An Entry-Level Guide to Note-Taking and Organizational Tools
Tags: productivity, beginners, learning, notes
Published: 2022-08-15 11:40:00

## Preamble

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### Who is This Guide For? 

This guide is intended for those who have minimal experience in using note-taking, planning, or information-manipulating tools more advanced than a calendar app or a word document. If you have found yourself seeking more effective and rewarding methods to organize your thoughts and are trying to find your bearings, then follow along. 
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### What Will This Guide Cover?

- Information to keep in mind when picking organizational tools; pitfalls and caveats abound, so being forewarned of them wins you half the battle.
- A recommended minimal-investment setup based on the assumption(given where you found this guide) that you are a software developer of some description.
    - A description of the use-cases for each suggested tool
    - A short guide on how to start using each tool
- Directions on how to branch out from here and some suggested reading
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## Important Info

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### Usage

The first thing to think about before picking any service is what you will be using it to accomplish. If you are a student or someone who works in an evolving field, you might need an application that enhances your note-taking capabilities. If your job or hobby is heavily project-driven, you could be in need of an organizational workspace that tracks your progress and remaining work to complete an ongoing project. 
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### Pricing

Another important point is pricing: choose whether you can afford to invest in a subscription-based service or that you might need to settle for a *potentially* feature-lacking free option. The setup in this guide will be entirely free as of the time of writing, but there were some compromises that needed to be made.
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### Personal Requirements

After establishing what you need and can afford, turn your attention next to how you will engage with it. 
- Do you need an application that is available cross-platform and synced across devices? 
- Will you be consistently working from the same device and instead might value an application that is available completely offline, thus reducing latency? 
- Importantly, will you need to collaborate on the work you are planning/organizing? 

Answering these questions and establishing your personal needs in advance will make sifting through the vast mountain of options much simpler. 
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### The Little Things

Finally, and most importantly to making your final decision, understand that the deluge of available choices means that you can afford to be picky. Since investing in these tools is a long-term process, missing, incomplete, or off-putting features that you might otherwise overlook can instead be deal breakers. For some personal examples, I will not use an application that cannot be set to dark mode by default, I passed up on one visualization tool for another because the latter allows you to navigate by right-click dragging, while the former uses middle-click dragging, and I even crossed out a few because I didn't like the style of the UI. Especially when these tools are often not open source and are only available online, little things like key-bindings and appearance are often impossible or very difficult to customize without extraneous effort on your part. Spend a little extra time trying to find out what is important to you, as small as the features may be, before finalizing your choice of application.
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## Filling the Toolbox

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### Overview

To reiterate and lay the framework, let's describe the person this toolbox will be designed for. You are a software developer or someone working in a similarly evolving/project-based field, you want to start using a note-taking tool to keep track of the knowledge related to your expertise, and you would like to have a broader tool that can be used in conjunction with your projects to plan, track your progress, collaborate, etc. You also want your tools to be platform and device agnostic, and you want them to be available offline when possible. Lastly, you are willing to do some legwork to get this system running, including learning a simple text-formatting language. With that out of the way, let's finally talk about the first recommended tool of this guide, [Obsidian][0].
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### Obsidian, Our "Second Brain"

Obsidian is newer to the note-taking scene, but it has several compelling points that have swiftly garnered it popularity and solidified its position on this list. In, [their own words][0], 
> Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Obsidian is an entirely offline application that we will use to take notes, develop ideas, and associate these notes and ideas with each other through a method called "[backlinking][1]." Backlinking simply means that when a note is created, we can open up a Linked Pane that will show places in our note where we mentioned a word or phrase from another note and can choose to link those notes to form a connection between them. Once we have enough of these notes linking to each other, we can visualize and navigate them through Obsidian's hallmark sexy graph view:

![Linked Dot Graph of Notes](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/16zo35prw23mik6i206l.jpg)

Onto the details, Obsidian's free plan only blocks you out of syncing across devices, a setback that can be bypassed by storing your Obsidian files in locally available cloud folders such as Google Drive/OneDrive. The app is supported by hundreds of both official and community-made plugins to customize, enhance, and completely alter your experience as needed. Lastly, Obsidian uses a simple text-formatting language called [Markdown][2] that is very easy to use, even with no prior experience(this entire article was made using Markdown). Now let's talk about the managerial tool, [Notion][3].
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### Notion, the "Big Brother"

Notion is a much more complex tool on first look than Obsidian, and that complexity can be off-putting. The ways we can displace that complexity are through some easily accessible features of the browser application. The first is templates. Other people have already done some of the work for you, so use their creations as jumping off points. If you need a calendar that links its events to pages of plans for part of a project, or you need a table linked to a database relevant to you, then choose a template that gets you most of what you need and work from there. The two main ways you will format and choose inputs yourself is through the "/" key and by highlighting a section of text. Both of these options will open a context menu allowing you to insert a data structure or change the current selection into a different data structure. For our purposes, we will focus on using Notion as a project manager, task planner, and general tool for filling gaps in our organizational needs.

![A Notion Project Board](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/got5u53pj8wtip5nu2mi.png)

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### Miro, the "Looker"

[Miro][4] is the part of the equation where you lose the most by not paying for the premium version. In simple terms, Miro is the visualizing tool that we can use for anything from flowcharts and mood boards to whiteboard style drag-and-drop post-it notes to illustrate and brainstorm ideas. The unfortunate cost of being on the free version is that, amongst other restrictions, you can only have three of these boards up at one time. So the workflow we will use here is to use Miro to create a visualization, export it as an image or pdf according to need, then delete it from our boards to free up space, This does mostly preclude us from having more than one ongoing visual representation, but having a tool that can do these visualizations at all is worth the hassle.

![A Miro Brainstorming Board](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5nh50lopb5ussymwjj6c.png)

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## Bringing It All Together

To recap: 
- Obsidian is the simple yet customizable note-taking tool that will develop a mind-map of knowledge and show us links within that knowledge that we might not have realized ourselves 
- Notion is the flexible and powerful managerial tool that will outline our projects, link our tools and applications, and keep us on track 
- Miro is our easily available visualizer for when text, graphs, and tables won't do the trick

There are a thousand and one other bits of information to learn about each of these tools that were not covered here. Experiment, look up guides, and branch out if any of them are not working out for you. Two resources that are helpful in making these decisions from a broader standpoint than what was discussed here are [this article][5] about types of note-takers by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and [this article][6] about types of note-taking applications by Cameron Flint. Once you've finished packing and understanding your toolbox, you will become a much more capable learner and creator.

[0]: https://obsidian.md "Note-Taking Tool"
[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Working+with+backlinks "More Information on Backlinking"
[2]: https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax "Learn Markdown Here"
[3]: https://www.notion.so "Organizational Tool"
[4]: https://www.miro.com "Visualization Tool"
[5]: https://nesslabs.com/how-to-choose-the-right-note-taking-app "About You"
[6]: https://cameron-sea.medium.com/knowledge-activity-and-content-5fbcad79d161 "About the Tools"