Obsidian

I use Obsidian for taking digital notes, some amount of project management and generally hosting my personal wiki/knowledgebase. A variable portion of this wiki is published on this site in the garden.

I'm not in love with Obsidian. It's not set up exactly the way I wish it was. I find tags less than useless for most purposes because I appreciate hierarchy and retrievable patterns. I want to file my knowledge like tools in a workshop, in predictable places that are retrievable by muscle memory rather than word-association games.

First-order retrievability is a requirement for me, a survival mechanism I developed for myself as a kid struggling with undiagnosed ADHD. A few years ago Adam Savage gave me the name for it. It's the idea of storing tools in always-reachable and immediately-available places; super important tools don't go in drawers. They're hanging directly above the workspace where they can be grabbed with one hand while manipulating the work on the bench. You don't even need to break flow to pick it up because it's exactly where you left it and always within reach. I do this with tools and hardware and software and I've found I want to extend it to nebulous ideas like 'a category of knowledge'.

Folders are good for this, of course, but folders are also basically just an extra click before you get to the thing you want. Truly the drawers of the software world. The holy grail of design on this front is Notion, with its 'everything is a page' model and where hierarchy is driven by the literal spatial organisation of links within a page. I love this, but Notion is the antithesis of everything I look for in software — online-only, sluggish, full of AI and subscription-based.

So instead, I've customised Obsidian to the best of my ability so it works the way my brain does. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Entry Points

To implement this hierarchical system, you need to define entry points. The defacto home page of my vault is the Projects dashboard. A project is exactly what you imagine: project management and notes for things I'm working on, whether they're full-blooded or experimental. I don't actually distinguish between those two things in the vault... maybe I should.

Structurally, each of these projects is a note under the Projects folder, and typically a folder note containing a number of other pages as needed. I might have a Kanban project manager or a tasks page or galleries of reference images and scribbling. With projects that I intend for people to use, like Lena or Meander, I've started writing documentation centrally under the project directory and publishing it on this site.

Generally, I just collate notes about projects, bullet journal-style ideas, concepts, etc. to get them out of my head and into a common place to retrieve them and turn them into something later. Similar to first-order retrievability, I need to have a central location to store notes about projects. If I jot down ideas for something in more than one place, one of those sources will be lost to me down the line. I always try to create one canonical location for a project where every random spark of inspiration can be recorded in one place, synced across my entire life. This usually starts with a note in Obsidian. It's not true for every discipline or even some individual projects, but it's a good rule of thumb.

The other main entry point is the Calendar plugin, which I have in my right-hand sidebar. It's usually stowed away, as in the screenshot above. I use the associated Daily Notes to plot short-term tasks, similar to a bullet journal. I do this in a physical bujo anyway, but it's nice to have a place to do it digitally as well when it calls for it. Sometimes collating a bunch of ephemeral resources, deliverables and links from co-workers for a thing that's gotta get done at work this week isn't best handled on paper, but also isn't a capital-P Project in its own right.

Oh I also publish my microfeed from the calendar notes. At the start of every month, I create one for the 30th or 31st and start filling it with notes as the month progresses.

In a different application, I might have a big customised dashboard that puts everything at my fingertips. For right now, I just have the calendar on the right, the projects dash in the middle and the file explorer on the left (or the quick-find palette) to hotlink everything else. I can see all of that in one screen, so that's good enough for now.

Link style

I haven't formulated a concrete linking style between my notes, but I've always generally tried to write in the Wikipedia style, where a link is not a disruptive element of the sentence and the sentence can be understood regardless of a link's existence.

For instance, I would not write 'read more about this concept here', where 'here' is a link. The sentence revolves around the link and its meaning cannot be understood in its absence, such as if it was printed out. At some point I'll document some personal informal style-guide for linking, because I do break the 'here' rule — and others — in a few places that I'm not proud of.

I was recently thinking about the fact that there probably are some unwritten grammar rules about this and did some research to find that both Wikipedia and the W3C do standardise these ideas under these two best practice guides!

• Wikipedia's Manual of Style/Linking
• W3C's Link Purpose in Context

Current Plugin Setup

I've chosen most of my Obsidian plugins and components to be able to be lived without. If they can't be lived without then they're either extremely popular or maintained by Obsidian staffers — kepano and mgmeyers.

• Dataview, the ever-present Obsidian recommendation. I actually only use this in two places; as a dashboard that shows me what is marked for cross-publication for this site — and acts as a sanity check for essential metadata like titles and descriptions — and another dashboard that aggregates all of the open checkbox tasks in my calendar so I can basically see all of the digital 'bullet journal pages' at once.
• Calendar, which adds a calendar widget with days mapped to daily notes in a folder. I don't use the 'Daily Notes' feature properly, I just arbitrarily track tasks or write journal entries on days as I feel the need to.
• Advanced Tables, which provides org-mode-style formatting tools for Markdown tables. I find this essential for managing the library.
• Kanban, which creates a basic Kanban board from bullet points in a Markdown note. I don't use this too much, but it's useful when I do. I'm hoping Bases will be extended with a Kanban view that's much richer than this plugin, à la Notion.
• Image Gallery, which lets you make a block that displays a folder of images as masonry gallery. I use this to browse reference images I collect for projects, like PureRef or Pinterest.

And then purely for design and aesthetics —

• Minimal Theme and Minimal Theme Settings, which is what makes Obsidian look like that.
• Hider, which does even more minimalism.
• Iconize, which provides the icons on notes and folders in the sidebar. I have this set up to read a frontmatter value icon so I can declare the icon in one place for multiple purposes. The icon at the top of this very page comes from that same frontmatter value.
• Folder Notes, which — in my case — lets a note with the same name as its parent folder be accessed just by clicking the folder, so you can get closer to having nested page navigation instead of folders.
• Pixel Banner, a horribly over-engineered plugin that I literally just use to display image banners at the top of some notes. Does way too much and has garbage AI tools in it (thankfully dead because I would never have an API key to give it), but it's the only up-to-date replacement for the very simple Banners plugin that became defunct a few years ago.