Today, another friend asked about writing, and as usual, I was enthusiastic about it. It’s not different when people bring up endurance topics such as running or triathlons, except I don’t have as much of a track record to talk about it.
My natural response is, “Hey, I’m learning to write, too! Why do you write?” When they ask for app recommendations, I get passionate about that as well. However, I feel conflicted—discussing apps can become a rabbit hole of distraction.
If the point is to write, shouldn’t we spend more time talking about what we write rather than what we use to write?
But fair enough, tools can give us superpowers too, not just our brains. Tools are created by really brainy folks anyway. At this point, I tend to recommend Obsidian or Notion for note-taking. Notion is great if you want to combine note-taking with organizing work items and collaboration. Obsidian is ideal if you want to think deeply and embrace networked thoughts—a topic for another day.
One of the shared reasons for my recommendations is their immense popularity. They’ve been tested by people from different walks of life. There should be an approach that works for you, and there are tons of inspirations out there. Notion benefits from venture capital money and has excellent marketing behind it.
When possible, I try not to give advice. I can only share my own experiences. Being opinionated is good, but it doesn’t have to project as advice. As of this year, I chose Obsidian over Notion. Can I explain my reasons clearly?
I choose Obsidian because it’s fast, available offline, portable, and future-proof. Those are the obvious reasons. I’ll save special reasons for later.
First, it’s fast. “The best gym to work out is the gym closest to you.” Speed reduces friction. With less friction, I can write more. It’s also fast to open the app regardless of my internet connection, which brings me to the second point.
It’s offline-first. Now I can write when I’m on a plane or outdoors without internet. I want to practice flow, and a good way to do that is by removing distractions. I don’t plan to write offline all the time—I appreciate Grammarly’s hints to ensure I don’t overlook silly mistakes—but the idea that my data is local and offline lets me enjoy its simplicity.
It’s portable. My biggest pain with advanced, smart note-taking apps such as Notion and Coda is that they are not truly portable. Coda is particularly terrible, as I discussed in my post Leaving coda.io. Although exporting from Notion is supported by many platforms due to its popularity and large communities, the exports aren’t genuine. Usually, you don’t look at the exported data again. You feel like you have to rebuild your workspace from scratch or deal with ugly exported data.
It’s future-proof. I wouldn’t bet my brain on whether the companies behind Obsidian and Notion will be around in 5 to 10 years. Yes, Notion a $10B company, but its philosophy is to keep adding more and charging more from users. That itself isn’t wrong, but if you stop paying, you may have a lot to loose. Obsidian may face a lot of competition as a bootstrapped startup, but my markdown files used for Obsidian will last, regardless of Obsidian’s fate. I can just switch to my favorite code editors: Vim or Visual Studio Code and I’ll be fine for the most part. My Notion-exported files would be too difficult to use, and I would lose many Notion cloud functionalities in the first place. Don’t get me started with Notion tables; they suck your time and energy to build, but once you stop using Notion, they are quite useless.
Both apps are innovative. One follows a “less is more” approach. Writing is pure. Go for less is more. Notion’s growing team of engineers will likely make the Notion file formats more complicated and less portable. With text files, I know what I write will remain the same. Obsidian is essentially a text editor that empowers me to write text files. As a bonus, it’s like an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for text, similar to how Visual Studio Code is for code.
There are two special reasons which I saved until now.
First, I want to learn about Zettelkasten. It’s a German word! It was popularized by professor Niklas Luhmann, who had a collection of 90,000 notes and authored over 70 books and 400 scholarly articles over a span of 40 years. Luhmann’s goal was to facilitate ongoing conversations with himself over time.
Second, I am experimenting with writing in public to boost discipline and consistency. With text files, I have many ways to publish them. With Notion, I would have to over-engineer with a database setup and various cloud integration.
“Running in public” has been beneficial for me. I upload my running data to Strava, which helps hold me accountable for maintaining my workouts. Tracking my data on Strava is like posting my writing publicly here. Using Obsidian is like my favorite place to run, and Quartz is my favorite way to put data online.
I feel hugely unqualified to talk about the benefits of writing. It’s like me in 2019, telling people about running and the shoes I wore. I would say, “It may not be for you, but having my data uploaded to apps like Strava and TrainingPeaks helps me stick with my practice.” I’ve been running for 5 years and have completed a bunch of races, so I have more to show. I’ve only posted 60 entries over 3 months. Only tell will tell.