My Note-taking System!
07/03/2026
This is a short description of my note-taking processes and my choices surrounding it. Part 1 is a philosophical tangent, part 2 is a technical setup on how to use Obsidian to take notes with IOS and PC, synced on Github, all for free!
Part 1- why care?
You’ll never see the same stock photo of a river twice
Why not just spin up the most convenient word editor to jot down thoughts, or alternatively not even bother and trust in your own memory?
I have seen two types of arguments surrounding the usefulness of note-taking. One is that you, as an individual, will never cross the same river twice. The ideas you have today are fleeting and transitory, and will not be had again in the same way, ever. Thus, being able to mark and return to your thoughts is what enables recursive thinking. Your understanding of the world can build on top of itself more easily on a stable foundation than the shifting sands of memory. Two is that “it's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've written.” The act of note-taking in of itself, even if you were to ignore those writings for the rest of your life, adds to whatever you were conceptualizing to begin with. It’s easy to get lost in one’s own headspace– seeing your ideas on the page, realized, forces you to confront these ideas outside of your own mind.
If we can assume the utility of note-taking, then we can assume the utility of optimizing note-taking. That is a personal decision. I can say I personally optimize on ease of thought capture and ease of organization, in that order (given that the first is time-sensitive and the second isn’t). But this, again, is a decision you’ll have to make yourself, based on why you decide you’d like to take notes and the situations in which you’ll find yourself taking notes.
Part 2– my technical setup.
This is very specific for my own configuration of values and hardware. I imagine this section will be of higher utility to a very small segment of the world with the specific problems and goals that I had in July 2026.
As of the writing of this article, I use Windows for PC with IOS for mobile for personal convenience. I also value
- Cost-saving
- Privacy
- Convenience
in that order.
Thus, there are going to be less convoluted ways to do what I am trying to do here– i.e., sync notes privately between my laptop and my phone.
The note-taking interface I use is Obsidian. I like the UI, I like the plugin environment, and I really like the fact that really it’s just a wrapper on a directory of markdown files. I may do a deeper article on Obsidian (and open platforms) one of these days, but for now, feel free to do your own digging.
It just works
Now, there’s just one problem with Obsidian. It doesn’t provide syncing services (i.e., between my laptop and phone) for free. It has a paid version (as of 2026) for an eminently reasonable $5 a month. If you’d like to save yourself the hassle, you can ignore the rest of this article and just buy that, which is fully equivalent and probably superior to the system I ended up setting up. But I had a free morning and familiarity with Git, so I figured I’d at least try and save myself another monthly subscription.
So the nice thing about Obsidian, as mentioned, is that it’s just markdown files. Unlike, say, Google Keep or ICloud, this makes data import and export remarkably easy. Obsidian also has a free plugin developed by silvanocerza called Github Gitless Sync, which allows you to plug in a Github repo and back up your files in the cloud within the Obsidian interface itself. This then turns your notes into just another git repo, forever available on the internet so long as Github stays alive.
That’s one half of the problem solved– communication to and from Obsidian on PC. But as you may know, Git on IOS is a significantly stranger problem, due to Apple’s closed environment. Luckily, we can use the GitSync app for IOS. This lets you sync files to and from Github, along with providing an IOS Shortcut option which allows for syncing to occur upon the opening and closing of another app in IOS. For me, this ended up being the Obsidian IOS app.
Ultimately this was a fairly simple workaround to actually using Obsidian sync or another syncing service, and through my use, works fairly well. The only problems I personally had is that sometimes, deleting files would cause strange Git conflicts (easily resolved even with basic familiarity with Git), and that the Obsidian IOS app doesn’t provide a note-sized widget for easy access to any particular note.