Obsidian Bases for Idea Generation

Dear Reader,

Generating new ideas is the currency in academia: The more impactful your ideas, the more impactful your research, and the better your chances of success.

But what are ideas?

Ideas are connections between two related concepts. For instance, if someone finds a link between a vegetarian diet and hip fracture rates, that's novel and vital research that could improve people's lives.

But these two concepts are not necessarily related. Nutritionists will write about vegetarian diets, and medical doctors will study hip fractures. Naturally, if you are researching these topics, your notes on them will not be well-connected.

However, you can set up your note-taking system such that even far-away connections are resurfaced in a meaningful way. In this week's more technical newsletter, I want to show you how to do that with Obsidian's Bases. So far, this setup has been incredibly useful to my own work.

(If Obsidian is new to you, please sign up for the free 21-day note-taking course to learn the foundations of digital academic note-taking.)

If each note is a single concept (like “vegetarian diet” or “hip fracture rates”), the goal is to uncover how those ideas connect, even when they aren’t directly linked.

I use three kinds of connections: parent links for tightly related ideas, related/lazy links for looser associations, and backlinks for direct interactions. All of these live as properties and can be displayed in an Obsidian Base. This lets notes from remote connections resurface automatically as you navigate, sparking new insights without extra effort.

Limited Spots for 1-on-1 Coaching in Nov/Dec

Time constraints always forced me to turn down requests for personal coaching. Recently, however, I worked with a one-on-one client, and the experience was genuinely transformative: They made breakthroughs in their note-taking system, and I learned a great deal about the real, field-specific challenges academics face.

Because I am rebuilding the Effortless Academic Note-Taking course, I decided to open a small number of coaching spots for November and December at a much discounted rate. These sessions will give you personalised solutions to the bottlenecks in your workflow and help me make the course genuinely better for everyone else. I hope it's a win-win.

Please click the button to book a session.

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Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

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Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

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