Video: The System I Built after 4 Years of Using Obsidian for my PhD


My First YouTube Video: PhD Story & System

Dear Reader,

Last week I recorded, animated and edited my first real YouTube video, which sums up everything you need to know to start using Obsidian efficiently for your research.

Part 1: Obsidian for Academics in 15 minutes

Part 2: Organising Ideas using the Source Topic Argument System

Part 3: A live demo of how it works, which was the highlight of the last information management course.

Despite my best efforts, it turned out to be 55 minutes long! But, on the bright side, it really covers everything that's important to start with.

Since this is the first video and my channel has very few followers, I am now calling for your support to:

  1. Go on YouTube and follow the EA channel.
  2. Like the video if you think it deserves it.
  3. Watch and comment (YouTube rewards engagement)

I deeply appreciate your support!

Lastly, if you watch the video, let me know what you think! I am new to making videos in this format, and every nitpick would help improve the quality in the future!

Making YouTube videos is extremely time-consuming. For each minute of this video, it took about 25 mins of work.

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.

If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, then switch to the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.

Want to unsubscribe from all future emails? Unsubscribe from everything.

The Effortless Academic

Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

Read more from The Effortless Academic

Setting up AI Agents in Obsidian Dear Reader, Over the last few days, I showed you what AI agents can do for your research, how the system is built from five simple components, and how it saved my PhD defence. But does that work for you? Before building the AI Agents for Academics Course, I surveyed 73 academics on their hopes for AI and designed the course to meet these goals. First Question: What would you like AI to handle? The "Other" category had more unique answers like "preparing...

Setting up AI Agents in Obsidian Dear Reader, Yesterday I showed you a video demonstrating how powerful AI agents are when you set them up well (click here if you missed it) and give them (restricted) access to your notes and papers. Today, let’s talk about exactly how this system is built. It has five components. Implementing them correctly is like making a wheel round, absolutely essential for its frictionless function. Let me explain in this video from the new AI Agents for Academics...

New Release: Academic AI Agents Course + Intro Bonus Dear Reader, Yesterday. I shared with you how my PhD defence ended up being a stress test for my note-taking system and the AI agents that run on top of it. (Click here if you missed it) But what are AI agents, and how exactly can they help in your academic work? To explain it in one analogy: An AI chat in the browser is to an AI agent what a calculator is to a computer. They are technically very similar, but while a calculator performs a...