One challenge at work is to keep all information and tasks organized. I used to take notes with pen and paper and sometimes I used OneNote to take notes for meetings. However, eventually a friend of mine suggested Obsidian to me and so I gave it a shot. And what shall I say – it’s an amazing piece of software. In it’s essence, Obsidian is a markdown-based knowledge base that supports links between notes and can be customized with a myriad of plugins.
As with most flexible programs, it needs some getting used to and some setup to adapt it to your own workflow and needs. To help with that, I will describe how I use Obsidian and which plugins I find helpful. Be aware that if you use Obsidian commercially, you will have to buy a license (which is well worth it in my opinion). But you can try it out and use it for your personal notes for free.
Daily Notes
During my daily work and especially during meetings, I just want to take notes whenever I find something noteworthy. For this, I use the Daily Notes core plugin which creates a new note every day – pretty straightforward. To get a good overview and navigate your daily notes, I can recommend the Calendar plugin.
Templates
Another useful core plugin is the Templates plugin. It lets you create nodes that can be copied into other notes (with placeholders filled). I use templates to insert a skeleton structure for my regular meetings into daily notes.
Tasks
When I discover that I need to do something in the future (e.g. an action point from a meeting), I somehow need to keep track of that. That’s where the Tasks plugin comes into play. However, I use tasks for different types of actions:
ToDos
There are some tasks that I can do myself at some point in time. Let’s call them ToDos. I tag them with a “#todo” tag and query them on a task-overview page using the mechanisms provided by the Tasks plugin, e.g.:
```tasks
description includes #todo
not done
no due date
starts before tomorrow
```I have this page pinned to my right sidebar below the calendar all the time so I can see my open ToDos.
Topics for regular meetings
I also use the Tasks plugin to keep track of topics that I need to take into one of my regular meetings, which is often the case. I have an own note for each of my regular meetings. Then I link a task to the proper meeting note if it’s a topic for the meeting. Within the meeting note I generate an overview of open topics for the meeting (formatted using a Callout):
> [!abstract] Punkte für das Meeting
> ```tasks
> description includes [[retro]]
> not done
> starts before tomorrow
> ```Dataview
In addition to tasks which I use to represent topics that shall be adressed in a certain meeting (and are then completed), I also want to have an overview of what I did during the last week so I can talk about that in weekly meetings. To do so, I tag those activities in my daily notes with the “#overview” tag and aggregate them using the Dataview plugin:
```dataview
list without id
L.text
from #overview and "daily"
flatten file.lists as L
where date(file.name) <= date(this.file.name)
and date(file.name) > date(this.file.name) - dur(7 days)
and contains(L.tags, "#overview")
sort file.name asc
```This Dataview query is then part of the template note for the meeting that I insert into my daily note when the meeting takes place.
Other plugins
Besides the plugins that I’ve already talked about, here are some more plugins which I find helpful:
So if you haven’t yet, you should definitely give Obsidian a try – it’s note-taking for nerds and it is fun!