How I Manage Life Using Obsidian - Templates & Periodic Notes

How's it going guys? Welcome to the very first video in a series I'm gonna start doing on the different Obsidian plugins that I use to make my note-taking easier and more streamlined. In this video specifically, I'm gonna be talking about 3 different plugins that allow me to organize my life, my daily life inside of Obsidian. So to get started, I'm just gonna make myself a bit smaller and I wanna show you kind of how I've got this set up. And then from there, you'll actually be able to see you know, what you want to take away from this, what you want to implement for yourself and what you feel. Um, yeah, just get some ideas from this. So the way that this works, as you can see, I'm, I'm inside one of my notes. This is the 24th of September, 2022. This is the date that I'm making this video. And this is what I see every single day when I go into my Obsidian. So essentially I'll just quickly do this. What this is, is it's a combination of a lot of different things, things that I've like set up myself. That I want to, that I want to challenge myself to do every single day. So the first one is going to be 5 Minute Morning. And this is just like 3 different questions, things that I'm grateful for, 3 actions that would make today great. And then I also have some affirmations that I, that I want to like write down. And so those are just, it's pretty much just that. I've also got this like tick all the boxes, meditate, write out affirmations, visualization, and reading for 30 minutes per day. Very simple stuff. Now, the next thing, um, which is pretty cool is that inside of the weekly overview, I've got, uh, firstly these two links, and this is not really that important. This is just like linking to a Google Sheet that I also fill out. And then I've also got like another note where I've got some affirmations and underneath that I use, it's a weekly review note that I've got embedded inside of my daily note. And the way that, that the setup is that it's continuously updating to the latest week, depending on which week that I'm in. So you can see right now, this is the weekly review of week 39. And what it shows you is your goals that you have for that week. So in every single daily note that gets populated, it's going to show my overall goals for the week, which is really convenient. Now, the next thing is I've got like this work matrix. And I'll show you this inside of— hey, I'm going to go to tomorrow. Let's say I open up Sunday. So inside of Sunday, you can see exact same structure. And I wanted to go to my work matrix. So basically what happens is that I want to have some sort of priority of my to-do list for the day. And this is where I create my to-do list. So I have like high priority tasks and I have low priority tasks. And this just helps me to give some order to my tasks. Now that I've shown you that, um, there's just a couple more. So I've got this thing, which is actually quite amazing. And this is basically a Dataview query. I'll show you the query. What? I'll show you the query. So this is the query. And what it's doing is it's actually going through all of my previous day's notes into Infinity, and it's pulling all of the tasks, which I haven't marked off yet. So this is quite helpful, especially because, For me, I write down a lot of stuff that I want to do, and not all the time does it get implemented. I'm not super strict on myself. Like, I like to just keep, keep track of this. So maybe once a week, what I'll do is I'll just start reading through these and I'll start seeing if there's anything that I've missed, something that I should bring top of mind that's actually quite important. Um, so you can see this, this one goes on quite a lot and, uh, that's because I haven't cleaned it up in a while, but, I generally try to like go through here and see what I've, what I've actually completed. And then I tick that off. And so over time, the goal is to get to the point where you're like at inbox zero, right? Where you've just finished all of your to-do lists from the previous days and you're always on the new day with a clean slate. All right, cool. Now the next one, and this is actually the last one that I'll just talk about here, is the log. So the log is for me personally, this is just where I write down anything that doesn't fit in any of the other boxes that I want to put into my daily notes. So if I have some ideas, if I have something that I want to remember, I just put it down over here and then I'll be able to find it. Cause I'll, I generally go and look at this at the end of every single day. So yeah, that's pretty much the, the main 5 ones. And to be honest with you, these ones, I don't really use these ones too much. This was originally a template that I got from another YouTuber, Nicole van der Hoeven. you should check her stuff out. She's great. And from the, like, for me personally, I just haven't found a way to make this part of my routine yet. I just keep it here because I kind of hope that eventually, uh, I will, I will find a use for it. Yeah. This is like talking about your daily review, what you're proud of, et cetera. All right, cool. Um, so with that said, like, I'm just for dramatic effect, delete those. These are the 5 that I really use inside of my vault today. Now I'm gonna show you how to actually create this for yourself. Okay? And I guess before that I get into that, I also need to explain to you how this links together with your weekly notes, your monthly notes, quarterly, and yearly. So the first thing to understand is you can see on the left over here, I've got this folder called reviews. And inside of there, I've got 5 different folders. So I've got the daily folder, monthly, Quarterly, weekly, yearly, right? So these are all different folders and it's important that they're in the structure, 'cause I'm gonna show you later with periodic notes how to set it up. So the daily one is what I just showed you over here. This is every single day. It just logs this automatically whenever I click on this button over here, which is quite convenient. Then we've got weekly. So weekly, you can see if I go to my weekly review, this is showing the, like the current week All right. So generally I would put my goals in here. I could say like task 1, task 2. And then when I go back, you'll see that it actually has embedded my week inside of my daily notes. I can see it every single day. Cool. Now you've also got a monthly. So monthly is going to be, if you, if you just look over here, monthly is where I've got the following notes. I've got the direction. So the direction that I want to move in, um, as I do, like, so this is where you review like your previous month. So I've got the direction I want to move in. I've got core principles. So this is like a list of, um, the, just a couple of principles that I, that I value and that I want to like remind myself of often. And then I've got like a yearly vision. So this is again embedding the yearly note. Uh, it's embedding the yearly note into my Obsidian vault. And then I've also got last month. So this is embedding the previous month's review into the