Using Obsidian to Track Writing Projects

Part 1: Short form writing 1,500–3,000 words

Patrick Berry
7 min readMay 8, 2022
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Introduction

This post describes my writing process for sort-form articles which are typically between 1,500 to 3,000 words (currently these are Medium posts, but may expand to include other online platforms in the future).

I have taken up writing online approximately 12 months ago and until now have been using Microsoft Word as my primary writing tool; using word files in various folders to manage my writing workflow, capture ideas, and manage notes and research.

I have been unhappy with this MS Word and file folder solution and have recently begun using Obsidian as both my writing and knowledge management tool.

This is part 1 of a planned three part series. Part 2 will cover using Obsidian to cover academic papers and industry journal articles of 4,000–7,000 words. Part 3 will cover book length writing in the order of 40,000 to 70,000 words.

Core Features

The following are the core features of Obsidian that I find most useful for writing,

Linking

Obsidian supports automatic bidirectional linking of notes. This is through wiki-linking, where a link can be inserted into text by…

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Patrick Berry

Industrial Process Control, Operational Technology, Industry 4.0, Cybersecurity, Digital TX, AI, ML, Data Analytics https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcberry/