Cultivating Mental Silence

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Day 2 Using Obsidian as my main app for Writing

This is my second full day using the Obsidian iPadOS app for all of my writing. Yesterday I wrote about my first use case with Obsidian; the curation of my ever growing album collection. Today I want to talk briefly about something I’ve been doing in another app, Drafts, and what it’s like doing the same thing in Obsidian.

Currently, in the Drafts app, I have a workspace for things related to my blog. In that workspace I keep a list of things I want to blog about. While trying to imagine what it would be like bringing all of my writing to Obsidian I needed reasons to try things out. I decided to bring my list of blog ideas from Drafts to Obsidian. This was very easy and there is a “Checklist” plug-in within the “Community Plug-ins” section of “Settings” that makes it simple to set up the list. I’m including a screen shot here so you can see what it looks like to me when I have the list opened next to my blog post in what Obsidian calls “split vertically.”

SIDE NOTE: One of the cool things about this “Checklist” plug-in is that if you use hashtags like “someday” and “date specific” you can pull up custom checklists that show you just the items ordered by the hashtag, as shown in this screen shot…

Being able to split screens vertically, or horizontally all within one app like Obsidian brings with it so much potential for the writer. I find it very convenient to have the list of ideas for my blog opened next to the draft that I am writing all while remaining in the same app. This feature allows me to use the list as a reference without having to use the split view feature of iPadOS. This in turn allows me to actually use the iPadOS split view feature with another app, like Safari, giving me more options to work with while I’m writing, as seen in this screen shot…

Like anything new, the more you play with it the more you learn. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I am only scratching the surface with what is possible with this app. Tomorrow I will be exploring my third use case for Obsidian; my Morning Pages workflow and process.