This Notes App Can Replace Four of the Most Popular Productivity Tools
Obsidian is the Winamp of productivity tools. If you’re as old as me, you might remember that the best part of this once ubiquitous music player extension was the sheer number of plugins and themes you could install to make it better, all of them created by enthusiasts.
Obsidian is a good note-taking app in its own right, packed with all sorts of features: you can organize notes in folders, link to notes from other notes, and even use advanced options like Mermaid charts . But like Winamp, Obsidian really shines when you dig into its vast ecosystem of plugins. As of this writing, there are over 2,000 Obsidian plugins available, and you can use them to turn Obsidian into anything you can imagine.
Of course, many of these plugins are small in size, but not all are. Some extensions are extensive enough to replace entire applications you might otherwise be using. Here’s how I used Obsidian plugins to replace four different productivity tools.
Your Kanban application
I used to be a big fan of Trello, once a humble personal Kanban planner . Fifteen years of bloat and upselling means the app is unrecognizable today, which is fine with me because Obsidian works better for me than Trello ever did. I owe it all to the Obsidian Kanban plugin.
Install it and you can create as many Kanban boards as you like in Obsidian. Each card can contain as much text as you want, formatted just like everything else in Obsidian. This includes links: Each card can link to pages you use to manage your projects.
I’m a freelance journalist who writes for several publications, including the one you’re reading now. I usually write about 20 articles a month, which means I always have several projects on the go. I use an Obsidian Kanban board to keep track of everything. I have columns for “Planning to write this month”, “Planning to write this week”, “Outlined”, “Required edits submitted”, “Edited but not invoiced”, “Invoiced but not paid” and finally “Paid”. This system allows me to see everything I’m working on in one place and track my progress on all of them. Honestly, I don’t know if I could manage my workflow without it. And since I also write all my text directly in Obsidian, I can jump right into the project from my dashboard.
This is just one example – I’m sure you can think of other use cases. But perhaps my favorite part of this system is that each Kanban board in Obsidian is really just a markdown document that combines multiple lists, meaning I can export them and keep an archive even if I stop using Obsidian.
Your logging application
Lifehacker has written extensively about journaling apps over the years, and I’ve personally thoroughly tested every example you can think of several times. They all have pros and cons, and I’m not going to pretend that Obsidian is the best tool for everyone. What I will say is that I use Obsidian for my personal journal and can’t imagine using anything else.
My colleague Kamosh has already written about using Obsidian as a journaling app, so I’ll direct you to him to find out how to get started. But I will add that I recommend installing the journal review plugin so that you can regularly review previous entries. You can also take advantage of Obsidian’s templates feature if you want to use the same layout for your journal every day. I used it to create a sort of bullet journal with questions about my day.
Your Read Later app
A few months ago, Obsidian launched Obsidian Clipper, which saves web pages to your personal “vault.” This is an extension for all major browsers that allows you to save entire articles from the Internet. This is useful for research, but also means you can use Obsidian as a replacement for reading-later apps like Pocket or Instapaper. Simply create a dedicated vault for articles you want to read later, point the plugin to that vault, and open the Read Later vault every time you want to catch up. You can even do things like highlight text or add your own notes as you read, all without having to pay for a subscription.
Your to-do app
The problem with many to-do apps (and the reason Lifehacker never seems to stop writing about them ) is that everyone has different productivity needs, and no one app can meet them all. If you’ve never found the ideal case management system for you, that’s understandable.
But if that’s you and you’re a fan of Obsidian in general, check out the tasks plugin. This tool goes through every note in your repository and collects all the markdown task lists you’ve created. This is an ideal addition if you already use Obsidian to describe your projects. The extension also allows you to add due dates, including recurring tasks, and set priorities.