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Importing Workflowy and Notion to Obsidian 3/6
I had 10 years of notes scattered across two tools. Here's how I migrated everything into Obsidian in under an hour.
📋 Workflowy → Obsidian
Workflowy stores your notes in a hierarchical structure. The native export gives you a plain text file.
1. Full export from Workflowy (Settings → Export → Plain text)
2. Pasted into a Workflowy.md file in my vault
3. Result: 1.8 million characters in a single file
Obsidian handles large files without breaking a sweat. Searching through 1.8M characters takes less than a second.
📦 Notion → Obsidian
Notion is trickier. Every page is linked, databases create subfolders, formats diverge.
1. Export from Notion: Settings → Export all workspace content → Markdown & CSV
2. Notion generates a .zip file
3. Unzipped into the Obsidian vault
4. Result: 847 MB, 7,837 .md files
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid:
• Notion filenames contain UUIDs (long identifiers). Ugly but functional.
• Notion internal links break. No big deal: Obsidian finds everything through search.
• Embedded images are included in the export and display properly in Obsidian.
🔍 The real power: unified search
Before: my notes were in 3 places. I couldn't find anything.
Now: Ctrl+Shift+F in Obsidian → I search across 10,000+ files instantly. One keyword is enough to find an idea I wrote down 5 years ago.
Total import time: under an hour for 10 years of notes.
Next post: how I automated the summarization of 533 Zoom meetings with Python + AI.
How many notes do you have scattered across how many different tools?
📋 Workflowy → Obsidian
Workflowy stores your notes in a hierarchical structure. The native export gives you a plain text file.
1. Full export from Workflowy (Settings → Export → Plain text)
2. Pasted into a Workflowy.md file in my vault
3. Result: 1.8 million characters in a single file
Obsidian handles large files without breaking a sweat. Searching through 1.8M characters takes less than a second.
📦 Notion → Obsidian
Notion is trickier. Every page is linked, databases create subfolders, formats diverge.
1. Export from Notion: Settings → Export all workspace content → Markdown & CSV
2. Notion generates a .zip file
3. Unzipped into the Obsidian vault
4. Result: 847 MB, 7,837 .md files
⚠️ Pitfalls to avoid:
• Notion filenames contain UUIDs (long identifiers). Ugly but functional.
• Notion internal links break. No big deal: Obsidian finds everything through search.
• Embedded images are included in the export and display properly in Obsidian.
🔍 The real power: unified search
Before: my notes were in 3 places. I couldn't find anything.
Now: Ctrl+Shift+F in Obsidian → I search across 10,000+ files instantly. One keyword is enough to find an idea I wrote down 5 years ago.
Total import time: under an hour for 10 years of notes.
Next post: how I automated the summarization of 533 Zoom meetings with Python + AI.
How many notes do you have scattered across how many different tools?