How continuously evolving my Obsidian vault exponentially improved my experience
Disclosure as per Medium’s AI policy: in this post I’ve used Microsoft Copilot for editing.
For the past year, I’ve been using Obsidian, the personal knowledge management app, for almost everything I’ve been doing, from task management, through meeting notes and up to planning my Medium posts. In this post, I’d like to share with you the one key insight I understood about working with this wonderful tool.
First, What is Obsidian? Obsidian isn’t just another note-taking app; it’s a digital garden for your ideas, thoughts, and knowledge. Think of it as a personal knowledge base that interlinks your notes, creating a web of information that’s tailored to your mind. Imagine a place where your thoughts can evolve, connect, and grow organically, transforming isolated notes into a cohesive network of ideas. Whether you’re a student, a writer, or just someone who loves to keep your thoughts organized, Obsidian offers a unique approach to managing your knowledge.
In this post I’d like to address a key point that in my opinion isn’t discussed enough — You need to personalize your vault. More than that — You should do it every single day. I’ll show this concept through several personal examples.
Why?
Personalizing your vault is the secret sauce to making Obsidian truly work for you. Your vault should reflect how your mind processes information and how you best work. Customizing the layout, choosing the right plugins, and organizing your notes in a way that feels intuitive can significantly enhance your productivity and creativity.
Personalizing your vault transforms Obsidian from a generic note-taking app into a powerful personal knowledge management system that’s uniquely yours, one that you feel comfortable working with every day. Simply copying templates from blogs or YouTube channels might be a great source of inspiration, but if you don’t modify them to match you how you feel is best, you will feel like there is a high cost to using all of these wonderful tools.
Now, let’s delve into how you can start customizing and get the most out of your digital garden.
How?
Before we begin discussing several aspects of personalizing your vault, you must understand that this is a dynamic and open-ended process. The vault I’m using today is the 200th iteration of the vault I started with one year ago. Every day you should look at how you work, what suits you and what doesn’t, and make small changes to make your work slightly easier, smooth over a pain point, and automate a small corner. Those small changes build up over time and bloom into a beautiful design that fits you personally.
Lines of thought
Here are a few general aspects that make up your vault. In each you have many choices that can shape and change the way you work, and I’ll show a few examples further on in the post.
Start by identifying what kind of structure suits you best. Are you a visual thinker? Utilize the Excalidraw to draw out your notes. Prefer a more linear approach? Keep your folders and tags well-organized. The beauty of Obsidian lies in its flexibility — it can adapt to whatever system you prefer.
Although Obsidian was originally meant to be a text-based editor, there are now many ways to lay out your thoughts more visually and dynamically. The built-in solution by Obsidian is Obsidian Canvas, but the community-driven Excalidraw plugin is a popular alternative. I won’t focus on a specific plugin but on the general ideas. It’s worth noting that I have separate workflows for different tasks, and so my vault contains all of these — text, canvas and Excalidraw.
Next, explore plugins that can add functionality tailored to your needs. There's a vast array of options, from calendar and task management plugins to those that enhance your writing experience. Don’t be afraid to experiment and find what enhances your workflow the most.
Perfect your vault by taking the time to create templates for recurring notes. This can streamline your process, making it easier to maintain consistency and focus.
Lastly, build a connected ecosystem of notes that interact with each other. When your notes interact with one another, you’re no longer dealing with isolated bits of information. Instead, you have a dynamic, interconnected web of knowledge that mirrors the complexity of your thoughts and ideas. This holistic approach to note-taking ensures that your ideas are always accessible, interconnected, and ready to be expanded upon.
My notes have formed complex connections over time, this diagram shows how my templates link to each other. While this seems like a bit of chaos, it’s actually really helpful to be able to jump between all the relevant pieces of information when viewing a note.
Examples
In this section, I’ll demonstrate these three aspects through several personal examples, trying to show how they have built up over time.
Daily Notes
My daily note is the center of my workflow in obsidian. I start each day by opening a new note, and the content is mostly dynamically updated to reflect what happened that day.
Daily notes are the prime example of a template that needs to be personalized. Not just for every person, but for the way you’re currently using Obsidian. As a concrete example, my daily note has changed significantly when I become a team leader.
Here’s how the note structure compares:
All sections are created dynamically with help from plugins such as Dataview, Rollover Daily Todos and QuickAdd.
Dataview
This plugin can query your notes and extract specific information out of them. For example, my meeting summary section is a table that is created by querying all the summaries of the meetings that happened today and are in the meetings folder.
Rollover daily todos
This nifty little plugin does exactly what it sounds like — it takes all the uncompleted tasks from the previous day and pastes them into the current daily note. This way I don’t have to worry about losing tasks from previous days.
QuickAdd
This plugin is all about automating your vault, which I love. It enables you to create macros that run as a command or when pressing a hotkey combination. One of the primary uses I have is for jotting down quick logs of what I’m doing or what I need to remember from anywhere in my vault and having them appear as a list in a section of the daily note I can refer to later.
While using this extensively as a team member, I’ve realized that as a team lead most of what I need is encapsulated in the meeting summeries and I didn’t use this feature any longer, changing my template to reflect that.
Meeting Notes
A meeting is a largely structure affair.
My meeting notes have a few pre-built sections for attendees, points raised during the meeting, tasks, and a summary. Each section was added as I needed it.
My meeting notes started as plain text files with only titles, but over time I added more advanced features:
- Creating a list of meeting in the daily note, which shows the summary from the metadata
- Creating pages for people, which show the meetings they attended
- Pulling all uncompleted tasks from all meetings so as to never miss a task
For each of these, I added a small section, slowly building up the form the meeting note has today. This form has been static for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with it.
Brainstorming \ Planning
For me, brainstorming is a visual exercise. There are usually multiple components and the interaction between them is what sparks new ideas.
I could use a text note and references to brainstorm, and there are times that I found that laying out my thought more linearly makes sense and helps me organize them, but for the most part I find that using a visual tool is much more productive.
You’ve actually seen parts of a brainstorming note already, all the excalidraws were a part of the planning for this post:
My brainstorming notes actually don’t have a template, even though Excalidraw drawings support it. I like the flexibility of the visual method, and the change here happened through using different plugins. I started with Obsidian’s built in canvas, added the X-Mind plugin to it, and only then moved to Excalidraw. I’m still using both, as I have existing brainmaps that I update, but almost all new notes are in Excalidraw.
Summary
Obsidian is a great tool that can be used in almost endless ways.
In the fast-paced world of digital note-taking, continuously evolving your Obsidian vault is the key to unlocking its full potential. This post delves into the importance of regularly updating and customizing your vault, transforming it from a static repository into a dynamic, living system. By constantly refining your vault, you ensure that it grows and adapts alongside your ever-changing needs and ideas. From creating interconnected ecosystems of notes to leveraging plugins for enhanced functionality, we’ve seen practical strategies to keep your vault vibrant and relevant.
I hope that in this post I convinced you that upgrading your obsidian notes a little bit at a time is crucial for maintaining the vault’s value as a productive and helpful tool.
Have ideas how to make the process better? Want to share your thoughts? Leave a comment so that everyone can benefit!
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