I’ve been using Obsidian since 2022-01-31, so a little more than two years now. In that time, I’ve largely lurked in the community, absorbing the workflows and tips that others share.
After a coworker started using Obsidian, I decided it was time to document my current processes in case they might be useful.
Basic structure
When I initially started, I only used daily notes, so I didn’t really need any structure. But, after a while, as I learned more and as I started using Obsidian for more than just daily notes, I attempted to adopt the PARA method. While this is a system that was recommended by Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain, this structure never really clicked for me.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago where I see this tweet from James Bedford about his organizational structure. Immediately upon seeing this, this structure seemed to make more sense. I’ve now largely adopted this, but with some minor tweaking. Here’s what my current structure looks like:
- 01 North Star
- 02 Journals
- 03 Commonplace
- 04 Outputs
- 05 Workspace
- 06 People
- 07 Utilities
- 00 Home
The primary tweak here is that I’ve added the People directory, which is where I put notes about family, friends, and coworkers.
Daily notes as the driver
Probably 90% of my day-to-day use of Obsidian is in daily notes. I find this to be the simplest and quickest way to boot up into a note.
I also have no issues with stuffing things in daily notes, just in case I might need it in the future. I can use cmd + f to find it later. 😄
My daily note template is relatively simple with just two sections: tasks and notes.
I don’t use the tasks plugin. I just create tasks with markdown for a given day. If I’m not able to complete a task on a given day, I manually copy it to the next day. If I find that I have to keep copying a task, at some point, I just stop copying it because apparently it’s not that important.
I learned this tip from my friend, Paolo Belcastro, who once described the same system to me, albeit on paper.
The notes section is for everything else, including notes from 1:1s, meetings, quick ideas, a log of things I did, etc.
While I have the Note Refactor plugin, I very rarely use it. I reserve refactoring for if there’s very large amount of text or when I need to reference a point across multiple notes.
Obsidian Sync Over iCloud
I used iCloud for syncing my notes between desktop and mobile for nearly two years. It was only recently where I hit an issue where the mobile app wouldn’t load and complained about some issues with iCloud.
I’ve switched to Obsidian Sync and have anecdotally noticed that things seem to be running better.
Readwise
Before Readwise, I always felt that I was missing a critical piece of learning and reflection. I’d invest a lot of time into reading books and other material, but I didn’t have a good process to pull insights back out.
Readwise has largely filled that gap for me with its ability to import Kindle highlights, saved tweets, and with their reader. Now, when I highlight anything, I know that it gets stored in Readwise, synced to Obsidian, and Readwise will resurface highlights to me over time.
Logging Ideas
This is perhaps the coolest and most useful integration that I have, at least for my sleep. 😄
When I’m in bed and trying to sleep, I often have wandering thoughts that keep me up. I’ve found that if I just get the thought written down somewhere, then I can get it off of my mind and then I can go to sleep. But, this means that I need to open my phone up or turn a light on and find pen and paper.
This process recently became much easier thanks to a couple of Siri shortcuts I created for use on my iPhone and Apple Watch.
One shortcut to allow me to dictate an idea and have that idea get stored in iCloud drive as a txt file. Another shortcut to move those files from iCloud drive to my Obsidian vault.
I found that having both shortcuts was necessary if I wanted to support using the shortcut on my Apple Watch. But, if I only wanted to use the shortcut on my iPhone then I could write the note directly to the Obsidian vault. But, the Apple Watch has a different filesystem and I wasn’t able to figure out how to write to my iPhone.
Here are the links to the two shortcuts. Although the log idea shortcut should work out of the box, you will likely need to update the vault location for the sync shortcut to function correctly.
- Log Idea: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/937ab41ab58b4fdea15ad85fb98fac1d
- Sync Ideas to Obsidian: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e74ed7bab95c466f8abc01f981ba9309
Last thoughts
My number one piece of advice for anyone getting started is to simply begin. Don’t worry too much about having the best workflow or structure. As issues naturally arise with your workflow, you’ll make tweaks and build what works best for you.
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