27 June 2026 · 5 min read

Why I stopped running my life in Obsidian

This is not a takedown. Obsidian is one of the best pieces of software I have used, and I still respect it. But I spent the better part of a year trying to run my whole life inside it, not just my notes, and I want to be honest about where that fell apart for me, because I do not think I am the only one.

What pulled me in

The appeal was obvious. My notes were plain Markdown files on my own disk. No account, no cloud, no subscription. I could link ideas together, and the whole thing felt like it would outlive any company. For writing and thinking, it was excellent, and it still is.

So I did what a lot of people do. I tried to make it the home for everything: tasks, a daily planner, habits, a reading list, even a rough budget. The community had a plugin for almost all of it.

Where it broke down

The trouble was that none of it came set up. Every part of my life was a small construction project before it did anything useful.

• Tasks meant choosing a task plugin, then learning its syntax, then writing queries to pull them into one view.
• My daily planner was a template I had to maintain, held together with a query language that is basically light programming.
• Habits were checkboxes in a note, with no real streaks or history unless I added yet another plugin.
• Finance never found a home at all. A budget in Markdown is just a sad table.
• Every few weeks an update would break a plugin, and I would spend an evening fixing my own setup instead of using it.

I ended up maintaining a system more than I used one. The vault was mine and it was local, which I loved, but the day to day job of running my life was still scattered and fragile.

The thing I finally admitted

Obsidian is a toolkit. It hands you a blank, powerful space and trusts you to build your own tool inside it. Some people genuinely enjoy that, and if you are one of them, you should stay. I realised I was not. I did not want to build a tool. I wanted to open one and use it.

I also stopped telling myself it was free. The price was not money, it was my weekends and the quiet worry that one update would knock the whole thing over.

What I built instead

I am a materials scientist, and I built a small app for myself to fix exactly this. It keeps tasks, finance, habits, a journal, a planner, reading, meals and more in one desktop app, already set up. The data is a single file on my own machine, so I kept the part of Obsidian I loved, the local ownership, and dropped the part that wore me down, the endless assembly. It is a one time price, not a subscription. I called it Exsut.

The honest difference is not local versus cloud, because Obsidian is local too. It is turnkey versus build it yourself. Obsidian gives you a blank vault to shape. Exsut gives you a life that is already laid out, and a planner where everything with a date lands in one place.

Where Obsidian still wins

I want to be fair, because this matters if you are choosing.

• Notes and knowledge work. Obsidian is deeper here, and it is not close.
• Mobile. Obsidian has real mobile apps. Exsut is desktop only for now.
• Plugins. If you want to extend and tinker, the ecosystem is huge.
• Free, and plain Markdown files you can open in any editor.

If those are what you care about most, Obsidian is the right call and I would not try to talk you out of it.

The trade, plainly

Pick Obsidian if you love building your own system and you mostly live in notes. Pick something turnkey if you tried to run your life in a blank vault, felt the maintenance pile up, and just want it to work when you open it. That second person was me, which is why I stopped.