Are you overwhelmed by the multiple notes you take for your work, your studies or your personal activities? Try this free app: it will help you stay organized and never lose any ideas again.
Whatever our activity, we all juggle an astronomical amount of information and tasks to manage in parallel. Revising your courses in preparation for an exam, managing a construction site or the launch of a new product, organizing a trip abroad or preparing for a friend’s surprise birthday, are all activities that require bringing together a lot information, take lots of notes… and above all keep them well organized.
It is this last point which often poses a problem. You can of course open a word processor to take notes during a meeting or a class, but when the files multiply, you often lose track and end up accumulating a mass of useless documents that you never open. And while mobile note-taking apps are useful for small lists and sticky notes, they quickly show their limits for complex subjects.
Among the many organization and note-taking software, one of them is particularly worth the detour, because it is free, in French, available on all platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone) and has a modern and pleasant graphical interface. This software is Obsidian. Very popular in the Web professions, it is still little known to the general public, and could greatly help you on a daily basis.
Much more than a simple note-taking tool, Obsidian is a real personal knowledge base, very powerful and flexible. Its principle is to create interconnected notes, through which we navigate via links, exactly as we do on Wikipedia for example. And once this “network of ideas and knowledge” has been created, we can visualize it in the form of a galaxy of points, connected according to the logical links between the notes.
This organizational principle is particularly effective for structuring a large amount of information: a university course made up of several chapters and sections, a professional project for which the budget, planning and communication must be managed, or even a trip to the foreigner whose steps must be planned, etc. The use cases are very numerous, because the application is versatile enough to adapt to many needs.
In each note, it is of course possible to format the text (bold, italic, underlined), to create titles and subtitles to constitute a plan, to insert bulleted, numbered lists, boxes to check or tables, images and obviously links, to other notes or to external resources, such as web pages. And it is possible to add even more functions, thanks to the immense library of extensions developed by the Obsidian community.
Another advantage of the application is that all notes created are stored as text files, in Markdown format. This makes it very easy to use them with other software, share them with third parties or publish them on the Internet. All files are stored in a folder called “vault”, which you can save locally on your PC, on a USB key, an external disk or even an online drive, to have them at any time.
These numerous advantages are also the main obstacles to the use of Obsidian for beginners. The app offers so many features that it requires some learning time to truly master. Likewise, writing notes in Markdown format is confusing at first, and the app’s interface may seem less welcoming than that of other software. Obsidian fortunately has very complete online documentation to help you in your first steps, even if it is entirely in English.
If you have the desire and the courage to learn to master the beast, much like you had to assimilate the concepts of Excel when you started, then Obsidian can become an invaluable asset for organizing your ideas and never forgetting anything. And since the app is completely free for personal use, you have nothing to lose by installing it to try it for yourself!