I’ve tried Obsidian before, but the whole process of migrating my Apple Notes into it just seemed like too much fucking work. I ended up deleting it and moved on. Then, the other day, I stumbled upon news of an Obsidian importer plugin for Apple Notes. Importing everything, including attachments, suddenly felt doable. So, I reinstalled Obsidian, imported my notes, and voila! It worked like a charm.

Next, I dove into the world of Obsidian setups and workflows. I watched videos, read articles, and eventually came across an insightful piece on the Drafts Forum by Stephen Millard, a highly respected member of the Drafts community.

Stephen describes his usage of Drafts and Obsidian, highlighting the distinctive roles each plays in his workflow. Drafts serves as his capture hub, a place where he preprocesses information for use elsewhere, acting like a transport service for his ideas. Obsidian, on the other hand, is one of his destinations, functioning as a personal filing cabinet for notes and writing.

He emphasizes that Drafts and Obsidian serve different purposes. Drafts excels in speedy capture and flexible text manipulation, focusing on simplicity and efficiency. Meanwhile, Obsidian is more about finding and exploring relationships between notes, featuring a more complex plugin architecture and a specialization in Markdown format.

Stephen’s longer investment in Drafts makes it a staple in his workflow, as it does for me, and he sees himself using multiple tools rather than replacing one with another. The availability of Obsidian on more platforms, including Windows and Linux, is a significant factor for him. Additionally, he discusses the lock-in aspect, mentioning that while Drafts allows easy extraction of data, Obsidian’s use of Markdown files makes it more accessible on different platforms and apps.

Stephen’s approach gave me a clear picture of how I could actually continue using Drafts seamlessly while still benefiting from Obsidian’s powerful features.