Obsidian templates are an obvious addition to any power user’s arsenal in the app.
You can add complex properties and note content just from a simple shortcut or search, saving you hours of time in the long run.
There are plugins that make this even more powerful, such as Templater, with you being able to add internal functions that complete up-to-date information in the note when it’s created with a given template.
But what’s it all for?
Templates are only worth using if they save you time. Having many templates in your vault that are used infrequently or not at all after you’ve made them contributes to clutter and distraction when you’re working.
I removed many templates that I had in my vault because of this. However, there are still some that I kept. I’m going to go over the templates that I removed briefly, explaining why I didn’t want them anymore, and I’m going to cover the ones that I still have in-depth, justifying their use in my vault.
Let’s get started…
What templates did I get rid of?
I’m going to cover these quickly.
I have a folder full of templates in my vault. When I opened it up a while ago, I was overwhelmed by the volume of notes with inconsistent names and strange contents that I didn’t use. It was hard for me to pick out the templates that I did want to access in between all the ones I had no use for.
Therefore many had to go.
I removed daily note templates because I use a paper journal, as well as hundreds of old AI scripts that I created. It might have been nice to keep them, but I had no use for them at the point of removing everything, and believed I was going to be able to recreate them in the future should I need them, so I didn’t want these templates pulling at my attention.
What templates have I kept?
A lot of the templates for complicated notes with a lot of metadata remain.
The first ones I’d like to talk about are my Readwise imports because their templates are unique.
When you install the Readwise Official plugin there’s an option to visit the Readwise website and customise the format of the highlights and notes that you’re importing.
You can edit the format of the metadata, highlights and highlight headings, as well as the titles of the notes, in any way that you might like.
It’s best to keep things simple though, so in the properties of my Readwise notes I simply have the author of the resource, along with its category (book, podcast, article etc.), the source (Kindle, Readwise Reader, etc.) and a link to the site on the internet if applicable.
I don’t see myself ever having to use more than the data that’s found in these few properties, but even if I do, I can readjust the templates and reimport my Readwise highlights to my vault.
This is similar for literature notes created with the Citations plugin. This plugin gains information from a .bib file that you export from Zotero containing your reference library, importing notes for each source into your Obsidian vault.
In the settings of the plugin, you define the frontmatter and layout of the literature note — I have the title, date, authors and publisher in this template, and the plugin autocompletes the information based on what’s in your Zotero library. Very useful when working on academic projects.
The templates for notes that I create every day have remained. This is not because of the complexity that’s found within them, but the fact that using the templates like this a lot of times instead of writing out the same content within them every time will compound over time and save me a lot of effort in the long run.
This is only worth doing for the templates you use every day, so I’ve kept my templates for:
- Simple notes
- Evergreen notes
- AI queries
- Content notes
Using these simple templates day-in-day-out will save me plenty of time if I keep using them in the future.
There are more complicated templates that I keep in my vault because writing out the metadata contents every time I want to create a similar note would be very long-winded.
These notes include:
- Lecture notes — I like to record several different properties, including date, attendance, category and module when creating these notes. Additionally, when the university semester is happening, they’re notes that I’m creating every day.
- Directed reading notes — similar to the lecture notes, I like to record the author, the module and additional information.
- I call them “Academic” notes — these are manuscripts for the academic writing that I do whilst university is happening. Within these notes, I define all the properties that are needed to export a complete PDF, including date, author, bibliography, font size, abstract and CSL. This is the most complicated template that I have in my vault.
You can see that most of the complexity in my note-taking life comes from university work. My entire system would be considerably more simple if all I had to do was focus on making content.
Do I still use Templater?
Templater is one of the most powerful plugins in Obsidian, along with others such as Dataview and QuickAdd.
And yes, I do still use it. It was tempting to remove the plugin when simplifying my vault, but I decided that the features that it provides are still central enough to my workflow to justify keeping it.
As I mentioned in the introduction of this piece, Templater contains a feature called Internal Functions. These are little lines of code that, when Templater calls a template to be inserted, fill out up-to-date information at the point of addition to the note. This can include the date, time, other metadata of the note, and many more.
My favourite Templater internal function however is <% tp.file.cursor() %>
. This allows you to define cursor locations in the file, jumping between them with a command or a shortcut. I place these internal functions in the properties of the note so I can quickly fill them out, as well as at the point where I want to start writing.
Because of the introduction of properties recently, I’m still figuring out the best way to continue using this internal function for filling out the frontmatter of the note, but it’s still going to remain an important, time-saving part of my system.
These are the templates that I still use in my Obsidian vault. I hope that you’ve learned something new from this video, and as always, thanks for reading!