🏷 Using Tags in Obsidian
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 5
Hello friends,
It’s the time of year when the DST haters are in full force! I’m pretty ambivalent to the whole thing as it’s not much of a disruption to our sleeping patterns here. But the spring is definitely a little less enjoyable than the extra hour of sleep we get in the fall.
In any case, I hope you’ve got a nice cup of coffee getting you started on your day. ☕️
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Using tags in Obsidian
Are you tired of hearing about Obsidian, Roam, and PKM at this point? If so, this is probably not the newsletter for you. We won’t be slowing down on that front around these parts.
In a tool like Obsidian, direct, manually created links are the best way to connect your thinking across notes. This is the default behaviour of the Zettelkasten, and I appreciate the emphasis it’s given by the folks at Zettelkasten.de.
However, I’m also not against using other forms of linking notes together. There’s value to being able to see connections across topics, and for that use case, tags work well.
But I was a little surprised with how tags worked in Obsidian after coming from Roam.
The Roam approach
Roam treats a tag just like any other note (or page if you will). When you use the pound character to create a link to a theme you know you’ll address in multiple notes, all you’re doing is creating a note.
#christianity is essentially the same thing as typing [[Christianity]]
In essence, a tag is simply another entry in your Roam database. Put another way, Roam doesn’t actually support tagging.
The Obsidian way
It’s similar, but using a tag in Obsidian does not result in an actual note in your vault. Instead, tags can be used as a way to group notes that share a common theme and are essentially a type of “saved search”.
You have a list of tags available, and clicking one results in a list of notes associated with that tag. Basically, a way to filter your notes.
Cause for confusion
This can be a real pain if you migrate from Roam to Obsidian.
I had created tags in Roam that had no actual content (because I had referenced the tag itself in a note, but hadn’t put any content in the resulting page for that tag), migrating my database resulted in empty notes in Obsidian. Once I started to create more content in Obsidian, I would find some tags with a corresponding file and some without.
It took me a good while to realize that tagging in the app was not actually creating a new note.
Anyway…
I share this hoping it may prevent even one person from experiencing that same confusion. As shown in the image above, tags have their own section in the right sidebar and can be included your graph. But they do not show in the file explorer as there is no file created. They are simply a way to see all content related to a common theme.
That sounds like the right approach!
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Items of note
The Wheel of Time entry on Wikipedia
Yeah, I don’t normally link to Wikipedia here. But I came across this recently when looking something up and it really sucked me in. Having spent 25+ years of my life reading this series, some of the books 5–10 times, I consider myself to have a fairly intimate knowledge of the story.
But the Wikipedia entry introduced some concepts that were new to me right from the start:
The series is set in an unnamed world that, due to the cyclical nature of time as depicted in the series, is simultaneously the distant past and the distant future Earth.
The series depicts fictional, ancient mythology that references modern Earth history (with one notable example being the legend of two giants named Mosk and Merk, who were said to fight wars against each other using spears of fire that could reach around the world), while events in the series prefigure real Earth myths (with King Artur Paendrag Tanreall, better known as Artur Hawkwing, serving as an allusion to the myth of King Arthur Pendragon).
😳
I have never thought of this story as been placed on our earth. It’s funny how people perceive things differently. Anyway, whether this is actually true or not, I enjoyed getting sucked in.
It might be time for a complete series re-read.
The knot: how to think about problem solving
Zakk Fleischmann with another good post. He talks about how we attack problems in a way that does not match the reality of how problems are structured:
We think of problem solving as walking through a series of steps. But a better way to think of problem solving is like untying a really big knot of string.
Imagine a really big knot. I’m talking really big here - like the size of your fist. The threads are tied back and looped through each other hundreds of times. If you had to untie that knot, how would you do it?
I like this kind of thinking. There are a number of areas in my life where I’ve learned I have to spend a good bit of time working on the problem in order to understand the problem itself. That makes planning hard as you don’t actually understand the full nature of the problem. And only working on it with your assumptions of the true issue will lead you to understanding the problem enough to actually resolve it.
Home maintenance is a great example of this. Unless you work in the trades, when you run into a problem, it’s usually for the first time. I’ve (slowly) learned to assume that my first several attempts at a fix are not going to result in an actual fix. But I’ll be learning as I go.
So I can then plan to give the problem the proper amount of time.
Mark Hurst is concerned about what is happening in design these days. Well, since 2008.
We’re headed into a dangerous time, when our society is run on digital platforms, and UX isn’t leading the way to ensure that those tools are usable. While the best-trained (and highest-paid) UX professionals are put to work optimizing the exploitation and deception of online users, New Yorkers continue to die from Covid, because there’s no easy way to schedule a vaccine visit.
He’s worried that UX no longer means what it should. Instead, it’s an acronym that is used to build products and services that take advantage of the customer. There’s no doubt in my mind that the big tech of 2021 builds their products to keep customers (users) connected as long as possible.
My real worry is that most of us don’t care enough to do anything about it.
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Quote of the week
Everyone has a set of default activities for filling the little gaps in their day, but they’re usually subconsciously chosen. You can get a lot of control over how you spend time by choosing sensible defaults. Keep a short list of good default activities to do whenever you have a few free minutes and you don’t want to decide what to do.
William Van Hecke, Cadence
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Current
Watching: I’ve never been a fan of racing in my life, but my 13 y/o son and I have totally gotten sucked into Netflix’s F1: The Drive to Survive. We’re late to this party as we’re just finishing season 1 and season 3 is about to come out. But it’s been fun and an eye-opener — I didn’t realize there are so few teams and competitors in the sport.
Fair warning: there are plenty of f-bombs and other salty language in the series.
Reading: I’m still working my way through Dune, but wanted to mention that I’m liking it more than I expected. I knew this story was around in my childhood, but when I discovered it was written in 1965, it surprised me a little. The sci-fi aspects holds up almost sixty years later.
Drinking: Phillips Brewing put out an offering of light beers (4%) that are also low calorie called Little Wonder. It’s a case of small cans that include a lager, a white ale, a hazy IPA, and a pale ale. Overall, they’re all good. The flavors are fairly subtle — I’m not sure if that’s because of the low caloric content.
But for someone who appreciates a lower alcohol option, I appreciate seeing offerings like this.
Listening: Lecrae’s Restoration has been in the regular rotation since it came out.
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That’s it for this issue. See you in two weeks!