current month. So you see how all of this is happening automatically because of the setup that I'm going to be sharing with you. It's really quite amazing. This is why I love this setup so much because you don't really have to touch anything once it's working. So this is the, um, I guess then there's other reflections, just things that I'm looking at. And then Yeah, this is the current month's review. All right, cool. So the next thing is the quarterly one, just so that you can kind of see, this is how it works. We've got the direction, we've got the yearly OKRs, last quarter, and then this quarter. I'll show you Q4. You can see yearly OKRs once again, last quarter, and then this quarter. And all of these things are kind of moving from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and then yearly, right? And then I'll just show you the yearly one just to top it off. So in the yearly one, I've got it set up like this. I've got key results that I want to be working on. I've got, uh, related core concepts. And then I've also got initiatives for each one of these results that I want to hit. I've got the following different initiatives and yeah, this is kind of just how I do it myself. So that's kind of the outline. Now I can finally get into showing you how do you actually set this up? Okay. The first thing you need to download is you're going to go to your community plugins, and make sure that you have the following plugin, Periodic Notes. Okay? So it's called Periodic Notes. You wanna make sure that you install this. And then once it's set up, the next thing to do is actually to create the following folders. So you can see over here, this is the folders that I use. I've got a head, like a main folder, which I call reviews. Then I've got daily, monthly, quarterly, weekly, and yearly. So simply, you just click on create a folder. I could say test, and then inside of here, I'll just do the exact same thing. So, okay, so that's a note, um, that's a folder. I say daily and you kind of just go like that. So that's an example of what you want to be setting up. And the important thing to mention is you don't have to set up all of them. So if you only want to be measuring your daily and your weekly and yearly, you don't have to worry about the other ones. This is just kind of extra that you can actually do. using the Periodic Notes plugin. Anyways, going back to the plugin over here, you can see we've got, okay, Periodic Notes. What you want to do is you want to set the default location for all of these different, um, folders. So you can see the notes folder, um, I've got it set to reviews/daily. The week folder is reviews/weekly. The, the month folder is reviews/monthly. And if you don't want to use the monthly one, you can always just click the this to turn this off. You can turn off the quarterly one, et cetera. Now, once this is set up, the next thing that you have to set up, um, there's another plugin, which is also amazing plugin, and that is called Templater. So you want to go to Templater. All right, cool. So here, um, this plugin, you want to make sure that you have this installed and this allows you to create the functionality of templates inside of your vault, which is quite amazing. So Just to give you an idea of how templates work, you can see, I will delete this quickly. Okay. So I've got a folder called templates and templates is basically where you store all of the notes that you wanna use over and over and over again. So you can see I've got daily, weekly, monthly. If I go to the daily one, this is what it looks like. I've got some code over here that shows you the current date. Then I've got exactly as I showed you the 5-minute morning, the weekly overview, the work matrix, et cetera. And I can even take these ones and kind of like, I guess what I'm gonna do is just archive them. So I'll maybe just do that archive and just take them like that. Okay. So that's pretty much how your, your template gets set up. You can set this up in whatever way you want. That's the beauty of this. You could just start with a simple headline that says to-dos. And then all you would do is like create like a checklist for yourself that you can use to start with every single day. And then when you log into Obsidian, you can literally just click on that template and it's going to pre-populate it for that day. So that's really the amazing thing about this, right? So you want to set up templates for the following: for daily, for weekly, right? So you want to set up templates like this weekly, yearly, and monthly, and kind of just go through the entire, the process that you, of the, of the notes that you want to see at every one of these files. By the way, if you want to have this exact setup, like I know this is, it's a little bit complicated to set this up yourself. I have got this inside of my Patreon, Patreon. Um, you can actually get access to this. So yeah, that's there if you want this. And, uh, that also helps to support me a little bit. Um, but either way, this is pretty much how it works, right? Okay. So you've got your periodic notes set up, you've got your template set up. And now the next thing to do is just go back to periodic notes over here. And what you want to do is just set your templates folder. So once you've got the template set up, you just wanna, you wanna link to all of your different templates folders. So templates for the daily, templates for the weekly, templates for the monthly, et cetera. And now, now this is where it all comes together. When you install Periodic Notes, you're gonna get access to this, which is a button that says Open Today. So when you click on this, it's gonna open the current day's date with your template. And then the last plugin that you're gonna wanna download just for this specific example, that I've also found is really helpful is called Obsidian 42 Jump to Date. Okay? So this is the one you want to get. When you install this, what it essentially does is it's got a calendar. I can literally just jump to any, any date inside of my vault. And you can see here's all of the notes from that specific date. So it allows you to kind of time travel in your vault. Like I could go back to the 24th of August and I can see all the stuff from there. And this is really the, the, the whole big picture of how I manage every single day, um, in Obsidian, how I manage my daily notes. I just click on the open daily and that's kind of how I do it. So hopefully you enjoyed this video. Hopefully it wasn't too complicated. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below. As mentioned, I am going to be linking to, you can download like a, an example, like template of everything that I showed you here. Inside of my Patreon, and that will be in the link in the description. And with that said, thanks for watching this video. I'm gonna be making a lot more of these plugin videos. I've got so many that I wanna talk about. There's Dataview, there's more stuff you can do with Templater, there's the Snippets plugin that makes things so easy and effective. And yeah, I'm really excited for it. So stay tuned for the next one, and I'll see you, I'll see you then. Bye-bye.