I am contemplating switching over to Obsidian for taking notes for my customer projects. I have used Omni Group’s OmniOutliner for many years (probably since version 1) and have note files on pretty much every customer that I have ever spoken to. My interest in using Obsidian is to surface related topics (ie problems that I may have solved for other customers) through the use of links. My current approach is to have a single file per customer where the filename syntax is, "notes - ", stored and synced with multiple devices using Omnipresence (Omni Group’s own sync service).
Within each note, I use the following outline (I’ve converted it to markdown for the purposes of Obsidian but in OmniOutliner, I am just using corresponding outline levels.
2021-02-07 -
ATTENDEES
- attendee 1
- attendee 2
- attendee x
NOTES
- notes taken during the meeting
Topic/subtopic
- if there are specific topics in the meeting, I will use an additional sublevel
ACTION ITEMS
- I will list action items in this section
- I also copy over action items to OmniFocus which is a much better tool for tracking
- I have been experimenting with adding a checkbox column to my outlined notes so I can simply put a check next to anything that needs a follow up. Visually, it’s a bit busy but I haven’t made a final decision on that yet.
2021-02-08 - another meeting and a topic
ATTENDEES
- attendees listed here
NOTES
- notes here
ACTION ITEMS
- action items listed here
The thing I really like about using OmniOutliner is that each row or group of rows can be moved around by dragging. This allows me to further organize my notes as I add more information and think about how to organize different topics. I can also record within the app, attach files, images, links, and export to various formats. As I mentioned at the beginning, I am looking to surface related information other than using search. I also use DevonThink, by the way, and it does have the ability to show relevancy rankings in documents so that’s an option for me as well.
Ultimately, I’m wondering if I should switch to Obsidian or add it as another tool to help me manage information (I don’t know how much, yet, it would benefit me).