I was wondering if any civil service aspirant (UPSC CSE, India) are using Obsidian for their notes, if yes, then what is the work flow if they can share 
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Hi! Not a civil service aspirant, but I’m from India too. It’s nice to see someone else from India so I couldn’t resist commenting 
I’m using Obsidian to manage my notes for my PhD…
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Can you share your workflow?
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Not a Civil Service aspirant, but trying to use it for my other competitive exams… BTW I am also using remnote in addition to obsidian.
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Haha, glad to know you.
Obsidian must be an excellent tool for PhD. I sometimes wish I had it in my Masters.
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Asking me?
My workflow is not yet final, I just keep taking notes tagged with status (draft, yellow, green) and the category it belongs to. Then move the note into a folder wrt to the paper it belongs. I have to use folder hierarchy as it’s really too many notes if I keep them all at a single place. I organise once in a while - but its hectic. That is why I was asking how other people manage it in case of UPSC.
PS I also have it linked with ANKI, so a note or a part of it moves into ANKI where I revise them (lacking self-discipline though :p)
I tried remnote, but being an user of ANKI, I needed ANKI integration. That was the whole point of my note taking system. I see that now you can connect ANKI with obsidian and the code actually is independent of Obsidian. It just parses markdown.
As for Remnote, after watching a series of Notion server outages, I couldn’t risk it. ANd didn’t want to have two systems for revision. Also, Remnote mobile app was pretty basic and crude back then (4 months back) and I prefer revising on mobile. Ankidroid is perfect in all sense with gestures and clean interface.
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Agreed. I am not happy with remnote’s bugs … I do love obsidian and want to use it for my studies and it is worthwhile to mention here that there is no match against obsidian features,but the basic issue is non availability of mobile app in obsidian as you know it’s imp requirement as reading notes on the go is the best way to utilise your notes … Anyways how you are using it on mobile for studying notes., If you have any good Android app suggestions for integrating obsidian notes then it would be great help also I think u are also using obsidian2anki pluggin for making flashcards. But please tell me how you solve the problem of context and extra in anki for transferred cards from obsidian
I had created an extra field for context which adds the context (file location to all the headers in succession) and this text is semi-transparent. If in any card, I don’t understand the context, I just hover over that context and it shows itself. If I am able to understand fine, else I have another field with Obsidian link which leads me to the note itself in obsidian (if on mobile I would simply flag them for later review on laptop).
I mostly make sure I have enough context in the cards and I have my decks according to different papers too.
As for app on mobile, I tried a lot of options, I was able to have notes on both iPad and android but viewing it satisfactorily was missing. SInce, clicking on a link was almost never available, but yes, we could open any file and view it via search (no wiki links though)
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Allright. Well I was Interested in the workflow of a CSE student in India.
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Can we have a workflow of Civil Service Aspirant here to get a feel of the system
Hi @rambo_lava100 not sure if you are still around. I was just looking at Remnote. Could you please share your thoughts on your approach - how you are able to work on both Remnote and Obsidian without any conflicts, and still make sense of your note organization?
After using both note systems i can say that remnote is good in terms of features like creating flashcards while writing notes. Only this feature is amiss in obsidian… Otherwise Obsidian is the best tool for taking notes as it has all the features one can think of. Plus it has very active community support…
and writing on obsidian is a fluidic experience which is not so good in remnote (when you have large database it becomes abit slow).
Regarding my approach on using Obsidian for exam’s like Civil Services-
I made a main page where all subjects (linked files) are mentioned. Within these subjects files I add my notes. I try to keep my notes short so that it wont become like book when later reviewing it… Plus one main thing-- linking is the key to extract value from your notes but beware do this only after completing your writing, dont do this while writing notes.
My system is not fullproof… everybody has his own method of organizing notes. Main motto of everyone preparing notes should be to extract value from these created notes by reviewing them regularly, if these are not regularly reviewed then notes go waste.
I am using Spaced-Repetition plugin. Which can emulate remnote to some extent except reading PDFs that efficiently.
I agree with the last lines!!
Yes I am using Obsidian for UPSC notes preparation, Here is the link for my graph view.
(Both are link to my YouTube video of graph view)
Thank you