example: I’m reading a passage and it reminds me of a quote/passage from another book Sometimes I may use an outgoing link to an ‘Idea’ note if I can’t fit the current ‘Library’ note into that ‘Idea’ note in any meaningful way, or if a significant part of the book contributes to that ‘Idea’ note, in which case I usually don’t bother summarizing that in the ‘Library’ note itself but rather keep it for the ‘Idea’ note.
  • these are exceptions and NOT the rule.
  • a good example of this would be A History of Religious Ideas Vol 1. You’ll notice in the summary section, most chapters just simply contain an outgoing link rather than a summarization.

For ‘Idea’ notes, outgoing links connect the current idea note to a ‘Library’ note.

Backlinks are links where the current note is mentioned.

  • For example, my homepage mentions my README page, therefore we can say that my README page has one backlink: homepage

‘Library’ notes will contain backlinks based on the ideas they contribute to. So if x ‘Library’ note contributes to five ideas, you’ll see those five ideas appear in the “Backlinks” section of that ‘Library’ note. Also, other ‘Library’ notes that have an outgoing link to the current ‘Library’ note will also appear in the “Backlinks” section.

The list of backlinks in an ‘Idea’ note are typically other ideas that are related to the current idea. Sometimes, there will be a ‘Library’ note in that list, but this is rare (this happens in the case where Ideas are directly linked in a ‘Library’ note, which shouldn’t happen under normal circumstances - see above for explanation)

Graph View

Backlinks