A Great Setup to Organize your Life with Obsidian — Part. 1 — Introduction and PKM

In a previous article, I talked about how to build a second brain with Obsidian. This article goes hand in hand with this one because today I am going to share with you how I implemented my PKM(Personal Knowledge Management) system in Obsidian. So it’s a practical application of my previous article.

The need

First, when building an Obsidian setup, you need to define what you need. Why? Because Obsidian is a complex software that allows you to build anything you want. To don’t be overwhelmed, defining what you need is a good start.

For my part, I have several needs:

• I need a task manager
• I need a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system
• I need a Life OS
• I need an event manager

You don’t have to put everything together in Obsidian. Before my task manager was TickTick, my PKM system was Obsidian (and it’s still this), my Life OS was Notion and my event manager was Google Calendar.

Today, I use Obsidian for everything (except the event manager because sometimes I need reminders). I like it because you can link all of these systems together, it’s a powerful feature. It’s harder to link them together when they are in separate apps.

Now, we’ll see how I implemented each of those things in Obsidian.

The PKM system

I begin with this one as it’s the initial thing Obsidian was made for. If you don’t know what is a PKM system, I would say that it is simply a system in which you can organize your knowledge in a precise and accessible way. Let’s say you are a student and you have a lot of courses to review. One way to manage your revision is to revise all these courses one after the other. Another way would be to group the knowledge you gain from these courses into a PKM system so that you can separate these courses into concepts and make links between these concepts. This way, if you review courses where concepts are common, you only have to learn those concepts once

Zettelkasten

I use the Zettelkasten method to organize my knowledge. If you don’t know what is Zettelkasten, perhaps you won’t understand what follows. I will make an article about Zettelkasten soon.

So, I have a main folder called “Zettelkasten”. In this folder, I put all my Zettelkasten-related notes. It includes evergreen notes, fern notes, MOCs…

I also make flashcards in Obsidian, and export them to Anki using a plugin: “Obsidian to Anki”. So I store these flashcards in Obsidian.

My PKM system’s entry is a folder called “Zettelkasten Inbox”. This folder captures anything coming through my mind.

As you can see, the folders are numbered. I’ll explain this later.

Also, I have reworked the Zettelkasten method a bit in my way. I implemented a new type of note: “Ideas” which are just ideas I think about and don’t want to forget. Seeds” are “raw” notes, i.e. they have to be processed and separated into different concepts. “Ferns” are notes I build from “Seeds”, which consist of a concept that needs to be developed further. Once the concept has been further developed, the “Ferns” become “Incubating” notes, i.e. notes for which the corresponding flashcards have not yet been made. Once the flashcards are made, the corresponding notes become “Evergreens”.

I use some metadata in my notes:

I think the picture is explicit. I will explain now how I manage references.

References

To manage references, I have a main folder called “References”. It divides into multiple subfolders: “Books”, “Articles”, “Reddit”, “YouTube”, “Podcasts”, “Movies”, “Courses”, “Contents”. Everything is explicit except “Contents”. It’s just a folder where I put references coming from documents or anything that cannot be classified somewhere else (for example, mail).

I use some metadata in reference notes, depending on the reference type. For example, here is what I have for books:

Note that, for books specifically, I import the reference notes from Goodreads with the Booksidian plugin. It allows to automatically fill the metadata.

I guess this is everything there is to know about how I manage references. Then I will talk about my “Watch List”.

Watch List

The “Watch List” is where I store the content I want to consume next. So I have a main folder called “Watch List” divided into the same subfolders I have in my “References” folder (except there’s no “Contents” folder”).

I also use some metadata in my Watch List notes.

I guess everything is explicit except “For”. I’ll get back to this when I will write the article about my Life OS implementation in Obsidian. To explain quickly, this is the project that consuming this content will help me with.

Final note

Now you have an overview of how I manage my knowledge with Obsidian. I also use Templater and QuickAdd a lot, but I won’t talk about them now because it’s too general and I don’t want to repeat what I do with these plugins in every Obsidian article. I will make an article about “How to augment your Obsidian workflow” later.

There is so much more to know about my PKM system, but it’s not in the scope of this article because it’s more related to the Life OS and how I link those two systems together. Be sure to follow me to know more about my Obsidian setup!

Edit: The next story is here. You can also find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian Like a Pro

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