Enter, Obsidian!

I follow Laura Scott on Instagram. I don’t know if anybody in the dermatology social media sphere who doesn’t. She’s the Regina George of dermatology; she’s immensely popular and a trendsetter for our group. Unlike Regina George, she’s impossible not to like.

With one of her recent stories/posts I saw that she’s been using a program called Notion as her “second brain.” Cue, stopping my otherwise mindless scrolling to do a a deep dive and thorough Internet search on Notion as well as the concept of the second brain. While I’m at it, I might as well as research and compare to the major players/various options in the field today, which turn out to be Notion and a program called Obsidian.

According to Reddit, which is where I get most of my life questions answered, Obsidian is the superior choice, as it relies on markdown files that can be kept on your computer and easily opened with any program that can read markdown files (which is any computer) or transferred to a different format. Notion, while it has a web interface, is more aesthetically pleasing but entirely locked within that interface. So if Notion were go something goes wrong with Notion, you’re SOL.

Obsidian has another feature that I find fascinating, which is linking various notes and ideas together, like webpages do. I distinctly remember years ago trying to get Evernote to do this and failing miserably. At the time I wondered “why isn’t this a thing??”

On that subject, Evernote and I have had a long but very unsatisfactory relationship since I started using it regularly back in 2015. At the time, Evernote did do a lot of things right, and Apple’s notes feature just simply wasn’t up to task.

A lot has changed since then, and Notes has gotten ahem, “notably,” better than it had been previously. Now it has hashtag system, smart folders, etc. And you could really rely on Notes entirely if you wanted to, but, I’m not sure if this is because I feel the need to do some thing unique or different, I chose to dive into Obsidian.

Other reasons why Evernote needed to go: I’ll never understand why Evernote search feature was so terrible . You think it would be an easy concept but I’ve had easier times finding daughters pacifier among a crumbles pile bedsheets that I have finding a well titled and well labeled note with an Evernote. That, coupled with an expensive yearly annual fee of $70, changes had to be made. We are never ever getting back together.

Within my perfect imagined note system, I can see myself jotting down things that I learn in clinic or while studying into my smartphone and then using links to wire together the connections that I’ve made. Such as how we learn, and one of the Obsidian’s main selling points.

Allow me to demonstrate: Say I learn, as I did the other day, that a acyclovir is not good for people with poor kidney function, something that’s good to know because acyclovir is a common treatment for shingles. Other options include valacyclovir and ganciclovir I believe. I’ll double check that. But with Obsidian, I can make a note that just lists use valacyclovir instead of acyclovir for people with poor kidney function we have shingles. And then I can back link that new note to a page that I already have about shingles, making a kind of Wikipedia like interface of my knowledge.

You may ask, well why don’t you just put that under your page for shingles treatments? Valid point, but this way, I can astutely answer I can also create another page listing drugs to avoid dermatology drugs to avoid with poor renal function and then link it there too. Being able to connect one thought to another to another helps strengthen our knowledge, like spokes on a wheel.