A Great Setup to Organize your Life with Obsidian — Part. 3— Life OS

Achieve your goals and projects with the help of Obsidian

We’ve already seen how to use Obsidian as a PKM system and a Tasks/Events manager. The last part missing to complete the system is the Life OS.

What is a Life OS

A Life OS (Operating System) is a system you can use to:

• Structure your life the way you want.
• Grow your identity and align it with your goals.
• Set and achieve goals.
• Increase productivity and reduce procrastination.

Who needs a Life OS

Anyone who wants to have an overview of his life should use a Life OS. It helps you to find areas of your life where you have to improve or areas of your life where you’re good and can capitalize on.

Life OS elements

A Life OS is composed of:

• Dashboards for goals and projects overview.
• Dashboards for tracking actions.
• PKM system.
• Tasks manager for taking action and productivity.

In a nutshell, it is composed of everything we’ve seen in the Obsidian setup series.

Life OS principles

To be efficient, a Life OS should follow some principles:

• Be simple. You don’t want to be overwhelmed with your Life OS and it has to be easy so that you can navigate through it without friction.
• Be focused on action. It’s useless to do tons of planning. It’s better to take action. Your Life OS should be oriented towards actions instead of planning.
• Be controlled. Your Life OS should be controlled by some rules you won’t break. Setting rules may prevent procrastination.

How to design our life for a Life OS

A Life OS design can be seen as a pyramid.

At the higher level, we have our values. They define our identity. They should have a “why” which is the reason why we think this value is important for us.

Then we have our goals. That’s what we want to achieve to suit our values. They should have a “why” and eventually a deadline.

And then we have our projects. They are necessary steps for achieving our goals. They should have a target so that we know when a project is finished (though some projects can have no target), and eventually a deadline.

Finally, we have tasks and habits. They are the actions we have to complete to achieve projects.

An example: Value: Art -> Goal: Become a pianist -> Project: Play Für Elise -> Habit: Play piano at least 30 minutes every day.

Obsidian Implementation

Now that you have understood what a Life OS is, you will be able to understand how to implement it in Obsidian.

First, we have to build folders for storing values, goals, and projects. Then, we have to build templates for these 3 things.

I’ll use dataview for building dashboards. If you’re not comfortable with it, I’ll explain it in another story. While waiting, you can check the documentation. All this to say that I will use a lot of metadata in my templates (metadata is either in YAML frontmatter or to be recognized by dataview as “Value::value”).

• Value: just has a name and a “why” as metadata.
• Goal: a name and as metadata: a “why”, a value, a deadline, a status (completed, not completed).
• Project: a name and metadata: a goal, a deadline, a status, a target. In projects, I added a section for tasks so that I can link tasks to projects.

A project example:

Once you have your folders and your templates, you can fill your Life OS, beginning with values, then goals, then projects, and finally tasks.

Now it’s time to talk about daily notes. They are useful to track your progress from day to day. Start with creating a folder to store your daily notes. Then you can create a daily note template using metadata for your habits. For example, here is my daily note template:

I have some things related to tasks in my daily note template, to see the tasks I have to do today and what I already completed. It’s up to you to customize your templates.

Now, we will build our dashboards. I made dashboards for each of our 3 things (projects, goals…). You can make dashboards easily with dataview queries. For example, here is the query I use for my projects dashboard:

```dataview
TABLE
 string("Target: " + target) AS "Target",
 string("Goal: ") + goal AS "Goal",
 string("Deadline: ") + deadline as "Deadline",
 string("Complete: ") + complete as "Complete"
FROM "006 Action/2 Projects"
WHERE file.name != "2 Projects"
```

It’s approximately the same for goals and values.

Now, we can add an alignment dashboard, grouping everything. It’s just a note grouping our 3 queries. I’ve added a “Trackers” section where I can track habits and everything in my daily notes.

```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
 link(file.name) as "Day",
 row["cold shower"] AS "🚿",
 row["piano"] AS "🎹",
 row["guitar"] AS "🎸",
 row["workout"] AS "🏃‍♂️",
 anki AS "🎴",
 reading AS "📖",
 row["improved-today"] as "Improved"
 FROM "600 Periodic/610 Daily" 
 SORT file.name DESC
 LIMIT 30
 WHERE file.name != "610 Daily"
```

This section gives me an overview of my progress from day to day.

I’ve also added a section called “Charts” where I put some charts. For example:

I’ll make a story later about how to create such charts in Obsidian.

Now everything is good, you have your Life OS!

Make it beautiful

You want to customize your Life OS to make it beautiful. For this, you can customize your Obsidian theme, or add plugins. For me, I use the “banners” plugin, allowing me to put banners at the top of some notes. I also use “Style Settings” to customize my dashboards.

The possibilities are endless.

Bonus: the learning center

I’ve made a “learning center” in my Life OS. It’s a place where I can have an overview of the books I have to read, the movies I have to watch… I can also see what I have already read, my ratings, my reviews, etc…

It’s easy to implement if you have a lot of metadata in your notes.

Here is my dataview query for my watch list:

```dataview
TABLE
tags as Type,
for as Project,
priority as Priority,
link as Link
FROM "200 Watch List"
SORT priority descending
```

It gives me the list of the things I have to read or watch ordered by priority. I also have a query for the books I want to reread:

```dataview
TABLE
tags as Type,
for as Project,
author as Author,
link as Link
FROM "300 References"
WHERE contains(reread, "yes")
```

As I’m a musician, I have queries related to this. For example:

```dataview
TABLE
row["tags"] as Type,
row["start-learning"] as "Start Learning",
row["Topics"] as Topics
FROM "500 Personal/510 Music Journal"
WHERE contains(can-play, "no")
```

I also have a query for my favorite references:

```dataview
TABLE
tags as Type,
for as Project,
author as Author,
link as Link
FROM "300 References"
SORT for ascending
WHERE contains(loved, "yes")
```

In a nutshell, you understand. The purpose is to customize your learning center so that it corresponds to what you want.

Conclusion

Now you know how to have a system in Obsidian to organize your life. Please take what I’ve given you as examples, don’t copy/paste my system. There are a lot of chances it doesn’t fit you. The purpose is to customize the system so that it suits you and it makes you more productive.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment as this story was a little bit hard to understand I guess.

Edit: find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian Like a Pro

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