My Obsidian Setup After 2 Years Of Learning And Adjustments

The perfect setup for me

After tinkering for two years with my Obsidian setup, I’ve finally found a setup that seems working for me. I love reading about other people’s setups, so I’m going to share mine too. Who knows, maybe you can use it as inspiration to improve your own?

Goals

Before presenting my setup, it’s important to outline the objectives it is designed to meet. Indeed, a setup is often designed to meet very specific objectives, which you need to understand in order to understand the setup. In short, why do I use Obsidian? And I recommend that you ask yourself this question when you want to use Obsidian.

The first objective is to store permanent notes. The concept of permanent notes is often attached to the concept of “Zettelkasten”, and so I have a part of my Obsidian vault dedicated to this Zettelkasten method. I won’t go into too much detail, but this method simply involves taking separate, independent, ideally indexed notes, and storing them in one place, so they can be found again.

One of the big challenges of my vault is therefore to enable this Zettelkasten method to be implemented efficiently.

Secondly, I also want to store all kinds of personal notes in my Obsidian vault. For example, periodic notes, project notes, lists of things I don’t want to forget, etc… So there needs to be a section dedicated to this aspect.

Finally, I’d like my Obsidian vault to be publicly accessible, at least certain parts of it, because I’m all for sharing knowledge. So I need a section to introduce a visitor to my Obsidian vault, and also a way of managing which notes should be public, and which should remain private.

Also, a more general objective: I want my Obsidian vault to be easy to use, and maintainable in the long term. I don’t want to spend more time playing with my setup than creating notes (I used to like it, but now I prefer efficiency).

Wiki

The first part of my vault is the “Personal Wiki”. This is where I store all my notes that are not personal, and that contain knowledge.

I have several folders:

Wiki Inbox: This is where all the notes from the personal wiki I’ve just created arrive, and they stay there until I’ve processed them. It’s essential to distinguish between notes to be processed and those already processed, which is why in many setups you’ll always find inboxes.
Notes: Here, all the notes in my wiki that contain knowledge. There are notes like “5G Antenna”, explaining how a 5G antenna works, or notes like “Casino Bonus Theory”, explaining a theory I’ve developed myself rather than information found elsewhere.
Plantations: What I call “Plantations” are simply notes that act as an index of notes. They’re Map of Contents, but I wanted to distinguish myself so I made an analogy and called them “Plantations” (my notes represent trees, found by the dozens in plantations). I have, for example, a “5G” plantation that brings together my notes related to 5G.
References: Here you’ll find all the sources of the information in my wiki. So there are notes for the various books I’ve read, films I’ve seen, websites I’ve consulted, etc. This allows me to find the source of the information it contains for any note in my wiki. The reverse also works: from any reference I can find all the notes referencing it.
Courses: This folder is similar to the “Plantations” folder, but contains course notes. What I call a course note is like a plantation, i.e. an index of notes, but the notes are indexed in a logical order, and don’t necessarily talk about similar subjects (even though a course often has a specific theme).
Status: This folder contains notes describing the statuses I use for my Zettelkasten notes.

In addition to these files, I have a few notes of my own:

Features: This is an index of notes I want to highlight (when you have thousands of notes, it can be useful to want to highlight some of them).
Learning Center: The references I store in my vault correspond not only to content already processed, but also to content to be processed. For example, even if I haven’t read a book yet, I’ll create a note for it so that I don’t forget to read it. The Learning Center gathers all the content to be processed (different from the inbox, here it’s more like a watchlist).
Random: This note is an index of 30 random notes that change every week.
ZK Index: This note is useful for organizing the Zettelkasten part of my vault, as it groups my various notes by status. I won’t go into detail, as it’s specific to the Zettelkasten section, which doesn’t necessarily speak to everyone.

That’s all for my personnal wiki. There are a few things that are a bit technical, so I’m using a few tricks to automate that, which I’ll talk about later when I talk about plugins.

Personal Part

The second part of my vault is this time related to what concerns me specifically. It includes the following elements:

Reviews: Weekly, monthly, and quarter reviews. I don’t use daily notes anymore, simply because I don’t feel the need to. My reviews are actually more checklists than notes, including actions like “Update on project progress”, “Backup my computer”, etc. And I add text if necessary, for example if a significant event has occurred.
Projects: I no longer use Obsidian for project management, but I still use it to store project-related notes. For example, I note in the project folder of my YouTube piano channel the music I’ve already played, and the music I’m planning to play on video.
Goals: This is where I write down my goals. A note corresponds to a goal. Often I don’t need to add any details, so my note simply consists of the title of the goal.
Workflows: I try to automate and simplify as many things in my life as possible, so that I can concentrate on the more complex things. I collect all my different processes in this folder, for example how to shoot a video or plan the next day as efficiently as possible.
Travels: I create a folder for each year, and a folder for each trip to collect notes related to the trips I make during the year.
Gifts: I often have trouble finding gifts. So I’ve decided to keep a history of the gifts I give to each person, so that I can see if I’ve already given something to someone, but also to get ideas when I’m short of inspiration.
And more…: As you’ll have guessed, this part is very expandable, and you can store just about any information you want to keep.

