I’m sure everyone agrees that there are some notes in your workflow that you keep coming back to.
Perhaps they’re the root of your vault, where you’ve linked all your maps of content. Perhaps they’re task lists with due and important reminders for what you have to get done that day/week/month.
There are only two notes that I access regularly, but they’re pivotal in my workflow, and I couldn’t work as effectively without them:
- Content note
- Slipbox index
This article’s going to go over these two notes — what they contain and how they fit into my workflow, why they’re pinned in my vault, as well as some related plugins and tricks that help me work with them.
Let’s get started…
Content note
This note is the folder note for the ‘Content’ folder in my vault, found under the Resources folder, in keeping with the P.A.R.A. method of organisation. The outlines I’ve written are resources for when I come to write, after all.
I’ve talked before about the power of folder notes in Obsidian, and this is just one circumstance where they’re used. This is going to be a more detailed insight into the contents of this specific type of project note.
The content note contains a selection of things — task lists containing ideas that I haven’t started writing about, as well as links to the outlines and drafts that I currently hold in my vault.
I do this through two plugins. Dataview and Todoist Sync Plugin, similar to the project note general layout. This time, however, I have sections for the specific platforms defined within the note, because of the volume of ideas that I have to process within the same folder.
The source view of the note can be seen here…
The ideas (Todoist tasks) come first in each section, followed by the unpublished work with the corresponding category
in the following Dataview list. I have a similarly-organised setup in Todoist so that keeping track of related tasks stays consistent across programs.
I choose a new idea from the task list and activate the QuickAdd shortcut that allows me to create a new piece of content with the correct YAML metadata in place automatically, and start writing the outline for the piece.
This is the most effective way I’ve found to keep track of content ideas and the progression of certain pieces. It’s simple and effective, the way I try to make the whole of my system, allowing me to focus on creating rather than running the plugins and infrastructure that allows me to create.
Slipbox index
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about how I use both P.A.R.A. and Zettelkasten in my second brain to create an all-in-one system that steals the best of both worlds. It still is one of my most popular pieces to date, and I still use this strategy in my Obsidian vault.
I can manage projects as well as knowledge, giving structure and organisation but also the freedom to link ideas and think openly when I need to.
With the slipbox index, I simply create a folder note for the Areas folder (which serves as my slipbox), with a Dataview list of the files inside. Through this, I can read the very clear and explanatory titles of the evergreen notes contained in the Zettelkasten and decide at what point to enter the web of thought and start to work…
I’m considering creating a method of adding topics to each of these notes so that I can add smaller maps of content around similar subjects in this folder note instead of just a block of links, but it’s yet to be implemented.
Notes on these notes
These are the most important notes in my vault, so I have to be able to access them easily.
Both are pinned in my right-hand sidebar so that I can access them quickly for reference, and view them whilst editing another note in the main pane of the app.
You can also use the plugin Grappling Hook by pseudometa or Hotkeys for specific files by Vinzent to bind your bookmarked/important files to hotkeys, which is great for power users.
As I said in the earlier examples, I want my system to be as simple and as minimal as possible to help me get work done without getting in the way. This is why I don’t have specific folders per topic in my Areas folder, or specific folders per platform in my Content folder — I can function exactly the same without this added complexity.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this brief rundown of the most important notes in my Obsidian vault. As always, thanks for reading!