Obsidian has been my PKM ‘daily driver’ for almost a year and a half now and it’s been the only tool that has stuck with me properly when creating work.
Over these five years, I’ve been developing and optimising the workflows that I use every day to get work done. In this article, I want to summarise the four most important ones for you.
They are:
- Planning and writing the script for content such as articles like these
- Taking notes for university and studying, turning them into flashcards
- Browsing literature notes and writing permanent notes from the information that they hold
- Managing projects and tasks in folder notes
Prepare to learn how each workflow is set up and how I use them.
Let’s get started…
Writing content to post online
I’ve written over 110 articles on the internet since the start of the year.
Not only this, every single article that I’ve published has been written at least in part within Obsidian.
After a little tweaking, the format that I’ve come up with is to first outline the article in Obsidian using a series of bullets. This is how I brainstorm and flesh out the main structure of the piece before I begin writing the content.
One of the best Obsidian plugins for this job is Outliner. A simple solution, all the plugin does is add a few quality-of-life changes to outlining in Obsidian. This includes a sticky cursor as well as list styling.
After the piece has been outlined, I start to write the main body of the article/essay. Referencing my outline so that I know roughly what to write, it’s easy to get into a writing flow and complete this step.
You’re not looking for perfection.
This is the first draft, so the idea is that you keep writing with as little disturbance as possible. This makes sure that your piece follows a logical structure, remaining coherent. Don’t worry about editing, we’ll do this later.
I then take the piece off of Obsidian for editing, using Hemingway Editor and then Grammarly to make sure my writing is concise and accurate. I then copy the drafts after each of these steps into Obsidian under the first draft so they’re all in one place.
The final piece then goes where the world will see it, whether this is on Medium, my website or my newsletter.
Out of all the workflows that I’ve spent time using, this is the one that creates all the content that others see. This makes it one of the most important workflows in my vault.
Taking university notes and creating flashcards
Aside from writing online, I’m studying at the University of Sheffield. There has to be a means of recording notes in lectures, writing essays and learning from literature.
I use Obsidian for this as well.
I study mainly from lecture material, so that’s going to be the workflow I cover here…
I download the lecture PowerPoint as a PDF from the university’s cloud platform, importing it into my attachments folder in Obsidian.
Creating a new lecture note inserts a template that contains the important properties. These include module, card deck (I’ll explain in a minute), date of lecture and whether I attended (not often).
I then outline notes from the slideshow from the lecture as an outline, recording the most important facts in an easy-to-digest format. Following this, I run an AI script that turns these notes into perfect question-answer pairs in a format that the plugin Obsidian_to_Anki can read and convert into Anki for study as flashcards. This is where the ‘cards-deck’ property comes in — I organise cards per module in Anki.
Plugins such as Citations, Pandoc Plugin and Shell Commands are important in managing the writing of essays and lab reports. However, this workflow is used a lot less than the flashcards one. If you want more details of my university workflows in Obsidian you can read this article.
Making literature notes and writing permanent notes
Part of my PARAZETTEL vault structure is a Zettelkasten.
This note-taking method relies on linked notes of your thoughts, inspired by the literature you’ve consumed over time.
I use the service Readwise for clipping interesting pieces of content from Kindle books to podcasts to threads on Twitter. Everything is then imported into my Obsidian vault through the Readwise Official plugin meaning I can have the highlights open side-by-side with the literature note or permanent note that I’m currently writing.
These permanent notes inspire ideas for other content, from articles to tweets to newsletter issues. This is the underlying workflow that the first workflow is built upon and is thus very important in my vault.
If you want to learn more about the Zettelkasten method and how it ties into my vault, read this piece here…
Task and project management using folder notes
I’ll start with a disclaimer.
I don’t do this entirely in Obsidian although the app elevates my project management workflow.
My task capture and organisation happen in Todoist — the only app I’ve used for longer than Obsidian for my work. The quick capture, task move and due-date-assigning shortcuts make it the most streamlined solution for task management that I’ve come across.
All my projects, areas and resources have tasks assigned to them, following Tiago Forte’s PARA method.
However, I don’t work on projects entirely in Todoist — I need to take notes as well. And where do I take notes? Obsidian.
PARAZETTEL for Obsidian follows the same vault structure as my Todoist — PARA by Tiago Forte — so the projects in Todoist exactly match the project folders in Obsidian. This means I can link the tasks from Todoist to Obsidian using two clever plugins:
First is Folder notes — this plugin creates a note that opens when you click a folder in the file viewer in Obsidian. This folder note is useful as a folder (or in this case project) summary. It’s where I add my Todoist tasks using the second of the two plugins…
This second plugin is the Todoist Plugin — it uses a query language like that of Obsidian tasks within a code block. Having connected your Todoist API key in the plugin settings, it scrapes tasks from your Todoist account and displays them in the Obsidian editor.
I configure the task view per project note so that the project-relevant tasks display at the top of the note, reminding me of the next steps, without having to leave Obsidian. Due dates, priorities and labels are displayed, so your tasks’ metadata are visible while taking notes too.
This workflow has been crucial in my overall project management across what I do on the internet. It keeps me focused and organised, so it gets a place on this list.
This brings me to the end of this collection of Obsidian workflows that are very important in my personal knowledge management and project management.
I hope you learned something new in this piece. Thanks for reading!