Every few months someone finds Obsidian for the first time and tells me it changed their life. A few weeks later, half of them tell me they stopped using it because they spent more time customising it than actually writing notes.
Both of those outcomes are completely predictable. Here's why.
What Obsidian Actually Is
Obsidian is a note-taking app built on plain Markdown files stored locally on your computer. That's it. No cloud sync required (you can add it), no proprietary format, no company holding your data hostage.
Every note is a .md file that lives in a folder called a "vault" on your hard drive. You can open those files in any text editor. You can back them up to whatever you want. If Obsidian shuts down tomorrow, your notes are fine.
That's the core value proposition: your notes, in a format that will work forever, in your own hands.
Everything else — the graph view, the plugins, the community templates — is built on top of that.
How It's Different From Notion
People always ask this. Here's the honest comparison:
Notion is a cloud-based all-in-one workspace. Databases, project tracking, docs, wikis — it does everything. Your data lives on Notion's servers. The structure is rigid-ish but opinionated.
Obsidian is a local writing tool for connected notes. It doesn't do databases or project management natively. Your data lives on your machine. The structure is entirely up to you, which is both the best and worst thing about it.
The short version: Notion is better for tracking things and collaborating. Obsidian is better for thinking and writing.
If you want a second brain that reflects how your mind works — associative, nonlinear, built up over time — Obsidian is closer to that than Notion.
The Thing That Makes It Weird and Good: Linked Notes
The feature that sets Obsidian apart is bidirectional linking. You can link any note to any other note with [[double brackets]]. Every note shows you what other notes link back to it.
The result, over time, is a web of connected ideas rather than a hierarchy of folders. Topics that seem unrelated on the surface start showing connections. A note about a workflow you use at work links back to something you wrote about ADHD task initiation two months ago.
For associative thinkers — which is a lot of ADHD brains — this is genuinely interesting. The graph view (a visual map of your linked notes) is mostly useless in practice, but the linking behaviour is real and valuable.
The ADHD Problem With Obsidian
Here it is: Obsidian is infinitely customisable, and ADHD brains will customise it instead of using it.
There are thousands of community plugins. Themes, custom CSS, templating systems, daily note workflows, task managers built inside Obsidian. You can spend a month building the perfect setup and write almost nothing in it.
This is not a hypothetical. It's the most common Obsidian failure mode.
The other issue: the blank vault. A new Obsidian vault is completely empty. No prompts, no structure, no suggestions. You open it and it's just... a text box. For people with ADHD who need some structure and activation energy to get started, that can be a hard stop.
How to Actually Start Without Losing a Week to Plugins
The simplest viable Obsidian setup:
1. Install it. Don't install any plugins yet.
Seriously. Close the plugin browser. The default Obsidian without anything extra is already a very good note-taking tool.
2. Create three folders:
Inbox— for quick captures, unprocessed thoughts, anything you need to write down fastNotes— for actual developed notesArchive— for stuff you want to keep but don't need to see
That's it. You don't need MOCs, Maps of Content, PARA, Zettelkasten, or any system someone wrote a 6,000-word blog post about. Start with three folders.
3. Write in it for two weeks before touching anything else.
The plugin urge will come. Ignore it. The point is to understand what you actually need from the tool before you start adding to it. Almost every useful plugin choice comes from a real friction point you discovered while using the thing.
The AI Angle: Obsidian + Claude
The plugin worth knowing about is Smart Connections. It uses local or cloud AI to analyse your vault and surface related notes you wouldn't have found manually. Ask it a question, it pulls relevant notes from your own vault to answer it.
That's a genuinely different kind of AI experience. Instead of asking Claude about something in general, you're asking Claude about something specifically in the context of what you've already written. Your own thinking, indexed and queryable.
For daily notes, there's also a workflow worth building:
- Write a daily note in Obsidian each morning — what you're working on, what's open, what's nagging at you
- Copy it into Claude with a prompt like: "Here's my daily note. Pull out the action items, flag anything I've mentioned before that's still unresolved, and help me prioritise the next 2 hours."
It's not automated but it's fast, and it pairs your long-term memory (Obsidian) with your active thinking tool (Claude) without much friction.
Who Should Use Obsidian
Good fit:
- You want full ownership of your notes (no cloud lock-in)
- You think associatively and want your notes to reflect that
- You write a lot and want a fast, distraction-free editor
- You're willing to spend a few hours setting up something you'll use for years
Probably not a good fit:
- You need collaboration features (Notion or Confluence is better)
- You want databases, structured tracking, or project management
- You're looking for an out-of-the-box solution with no configuration
- You know you'll spend more time customising than writing (be honest with yourself here)
The Short Version
Obsidian is a plain-text, local-first notes app with powerful linking between notes. It's not a Notion replacement — it's a thinking tool.
For ADHD brains: the associative linking is genuinely useful. The infinite customisability is a trap. Start bare, add only what you actually need, and use it alongside Claude rather than treating it as a standalone system.
The people who get the most out of it are the ones who resisted the plugin rabbit hole and just wrote things down for long enough that the vault became valuable. That's the move. Write first, optimise later.