I stopped using Obsidian for quick notes, and my vault actually got useful

Published Aug 20, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Obsidian itself is rarely a problem; the problem is what a lot of people are using it for. It's become a common default for mundane, simple note-taking tasks like making grocery lists or one-line reminders, and I've seen enough people doing this (myself included) to feel it's worth pushing back on. Obsidian is one of my favorite pieces of software, but it's not really the right shape for a "quick notes" type of job. And using it for these small tasks actually makes it worse for the things it was built for. So I want to make the case for pulling the quick captures out of your vault, what to use instead, and how to get the most out of Obsidian… Using Obsidian for quick captures is like using Photoshop to crop an image "Buy milk" doesn't belong in a knowledge base I've been running my vault (several actually) for a couple of years and would genuinely miss it if it went away, so this is not a case against Obsidian as a product, it's about how too many of us use it wrong. Obsidian is more of a library than a notepad, and there's a reason you don't walk into a library to write down a phone number. Opening a full desktop app just to jot down "buy milk" is the same type of mismatch. Using Obsidian for quick capture introduces a lot more friction into your workflow than you're probably realizing. Obsidian is Electron, so it takes a moment to start up. And if you keep separate vaults for work and personal like I do, there's also a vault picker in front of you before you can get started. On mobile, it's worse, because Obsidian Sync is a paid add-on and every free workaround I've tried (including iCloud and Syncthing) is a lot more effort than it's worth for quick captures. Obsidian does give you checkbox syntax, which is nice for to-dos, but to get it to behave like a real task manager with recurring items and due date views, you'd need plugins. Then there's the vault itself, and every quick note that ends up there will never actually link to anything, and will probably also never get deleted. So it's just taking up real estate. Let something else handle the small stuff I'm not telling anyone to ditch Obsidian, but to rather find an alternative specifically made for quick captures. The obvious one is going to be Google Keep. If you're already in the Google ecosystem, you really don't need much else. It has cards with checklists, reminders, voice notes, a phone widget, and a browser extension, and everything's synced for free. Simplenote is the Google Keep alternative I'd recommend, and probably the closest you'll find to being like a little sibling of Obsidian. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and web, and it does plain text with Markdown and tags, plus syncs instantly (without a paid tier). Automattic did move Simplenote into maintenance mode earlier this year, which means big fixes only and no new features. But it's still a great option for the simple job of quick capture. Joplin is also worth a look. It sits somewhere between Simplenote and Obsidian in terms of complexity. You get a little more structure with notebooks but it's not as heavy as Obsidian. It's open-source, self-hostable, and syncs through whichever backend you want. I'd even recommend Apple Notes and Samsung Notes over Obsidian for quick notes and to-do lists. Nearly everyone has access to these; they're super lightweight and sync through your account. What Obsidian actually deserves to be used for Everything a quick-notes app was never built to do The whole point is that once you have a place for the small stuff, then your vault will stop filling up with junk, and Obsidian will get a lot better at doing the things it was built for. Obsidian is so much more than a note-taking app - it's a full PKM stack. It has long-form notes that link to each other, tags that actually mean something because you've had time to develop them after years of usage, and backlinks that surface the right connections and even remind you of forgotten connections. It only really works if the vault has signal in it, and grocery lists dilute that signal. There's the archive side of it too. I use Obsidian as a literal vault, like storage for content. This includes article research I want to keep, book snippets that impacted my life in some way, meeting notes that are paramount to ongoing work, project post-mortems from ages ago, study material, the list goes on. I might not need every single thing today, but chances are it'll come in handy at some point, in which case, it's already sorted and filed neatly in the vault. It's also a genuinely good studying environment. There are loads of plugins you can utilize for this, but my favorite is super basic: it's the built-in split-view feature. It really helps with recall. The Canvas core plugin is also great for studying and brainstorming. It's a whiteboard tool where you can pin notes and create links between them; you can also add live web pages. The Bases core plugin turns my folders of markdown into database views, which is great for ongoing project management. I've built a pipeline out of an "index" folder that runs in here, and have several filters set up to sift through everything. The other thing worth mentioning is AI agents. Because the vault is just a regular folder with Markdown on disk, I point tools like Antigravity and Claude at it without any special integration. This is what I use to do automatic cleanup and keep my frontmatter in check. While useful for large batches of knowledge stacks, this is a bit overkill for grocery lists - I just get rid of those when I've bought the items. Stop handing Obsidian the small tasks I'm not trying to talk anyone out of Obsidian here; the opposite, actually. It's more about matching the size of the tool to the size of the task or thought. Task lists don't earn a knowledge base, and cluttering a knowledge base with them makes it worse at doing the job it's meant to do. Obsidian OS Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, Android Individual pricing Free normally; $4/month for Obsidian Sync