The idea of a personal wiki has always appealed to me. I tried a few times to incorporate one into my "workflow" if I even have one. I tried all sorts of different tools but the latest one that's been keeping me occupied is Obsidian. I really want to like and use Obsidian, but I'm unable to. Let me explain.
I've implemented the PARA method into my personal wiki. It's a way of organizing all information into four buckets:
- Projects for any ongoing stuff
- Areas for anything that's going on in your life like your car, finances, mental health, etc.
- Resources for anything that you might want to reference later
- Archives for anything that's no longer relevant
Gotta say, I love this so much and it's not really relevant to any one tool. I've been using this method for a while now and it's been working great.
But, even with this organisation of information going on, Obsidian still doesn't click for me.
To be frank, Obsidian just... feels wrong. It's undeniably an Electron app and that just makes the experience really cumbersome to me. The application always feels a little sluggish and is never truly at home on any platform. You can make Obsidian look a little better using the great Minimal theme but its core problems remain. The entire ecosystem of themes and plugins is also a little overwhelming and are prone to break in any subsequent release. I don't want to spend hours tweaking my personal wiki, I just want to use it. The barrier between my thoughts and putting them into writing needs to be as low as possible.
I know there are many people out there who love Obsidian, people who spend dozens of hours making it just right. I however will be reluctantly looking elsewhere.