What you'll see in this repo is a highly opinionated, unapologetic way to use Obsidian. Note that this is not the only way to use Obsidian, nor is it the correct way. But it is a way that works well, especially once you understand the philosophies behind it.

Some of these techniques may be familiar to you, others may be novel due to the idiosyncracies about how my own mind works. I'll do my best to explain all of my philosophies and lived experience in the creation of this vault. Some techniques, processes and plugins are built into the platform. Other techniques leverage powerful external softwares to greatly enhance the Obsidian experience. I'll argue for those as they come as well as provide potential alternatives.

By following this guide and leveraging this template, I can promise that you'll be able to evolve from possibly never having used Obsidian to being up to date with the way I think about using this phenomenal software. I hope you enjoy and have fun!!

Motivation

I've been using Obsidian for well over a year and have developed many experiments, some of which succeeded and many others that have failed. I have tried to compile all the lessons from these experiences and create a vault that mirrors my up to date thinking on how Obsidian can be maximally utilized.

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 (BHOV-2023) will tread the line of practicality and theory. Let's dive in!

Philosophies

Before we get into anything practical we need to discuss the underlying philosophies powering this vault, or none of the implementations will make any sense. Most of these philosophies I've learned or adapted from great contemporary and erstwhile authors and thinkers -- the following is a reflection of both my value structure as well as my take on the works of others.

Philosophies we'll encounter along the way:

Deep Work (Cal Newport)
Time Block Planning (Cal Newport)
PARA (Tiago Forte)
CODE (Tiago Forte)
Progressive Summarization (Tiago Forte)
Zettelkasten (Niklas Luhmann)
Digital Garden (Andy Matuschack)
An unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates)
Jamming (Music Production)
AGILE (Software Development Project Management)
Metcalfe's Law (Computer Science)
Atticus Finch is the same in the house as he is on the public streets (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Large Language Models and Transformers (Machine Learning)
Automation and Scripting (Software Development)
Content management systems (Software Development)
Antifragility (Nassim Taleb)
Version Control Systems (Software Development)
Causa Sui (Ernest Becker)
LYT + Maps of Content (Nick Milo)

Deep Work

To do deep work is to be able to focus on a significant problem for an uninterrupted block of time. As a software engineer and writer, I am dependant on the flow state to create my best work and cut through the noise of digital and physical distraction.

To enhance the likliehood of entering the flow state, and enhancing the quality of the flow state while it's engaged, this vault has tools to help you cut through the mud and focus on what needs to get done.

Processes:

Intra-Vault Research
Keeping relevant project info in one spot
Vault wide task management protocols

Plugins:

QuickAdd
Tasks

Related Philosophies:

Time Block Planning

Time Block Planning

Time Block Planning is the intentional process of giving every hour a "job". This intentional workflow allows for the creator to get a bird's eye view of their active commitments. This methodology bubbles up from daily commitments to a weekly view and a quarterly view. These views allow for enough space for projects to finish, while being short enough to see realistic change.

In BHOV-2023, I don't functionally time block that much. This is because I usually get a late start to the day (more on this later), and I don't like using calendars that much. I've found writing the time next to notes in my daily page works just fine, e.g.:

1-3p coding
330-5 meeting with [[blah]]
...

if I need a notification for a meeting, I'm most likely gonna be late regardless...

If you are planning on using a daily calendar, I'd recommend the Full Calendar plugin. I hear good things!

The Time Block Planning is great for weekly planning and quarterly planning as well. When combined with Templater (plugin) and Periodic Notes (plugin), Time Block Planning gives a great weekly review to look forward to.

Plugins:

Templater
Periodic Notes
Full Calendar (optional)

Related Philosophies:

Deep Work
Agile Planning

PARA

The PARA framework is a structure that usues cross app folders with the same names (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) as buckets to capture different projects. The main value to this vault is the Project and Archive folders. These two folders alone do a ton of work and allow resources to "live" inside their parent project folder. This makes organization much easier, as well as the retrieval of resources used to create old projects.

If you look in the PARA directory (/_PARA), you'll notice a distinct lack of and Areas and Resources folder. That is because in BHOV-2023, I've offloaded a lot of the value those folders provide to other tools and techniques that will be discussed later. If you have well defined areas in your life and prefer to keep non-project related resources in a centralized place, feel free to recreate the folders!

Scripts:

quick-add-create-project-folder.js
quick-add-file-filter.js
quick-add-projects-folder-kanban-variables.js
quick-add-projects-folder-variables.js

Plugins:

QuickAdd
Kanban
Shimmering Obsidian (optional)
Waypoint

Related philosophies:

CODE

CODE

CODE by Tiago Forte tands for Capture, Organize, Distill and Express. Fast capture with minimal friction is a priority goal of BHOV-2023, because you never know when and where inspiration will strike.

