How to Augment your Obsidian Workflow

Once you have a working setup established in Obsidian, you will want to speed up things and optimize your setup a bit to avoid wasting too much time on useless things.

Spot the things you can optimize

I’m sure there are a lot of things you can optimize in your Obsidian setup. To find them, the easiest thing to do is to spot your repetitive actions. Here I will give you some examples of things you can spot. I will also give a way to fix it even if we’ll talk about it in the next part.

• Are you too much copying/pasting text? Consider using templates.
• Are you too much closing/opening notes? Consider using Sliding Panes to stack notes.
• Are you too much moving notes into the same folders? Consider using QuickAdd.

Fix the problems

Once you’ve spotted what can be optimized, you want to find solutions. Most of the time, it will require plugins. The top plugins for gaining time in Obsidian are:

• Sliding Panes: allows you to keep multiple notes open and quickly navigate between them.
• Templater: allows you to create complex templates.
• QuickAdd: allows you to capture things into notes, create notes from templates or automatize multiple actions.

We’ll go more into detail about each one of these plugins.

Sliding Panes

Sliding Panes is a plugin allowing you to keep multiple notes open. You can then navigate between them quickly. Have a look at the screenshot below, I have 5 notes opened and I can navigate between them either by clicking on one of the notes or using my mouse wheel.

Not a lot to say about this plugin, it’s very easy to use.

Templater

Templater is a plugin you can use to create complex templates. If you don’t know what a template is, it’s like a blueprint to create a new note. There is a native feature in Obsidian you can use to create templates but for complex templates, it’s good to use Templater.

Below is what a template note looks like:

When you’re on another note, you have a command available to open Templater. You can then select one of the templates you’ve created to paste their content into the active note. Some special values can be replaced, as in the example above there is “<%tp.file.title%>” which will be replaced with the active note file name.

To use templater, you just have to create a folder in your vault where you store all your templates. Then, you can use the “Templater: Open Insert Template modal” command to choose the note to use as a template for the active note.

To know more about templater: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater

QuickAdd

QuickAdd is a nice plugin to optimize your workflow as you can do a lot of things with it. With QuickAdd, you can:

• Capture: it allows you to quickly add text to a note. You can choose to create the note if it doesn’t exist yet, you can add the text below a specific section, etc…
• Template: it allows you to create a template with specific options such as the filename format, the destination directory, etc… It also provides a user interface for entering some values which have to be in your note, as in the image below. You can specify any value you want QuickAdd to ask you for.

• Macro: a macro allows you to combine multiple actions to execute. These actions can be capture actions, template actions, Obsidian commands, editor commands, user scripts, etc…

There are a lot of things to say about QuickAdd, I can’t cover everything here. You can check https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd to know more, but I will also give you some examples of how I use QuickAdd:

• Templates: I use QuickAdd templates because it allows me to create notes more quickly. I just hit a shortcut and it opens modals to ask me some values such as “File Name”, “Author”, “Rating”, etc… Then it automatically creates my note in a folder I specified.
• Captures: I use captures a lot. For example, as I use Obsidian as a task manager, I can just hit a shortcut and fill in some values to capture a task in my tasks note. I also use it to quickly capture ideas. For example, I have a writing dashboard and I can use QuickAdd to quickly add an article idea with a timestamp to my dashboard.
• Macros: I use macros to chain some actions. For example, when I finish a book, I can hit a shortcut in Obsidian and it will automatically create several tasks about this book, such as reviewing the book, transferring another book to my Kindle, publishing my review on Goodreads, deleting the book from my watchlist, etc…

Final note

There are other plugins you can use to automate things, but it depends a lot on what you do with Obsidian. For example, I use a plugin to automatically create book notes about the books I’ve read stored on Goodreads, but it’s a very specific case.

Thanks to QuickAdd, you can also create user scripts to automatize absolutely everything you want if you know JavaScript.

It’s up to you to build your solutions, I have just given you the basics!

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

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