I also have special notes here:

Guiding principles: I write down my guiding principles here, which I reread every week. I often make mistakes in my life, from which I learn lessons that I write down here so that I don’t make them again.
Vaults: Obsidian is only a small part of my PKM. This note lets me know where information is stored that isn’t in Obsidian. For example, my contacts are stored in Google Contacts, my sports activities are stored on Strava, etc… This note is far from compulsory, but it makes it easier to see how many places our information is stored, and also to facilitate backups: I know that if I want to backup all my data, I have to backup every item mentioned in this note.

Public Part

This part is for visitors to my vault. I’m not going to talk about it because you probably don’t want to publish your vault online, and therefore don’t need to know about this part of my setup. And in any case, just go to my online vault and consult this public part: https://mindtopia.esteban-thilliez.com.

By the way, you’ll find in my online vault a large part of the setup as I talked about it there. It might be interesting to see what it looks like. However, there are a few differences, as I use some features locally that don’t work in the online version. Also, not all my notes are public, so some parts of my online vault are hidden from you. Also, I hope you won’t be too outraged by my English if you read my notes (I’m French, but I like to do everything in English, including writing my notes whether they’re personal or not, so they’re bound to be full of mistakes)!

My Sidebar

A simple way of summarizing the structure of my vault is to present my sidebar, which contains everything I’ve talked about so far.

Plugins

So far, I’ve only talked about my folder structure. I’m also going to quickly introduce the plugins I use.

The most important plugins, with which you’re probably already familiar, are Dataview and Templater. Dataview lets me create notes like the Learning Center simply by writing queries:

TABLE
status as Type,
priority as Priority
FROM "10 Wiki/14 References"
SORT priority descending
WHERE consumed != true

You can take this a step further and create tables of this kind with Dataview:

Here is the query:

TABLE
("![|100](" + image + ")") as Cover, Author as Author, Rating as Rating
FROM #wiki/references/omdb
WHERE file.name != "OMDb Reference"
SORT Rating desc

If you want to know more about Dataview, I’ve already written some articles about it (Obsidian Dataview: Build your Vault as a Database, The Most Efficient Way to Index your Obsidian Vault).

The other important plugin I’ve mentioned is Templater. I can’t imagine using Obsidian without Templater, it’s a real time-saver. Quickly, for those who don’t know, Templater lets you define note templates, which can be used to create other notes with a basic structure defined by the template. Here is for example my weekly review template:

I’ve also already written about Templater and native Obsidian templates, find more in this article: Obsidian Templates: Make Things Easier and Automatic.

Another time-saving plugin is QuickAdd. It’s a little confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to capture text in specific notes, create notes according to templates and move them into folders, run your own scripts, and so on… Find more in this article: Obsidian QuickAdd: Automate the Boring Stuff.

I’m sorry to redirect you to my other articles, but I simply can’t detail everything in this one, there’s so much to say. And so much to say that I’ve already said, especially.

In addition, there are other less essential but very useful plugins, such as Excalidraw (see Obsidian Excalidraw: Embed Drawings into your Notes), which lets me take notes by hand with my tablet computer, Digital Garden (see Publish your Obsidian Vault for Free), which lets me publish my vault online, Book Search, which makes it easy to create book notes, Omnisearch, which makes it easy to find certain notes, and so on…

Tricks

When you’re working with a very large vault containing lots of notes, you need to find an efficient way of doing maintenance.

Fortunately, I know my way around programming, so I can write scripts to help me with certain tasks, a bit like plugins do. So I recommend that you learn Python if you ever really want to customize your user experience with Obsidian. With ChatGPT, it’s even easier because you can simply ask it what you want and it will write your script for you.

Here are a few examples of tasks I use Python for:

Choosing 30 random notes per week to display to me (I mentioned this in the section on my wiki, well now you know it works with a little Python script, I don’t know if there’s a plugin to do this).
Find similar notes (sometimes I don’t pay attention and create notes that already exist in my vault but with a slightly different title, I’ve made a script to identify them).
Find all the backlinks for a note.
Etc…

Once again, I refer you to another article to find out more: Improve Obsidian with Python.

Graph View

A few words about the graph view: I don’t use it. I love this feature, so I’d love to be able to use it in practice, but I can’t find any use cases for it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s only useful for moving around your vault from note to note, and I never do that.

It might also be interesting to visualize the growth of your vault, or to see the themes that recur most in your notes, but I don’t find it very useful.

A Template Vault?

I’m not necessarily a fan of vault templates. For me, your vault should come from you, and successive iterations to get something you use and that works for you.

On the other hand, if people are interested, I can create a template vault and share it. I’ve already done this once (A Great Setup to Organize your Life with Obsidian — part. 4 — Template Vault) because someone had contacted me privately to ask for it, so feel free to ask me.

Final Note

This article was a little long, but that’s to be expected as my Obsidian setup is made up of quite a few elements. But who knows, maybe in a year’s time I’ll come back to this article and realize that my setup is nothing like it used to be.

Don’t hesitate to tell me about your setups in the comments, I’ll be curious to hear about them, and I think the readers of this article will be too!

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