Smart note taking

When you take a lot of notes in your work, it's handy to do so electronically so you always have them at hand and can search through them.

Moreover, it often happens that actions from one meeting also need to be used in another meeting. It can be hard to manage this with the resources your employer provides (often Microsoft products).

We had a look at Obsidian and have been using it for quite some time. It comes a long way toward what we're looking for in a combination of note taking and task management.

A strong point is that the notes are becoming more dynamic: for example, because you can link tasks to tags and dynamically display a list of tasks with specific tags in a note. I find tags a very useful mechanism for distinguishing information.

Another major advantage of Obsidian is that it runs locally and not in the cloud. This also makes it easier to use in a work environment with stricter security regulations.

And Obsidian is used by a large user community, so there are also many plugins available. For example, for more extensive task management ('Tasks' and 'Task Genius' are very good). But also for accessing JIRA (used for software backlog management) information in notes.

Performance-wise, it works well (quite impressive, even though it works with separate text files). The downside is that it doesn't really have a database, which makes task management in particular suboptimal: other tools, such as the newcomer Tana, do have one, but they often operate in the cloud.

Obsidian can synchronize via iCloud, for example, but also through its own synchronization server (although there is a charge for this), so you can also use it via an app on your mobile phone.