Setting up your Obsidian Vault for Personal Knowledge Management can be daunting. You start from scratch, there are 1000’s of plugins to chose from, and honestly it all becomes one big distraction from actually generating thoughts and ideas. In this video, I will share my approach to managing an Obsidian vault in hopes it will save you a few headaches when starting from scratch.
Note: I publish my Obsidian Vault using Github Pages and because of this I use more folders than most vaults you will see. Having folders that I can hide away makes making sure I only share what I intend to share with the Internet. If you haven’t already go check out my vault at brandonkboswell.com. I will put a link in the description.
Folders / Major Areas
- 1-1
- I thoroughly enjoy writing in Obsidian, so I put my 1-1 notes with people I chat with on a regular basis instead of putting them in another app
- It’s just a running log with a date and the todos associated with that session
- Business
- A random assortment of notes that I want to keep and link to, but I don’t want shared with the world.
- Collections
- Where I collect items I thought were interesting that I want to be able to refer back to, but I might not actually have significant commentary on. Please let me know how you do this in the comments, that way I do this is not ideal. Basically I screenshot or get the URL for whatever it is and then Quick Add to TickTick and then when I clean out my TickTick Inbox I put it into Obsidian for storage.
- Cooking
- My wife is a far better cook then I, but I do cook a few meals each week. The issue I always found was I would do a meal and then by the time I cook that meal the next time I couldn’t remember what I had tried, so I end up making the same mistakes and not progressing at perfecting the dish. So I started creating cooking notes for these and after each time I cook a dish I put another entry into that note. When I go to start cooking that dish again I refer back to what I had written the last time on what to try next.
- Ideas
- A random assortment of ideas. These are mostly a folder just to make them private when publishing
- People
- My notes on people. This one is also private as it has a bunch of people who didn’t ask to be published online.
- Personal
- Pictures of cards, notes people have sent me or deeply personal writing prompts that don’t need to be public
- Projects
- A folder where all of the Youtube Videos or Articles start while I’m figuring them out. Currently this folder is not published, but I might make it public soon and then just apply a draft tag to things that shouldn’t be published. For instance the script for this video is in there
- Seedlings
- This is where all of my Atomic Notes / Evergreen Notes go.
- Sources
- This is where all of my Readwise Highlights & Literary Notes go.
- Temporal
- Daily Notes
- Ex: 2022-02-25
- Weekly Notes
- Ex: 2022-W07
- Annual Notes
- Ex: 2021 In Review
- Daily Notes
- To Publish
- Articles / Documents that would be useful to the public, but need cleanup / refinement before they can be shared
- Underscore Gang — I need to find a way to describe this
- Index
- Content Calendar
- Backlogs
- Gaming Backlog
- Idea Backlog
- Book Backlog
- Music Backlog
- TV Backlog
- Seedings
- Writing Prompts
Plugins I use
- See Video where I run through this.
Themes
- I use the Minimal Theme
- I’ve tried the Notational one and the California Coast and they are both good as well, I just happen to like the Minimal Theme slightly more.