Obsidian + Agenda

Hi friends,

I’ve been using Obsidian for just about every kind of note in my life. Zettelkasten of course, but have also been using it for meeting notes (using daily notes mostly). I really like the idea of being able to see every note that is tied to a single person if I need to come review time, or reference time, or whatever. However, I work with a lot of different people, which will easily end up in the hundreds in the short term and could be in the thousands in the long term. I’m concerned that I’m going to gum up the zettelkasten link suggestions and quick open with so many names and ephemeral notes. I don’t know if this is a valid concern or not.

So I’ve been considering using Agenda alongside Obsidian for the day-to-day meeting notes. Stuff that may or may not be valuable for the long term. I like that it’ll tie to my actual calendar, and that it’ll keep the potentially trivial out of the way of the long term knowledge building.

But I’m trying to decide whether Agenda will work well for this over the long term, and where the balance is between overcomplicating my app ecosystem vs. the potential of overloading the app that I prefer to use for most of these things.

Is anyone else doing something similar? Or going through something similar? Or just wants to say hello?

If you want to link notes to a calendar event and maintain some compatibility with Obsidian, you might want to look at NotePlan. The advantage would be that NotePlan works with plain-text markdown that could be stored in an Obsidian vault folder.

(I read someone here explaining how to do the NotePlan / Obsidian hookup, but I don’t remember who or when.)

Agenda is nice but the notes are stored internally in a database. You can add Agenda links to your Obsidian notes and vice versa, or use Hook to work between Agenda and Obsidian, but, in my opinion, that sort of repetitive extra effort is a lot of friction over time.

Hope that helps,
Katie

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“Hey, Bobert!”

“Bobert?”

“Sorry; I already had a Bob, Bobby, Rob, Robbie, and Robert.”

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Would a simple option be to have more than one Obsidian vault… one for Zettelkasten, one for other notes like meetings and people?

I’m going through a similar thing right now. My tool of choice for most (non academic) writing is Ulysses and I’m working out whether I can reasonably use it for meeting notes, journal, study notes, people and so on. Or so I go with something like Obsidian or Agenda?

In fact, I did try Agenda, but discovered a bug with automation (which I use a lot) which caused data loss, reminders didn’t always sync properly and there was a delay in content appearing between devices (maybe an iCloud issue). It could be great, but wasn’t there for me yet. Your mileage may vary through - it has a lot of enthusiastic supporters. I have edited my Ulysses theme to be more ‘Agenda-like’, though :slight_smile:!

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Probably this: Using Obsidian and NotePlan together

Good old @ryanjamurphy :slight_smile:

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Like you I’ve been putting all my notes in Obsidian, including meeting notes, notes for important people, etc. I feel like the real power of Obsidian is to have everything there to make connections with. Taking things out and putting them in another app seems contrary to the whole purpose of using a tool like Obsidian. You can use filters and local graphs, etc to narrow down your search and connections if there is too much information getting in your way. I’d experiment with that before taking notes out of Obsidian.

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