To do quick capture on my computer, I leverage Shimmering Obsidian and custom written shortcuts. This plugin is powerful because Alfred can be evoked anywhere on your Mac (while watching a video, browsing the web, etc.). This helps avoid the Doorway effect. The plugin then puts the thought in our Inbox/ for future processing. The important part is that we can trust that our ideas will land in a place where we can process them later. A similar process is done on my mobile device leveraging iOS shortcuts and Obsidian Sync.

These apps and plugins serve as scouts, running the long distance of time and space to place ideas in your trusted vault from anywhere in the world.

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

In BHOV-2023, Organization is accomplished using plugins like Dataview and Tasks to surface relevant data from across the entire vault. For example, tasks captured from your mobile device on the go anywhere in your vault will show up in the same place with this Tasks filter:

not done
heading includes todo/mobile

This is a great way to de-stress about open tasks getting buried in some previous

Distill will be discussed in the Progressive Summarization section, and Express in the Digital Garden and CMS sections.

Plugins:

Shimmering Obsidian
Sync
iOS shortcuts
Readwise

Scripts:

quick-add-file-filter.js
quick-add-projects-folder-kanban-variables.js
quick-add-projects-folder-variables.js

Related Philosophies:

Progressive Summarization
Digital Garden
CMS

Progressive Summarization

Progressive Summarization is a research/reading technique developed by Tiago Forte. In short, the goal is to read something, look for salient and helpful material, and highlight it. Then a second pass is applied, doubly emphasizing the important bits you find important. Finally, a third pass is done to rewrite the concept in your own words. Let's use the paragraph from above as an example:

Highlighted from source:

...

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

...

Second pass:

...

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

...

Third pass:

The first marathon was run not for fun or to push one's body for exercise, but for duty. The messenger Pheidippides made the 25 mile trek on foot to pronounce victory (Niki!) to the Athenian citizens. He then promptly died.

To facilitate this process BHOV-2023 leverages Readwise and Note Refactor to do the three passes. Readwise is pass one, pass two is to exract salience and a title and tags (this can be done with AI thanks to GPT-3 Summarizer!), but a lot of the times I do it by hand. Finally, the tird pass is setting the note into it's final Zettelkasten state, and assigning to a PARA project, or leaving it in the root directory.

Plugins:

Note Refactor
Readwise
GPT-3 Summarizer (optional)

Related Philosophies:

Large Language Models
Zettlekasten
PARA

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten, German for slip box, is the metaphorical glue that holds ideas together. Zettelkasten is a loose but exteremely powerful structure, and a system with few hard and fast rules that can scale magnificently.

These rules are:

Unique Identifier as filenames
Atomic content -- one note roughly equals one coherent thought
Links, tags, and citations > including the knowledge in the note itself

Fortunately for us, Zettelkasten is a core feature of the Obsidian workflow. The core plugin Unique Note Creator will take care of creating IDs. Plugins like Footnote Shortcut and Zotero Plugin make citing external resources breeze. This allows you as the author to focus on two things:

Is this note atomic?
What will I link it to?

In BHOV-2023, Zettlekasten is responsible for ideas and notes that don't fit cleanly into the Projects or Archive folders of PARA. In other words, evergreen knowledge that forms your lattice of thinking, but doesn't have specific utility. In BHOV-2023, the goal of the Zettelkasten is to serve as puzzle pieces to help us Express (the E in CODE) ourselves.

Notes like 202212090137 and 202212090136 live in the root directory, but have tags that serve as "buckets". The page preview plugin allows us to hover over the notes and see what's inside (if you're reading this in Obsidian, go ahead and give it a try!)

When creating a new file in BHOV-2023, by default it will automatically create it to the Zettelkasten spec. A single Zettelkasten is referred to as a Zettel, so each note is tagged with #zettel by default in BHOV-2023.

Plugins:

Templater
Unique Note Creator
Omnisearch
Local Graph
Backlinks
Note Refactor

Related Philosophies:

Large Language Models
Digital Gardening

Digital Gardening

If Zettelkasten is the planting of the seed of a single idea, Digital Gardening is the maintnence of the whole. It is the work of groundskeeping the entire vault, and finding utility in the edges.

We can ease the "writers' block" of deciding which notes to upkeep by leveraging Random Note Review, which will surface three notes to review in our Daily Note.

