Organising with Obsidian

I have never been one for being disciplined with note-taking. Every few months, I tell myself it is time to better organise myself. I get a new physical notebook or open a new task tracking software and try my hardest to stay disciplined, only to find myself forgetting about it and moving on within a week or two. There are many reasons for this, some of which are faults of my own, others because the processes or systems are either non-existent (notebook) or too rigid (most software). Recently, I have begun using Obsidian as a new approach to note-taking with great success.

I’ll try not to go too deep into what Obsidian is, as their site does a wonderful job explaining it.

Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.

Why Obsidian?

There are a number of reasons why I personally find Obsidian to be the right choice:

• Allows me to back-up my notes directly to a Git repo
• Fantastic community backed plugin ecosystem
• Markdown style editing experience

Plugins

I have a number of plugins installed, however the ones I currently cannot live without are:

• Obsidian Git
  • Auto-commits and pushes the filesystem, removing the need for manual effort
• Periodic Notes
  • Allows easy creation of Weekly and Monthly notes, which are key to my note-taking approach
• Templater
  • Advanced templating, which when used alongside Periodic Notes provides a great experience

Approach

There are two key aspects of my note-taking approach. Firstly, I do not write copious amounts of notes. I try to limit my notes to critical things to help me find later. Secondly, I want to automate as much of the boilerplate as possible.

This is achieved by using a Weekly Note system, providing a single file for all notes I take during the work week. Below is my template for a Weekly Note.

 1---
 2Year: <% tp.date.now("gggg") %>
 3aliases: ["<% tp.date.weekday("gggg-MM-DD", 0) %> - <% tp.date.weekday("gggg-MM-DD", 6) %>"]
 4---
 5
 6[[<% tp.date.now("gggg-[W]ww", -7) %>|↶ Previous Week]] | [[<% tp.date.now("gggg-[W]ww", 7) %>|Following Week ↷]]
 7
 8## Monday <% tp.date.weekday("Do", 1) %>
 9### Daily Log
10- 
11
12### Meeting Log
13- 
14
15## Tuesday <% tp.date.weekday("Do", 2) %>
16### Daily Log
17- 
18
19### Meeting Log
20- 
21
22## Wednesday <% tp.date.weekday("Do", 3) %>
23### Daily Log
24- 
25
26### Meeting Log
27- 
28
29## Thursday <% tp.date.weekday("Do", 4) %>
30### Daily Log
31- 
32
33### Meeting Log
34- 
35
36## Friday <% tp.date.weekday("Do", 5) %>
37### Daily Log
38- 
39
40### Meeting Log
41- 
42
43## Outcomes
44### Summary
45- 
46
47### Artefacts
48- 

This structure allows me to take notes for each day, and provide an ongoing summary of the outcomes and associated artefacts (links to Pull Requests, documents etc).

As my month goes by, I can then generate a Monthly Note, which simply collates all the outcomes from each week in the month and embeds them directly into the monthly template. Now I can see a summary of what I have achieved, without having to dive into the detail of every day. The template I use requires the Templater plugin, as I do some execution via JavaScript to iterate through the weeks.

 1---
 2Year: <% tp.date.now("gggg") %>
 3---
 4
 5[[Periodic/Weekly Notes/<% tp.date.now("gggg-[M]MM", "P-1M") %>|↶ Previous Month]] | [[Periodic/Weekly Notes/<% tp.date.now("gggg-[M]MM", "P1M") %>|Following Month ↷]]
 6
 7<%* firstWeek = parseInt(tp.date.now("ww", 0, tp.date.now("gggg-MM-01"), "gggg-MM-DD"), 10) -%>
 8<%* lastWeek = parseInt(tp.date.now("ww", -1, tp.date.now("gggg-MM-01", "P1M"), "gggg-MM-DD"), 10) -%>
 9<%-* for (let i = firstWeek; i <= lastWeek; i++) { %>
10## Week <%* tR += i %>
11![[<% tp.date.now("gggg-[W]") %><%* tR += i%>#Outcomes]]
12<%* } -%>

What’s next?

As I get closer to the end of the current Quarter, I am going to attempt a Quarterly Note, to see if there is value in taking my collation to another level. This may become especially helpful when it comes time for performance reviews, as my artefact generation is automated.