I’ve used Ulysses for blog posts and Bible study for years. My wife uses it too now, so the subscription is becoming indispensable for us. It does a lot of things right.
I also use Obsidian for my knowledge management. I’m a freelancer with a bunch of clients and tons of work happening at once. Mostly, what I keep track of is a daily log, my meeting notes, normal notes, and client indexes. I am bad at keeping up with the indexes, though.
Yesterday, I went looking for a meeting note in Obsidian and couldn’t find it. The search just killed me. I couldn’t remember the name of the file — just the person at the meeting. That person has been at many meetings, and Obsidian just refused to show all the results for their name.
I also tried the same search in Craft (where I had a duplicate of this note and several others during a 3-month experimentation period), and I found the note instantly. The search was 10x better.
This made me realize something important: I like Obsidian conceptually, but I don’t like the software itself (I never have). I begrudgingly used it because it seemed useful as a knowledge tool. But for the way I use knowledge tools, it tripped over itself yesterday. Therefore, I’m either using it wrong or it’s not meant for me.
So now I’m considering my other options.
Here’s my basic folder structure:
- Daily Notes
- Meeting Notes
- Notes
- Potential Projects
- Active Projects
- Completed Projects
I thought about just creating a folder for each project with a subfolder for meeting notes for that project, which would have solved my problem yesterday. However, some meeting notes may not relate to a specific client or project, or may relate to more than one client or project. So I need tags for this feature.
For that reason, I can cross Craft off the list (no tag support), which is a bit of a bummer because it’s a lovely application. (I also am not considering Noteplan, for a couple small nitpick-y reasons, but the big one is that I don’t need task management in my notes.)
That leaves Ulysses. I could use a mix of tags and groups to make “folders” of meeting notes for each client, while still having all the meeting notes in one directory. Ulysses also lets you independently sort each folder, so some (like normal notes) can be sorted by date created, and some (like daily journals) can be sorted by title (so 2022-09-23 also comes before 2022-09-22, even if I forget to make a daily log one day and need to make it the following day).
A directory structure within Obsidian looks like this:
- Daily Notes
- Meeting Notes
- Notes
- Active Projects
- Client / Project Name
- Smart group of notes tagged with Client Name
- Smart group of meeting notes tagged with Client Name
- Client / Project Name
- Etc
If I abandon Obsidian, I know I’ll miss wiki links and Markdown support for checkboxes. Is there anything else I’d miss? Is there another app I should check out? Is there simple some sort of PKM technique I’m missing?