<%* const files = app.vault.getFiles(); const random = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const random2 = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const random3 = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const randomNote = files[random]; const randomNote2 = files[random2]; const randomNote3 = files[random3] -%>

- [ ] [[<% randomNote.basename %>]]
- [ ] [[<% randomNote2.basename %>]]
- [ ] [[<% randomNote3.basename %>]]

<%* const todayIs = tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>

The side benfit of all this work is that it publishable! Since a garden is a collection of linked and curated thoughts, a published garden serves as a public utility similar to maintained gardens in the real world. Visitors can meander around your thought garden, stopping to marvel at the hydraengeas, or beelining straight for the mini pagoda and water feature in the corner.

Later, we'll address how to seperate private and public, but for now, assume any note that you do the work to Zettelkasten, will eventually have some sort of public value.

Plugins:

Publish
Templater
Footnote Shortcut

Related philosophies:

Zettelkasten

...

Implementation

todo

Elements of Markdown

Footers

Footers serve two very important roles: citation and non destructive updates. Citation is used in the Zettelkasten, to help link a note to its source material.

Footers also make for great non destructive updates to notes. This means you can revisit an old note, and instead of altering it directly, you can append a footnote to the end of a thought, without changing the structural meaning of the original file. Think of it as sedimentary rock, or a really lightweight VCS.

Footnote Shortcut combined with Natural Landguage Dates allows for super easy non destructive updates that serve as asides, knowledge from a wiser and smarter future you.¹

...

Folder Structure

todo

Tests

todo

External Tools

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 uses a lot of external tools and technologies. I firmly believe that each of these technologies plays a significant role in making Obsidian an ecosystem instead of a stand alone application. These tools serve as scouts, fetching information from different places and returning the goods to "home base". That being said, some/most/all have some form of financial component as well as their own learning curves, so I wouldn't be dissapointed if you don't want to use them. That said Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 works a lot better as a holistic system if you do.

Tools Used

Readwise ($)
Alfred (Mac only) ($)
Shortcuts (iOS only)
Zotero
GitHub
Sync ($)
Publish ($)

...

Installation

Great! Now that that's out of the way, we can finally get to running the vault, phew!

Select Use this Template or git clone https://github.com/bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023.git
Download into your local machine
Open the vault and rename it to whatever you want and open it in Obsidian

After You're Up and Running

After getting your sea legs for a few days (perhaps a week!) and you feel comfortable with Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 system, it will sadly be time for us to part and for you to forge onwards. You'll be able to safely delete the following files:

README
_tests/*
Readwise/ (if you're not using the service)
_tutorial/*
_PARA/Archive/Archived Project (!Note: do not delete the Archive folder itself, just the example folder)
_PARA/Projects/Test Project (!Note: do not delete the Projects folder itself, just the example folder)
_PARA/Projects/Test Project 2 (!Note: do not delete the Projects folder itself, just the example folder)

...

"Required" Plugins

Truly nothing in this vault is required, but if you want the full experience, these community plugins are quote-unquote mandatory:

Auto Link Title
Calendar
Commander
Dataview
Excalidraw
Folder Note
Footnote Shortcut
Kanban
Natural Language Dates
Obsidian Git
Omnisearch
Periodic Notes
QuickAdd
Random Note
Readwise (look -- I really hate to put a paid subscription plugin on the "required" list, but this app is so good, it's really revolutionized my reading experience across Twitter/Kindle/blogs/podcasts. Plus their new Reader app is straight up awesome. A lot of the ease of this vault derives from Readwise, so don't use it at your own risk)
Style Settings
Supercharged Links
Templater
Waypoint

...

Optional Plugins

These plugins aren't needed, as some are QoL and others have a steep price tag attached (some even have both!). But these apps are no less critical to my workflow than the "Required" apps above, so I need to include them.

Open in VSCode
Map View
Shimmering Obsidian (Alfred plugin)
Full Calendar
GPT-3 Summarizer
Obsidian Linter
Tag Wrangler
Zotero (requires Better BibTeX for Zotero plugin)

...

Migration Guide for Current Obsidian Users

...

A Day in the Life - Real World Use

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 is only helpful if you can use it day in/day out as a tool to help you in life. Here's how I would use it in any random day (let's say Tuesday, perhaps):

Noon (wake up -- I'm a night owl and a degenerate) 🤷

...

Special Case: Saturday or Sunday

Reflection is a critical component to the value of this vault, and so one day a week must be carved out to do reflection. This shouldn't take more than thirty minutes or so, but it does need to happen once a week, so choose what works best for you.

...

Final Word

todo

2022-12-09: see what I mean? ↩︎