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. If you use Obsidian for work, you are encouraged to buy a Commercial license, but you can try it for free to see if it works for you.
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!