Contacts in Obsidian? Heck yeah!

Today I want to share with you my top 6 reasons for managing contacts in my Obsidian Personal Knowledge Vault (PKV) instead of in a purpose-built contacts app or back-office app like Microsoft Outlook.

Photo by Hannah Nelson — Photography (pexels.com)

The value of a personal knowledge management system is exponentially increased to the degree that one integrates relevant personal information into it. And what could be more relevant than the people in your life? How can you call it a “second brain” if it doesn’t contain the human connections that are meaningful to you — your work colleagues, your professional contacts, mentors, friends, and family?

Here, I will share some of the specific benefits I’ve discovered from making the “Person” class, a first-class citizen in my PKV. Contacts in Obsidian? Heck, Yeah!

Here’s Why…

1. Query and report on people and their properties.
   With the Dataview plugin for Obsidian, you can query across your Person metadata and generate custom reports that aggregate the specific properties you want to see in a single view. This is something that popular contact management applications typically do not do!
2. Search by specific metadata properties.
   Suppose you’re traveling and want to find all the friends you know in a given destination. Since Obsidian allows you to search by property, you can simply search all Person instances by city, state, or postal code.
3. Classify and organize people into membership groups.
   
   Software like Microsoft Outlook allows you to organize contacts with Contact Groups. In Obsidian, this is also possible. One Person instance (a markdown document) can be added to one or more groups with tags.
4. Link and browse people by their relationship to things and to one another.
   What is the relationship that people have to you, your information, to one another, and to other things in the world? Typical contact management software does not relate people to one another and to other things by multiple dimensions, facets, or concepts. In Obsidian, this is easily done.
5. Take rich notes that promote good relationship habits such as the “Follow Up”.
   A simple, but powerful habit is to open a Person resource when you are meeting with a person so that you can take notes about them and follow up on topics you’ve been meaning to discuss. Typical contact applications focus only on storing contact information for the purpose of looking people up and contacting them. With Obsidian’s easy markdown editing of rich and relatable text, you can also store common contact information, while putting an emphasis on storing information for the purpose of enriching your knowledge of people and the value of your relationships.
6. Provide a single point of access to A.I. agents for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
   A.I. is quickly expanding the value of personal knowledge management with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and agent-oriented architectures. Rag, for example, prescribes a way to augment large language models with your own data. Keeping Person data in your PKV can improve an agent’s ability to reason on your information and the quality of the resulting conversational interface.

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In conclusion, managing contacts within your Obsidian personal knowledge vault (PKV) offers unique advantages that traditional contact management apps simply can’t match. Integrating contacts into your PKV not only centralizes your information but also enriches your personal and professional interactions.

Stay tuned for my forthcoming post, where I will share My Recipe for Managing Contacts in Obsidian. My step-by-step guide will help you get more value from Obsidian and your human relationships.