2025-06-24

I have been thinking a lot about work organization and note taking, recently. This was spawned by my employer beginning to enforce draconian software usage policies on all employees, including those tools that we use for organization and note taking. I've always been a proponent of using the right tool for the job and, while I understand and respect the need for a large organization to ensure employees are not violating EULAs or exposing proprietary company inforamtion to third parties, the way that the policy is being applied is quite lazy and, frankly, ridiculous.

For years I've been using Obsidian for note taking and general organization. I've built my entire workflow and, frankly, life around this tool. After numerous attempts to get an exception filed for Obsidian, I've been told, with finality, that I am not permitted to use it. When asked why, I was told that it was not worth the effort for the procurement team to review. To paraphrase their own words, we already have approval and licenses for Notion and "meets all of the requirements I have outlined" for my workflow.

There is just one small problem with this... it's a completely different system with a completely different way of operating, incompatible templating format, proprietary and a cloud-only storage in their proprietary cloud. In order to make the switch, I'd have to not only learn how to use the new tool but I'd have to learn many of it's more advanced features to such a degree that I can translate my templates in Obsidian over to it. Among other things, this involves learning how Notion uses databases and database queries (completely different than how Obsidian does things). And that just scratches the surface of the problems I'm going to encounter.

As a result of doing my real job, now. My employer is forcing me to spend time re-inventing a system I spent years perfecting and without which I would completely fail to function at this point. I chose Obsidian specifically because I knew this would be the case and Obsidian is the most future-proof solution (being only self-hosted Markdown at the end of the day). And I'm not going to spend my personal time on this because I already have a system for personal organization OBSIDIAN.