Don’t rely on single-degree connections - they are close to useless. They really are, and I’m not kidding because I’ve been in this backlinking thing for close to 3 years moving from Roam and now in Obsidian for a long while. Doing this single-degree thing does allow you to access it in future (given if you ever do, given your inflow of torrents of information and your discipline level) but from experience it builds cobwebs of underutilised information that never see the light of day. It feels good because it is lazy, but ultimately isn’t good for the health of your PKM.
My solution to this:
- Go at least 2 degrees deep, and make this quickly accessible so that it doesn’t become troublesome. Some use Graph Analysis plugin. I prefer having a panel of the Local Graph in my sidebar, with depth level increased to maximum.
- Make note titles like APIs. They should contain full opinions/claims/succinct summaries or act like thumbnails to a bigger body of information.
- Whenever you create a note, always create [[access points]] like these. They will create uncreated nodes that help you connect to this note in future. For example, if you typed [[dehumanisation|dehumanised]], everytime you create a subsequent new note in future that links to [[dehumanisation]], it will show you this old note that you’ve created.
- A quick way to create new notes, or “thought sequences”. I call this Threading, which I use the Breadcrumbs plugin for. For example, this entire forum thread is a “thread”, sequential ideas that take cues from the previous post, a logical sequence of ideas.
- Another way to pull up “distant links” is to use the Obsidian Sidekick plugin which you can install through the Obsidian42 BRAT plugin. Or you can install the Various Complements plugin. Basically it highlights partial matches of things that you are typing which can jog your memory and provide possible linkages to your current material.
Here’s a video I made showing my process: How To Use Local Graph View In Obsidian - YouTube It’s a little long, but I promise that it will spur some new ideas in how to structure your work.
The power of the local graph view needs to spread. It’s such an integrated function within Obsidian but so severely underused. It has grown to be the single most powerful function in Obsidian that I cannot do without.
I’m not a big fan of ‘retrospective work’. I hate reviewing, I hate going back and processing things. So much wasted time, and the information is already probably lost in context by the time you come back to it. It’s not only inefficient, it’s inorganic and not how our mind works. This approach makes and forces you to have everything you need on hand, forces you to connect to old ideas immediately upon consumption.
It’s almost like weaving a spider web, and I’m considering calling this “Knowledge Weaving”.