I've tried numerous ways to keep my thoughts organized over the years, both before and after diagnosis. Planners, notebooks, bullet journals, digital todo apps. Nothing seemed to really stick. Until I tried an app called Obsidian, and it seemed like everything changed.

Another Notes App

At first glance, Obsidian is a note-taking app like Evernote or Bear. By default, Obsidian isn't prescriptive of how you organize your notes. It creates a Vault, a fancy term for Folder, and tells you to go at it. This can be overwhelming to someone with ADHD; the paralysis that a blank page can instill is very real. Instead, it filled me with the desire to hyper-fixate on the "best" structure. Eventually, I abandoned that and stuck to what Obsidian tried to give me initially.

Embrace the Flat

My Vault is mostly a flat structure, with a few folders for assets, templates, and daily notes. This allows me to not worry about making sure notes are in the right place and creating more friction in front of my note-taking habit. I navigate through the built-in search, backlinks, and tags.

Backlinks allow you to link a note to another note within the Vault, like a hyperlink in a web page. Tags take it further and enable you to group notes by a shared theme.

Graphs and Tags

My favorite feature is the Graph view, which allows you to see your entire Vault as a Graph based on the usage of backlinks throughout your notes. Eventually, as you take more notes, you connect ideas organically. As you write about one topic, you have an idea about something else or remember something you read a while back and link the ideas up. I feel this power of controlled chaos can emerge from something like Obsidian. For the first time, I have a way of representing information that resembles my inner thoughts.