Obsidian Notes Setup

This is an operational vault that demonstrates how I use Obsidian to manage meetings and tasks. This document attempts to provide guidance on interesting files to review.

To get a real feel for it, I'd suggest downloading the vault and opening in Obsidian. If you've taken that path, open up 2022-04-10 10-30 Meeting 2 and triage to get a feel for things!

Daily Notes

These are generated from daily notes. The sections are:

• Section for notes
• List of any notes created or referencing today
• Any tasks due or completed today
• Embedded Current Goals
• A morbid hand-wave guess of how many more days I have on this planet
• Chart of happiness, weight, body fat, etc.
• A daily mantra
• A random quote

Meeting Notes

I use this script which leverages my calendar and the meeting template to create one note per meeting. The two important things to note are frontmatter and the Dataview script.

Frontmatter

---
topic: "a string or a [[link]]"
attendees:
  - "[[links to people]]"
---

Content

Generated - Contextual Tasks

The contextual-taskview view pulls in tasks based on matching attendees and topics, like this: Explicit tasks, as seen above, mean that the task directly references one of the attendees of the meeting.

Implicit tasks simply mean that there is an overlap between the attendees of the current meeting and the attendees of the meeting where the task was created.

Input

Most of my notes are bullets or tasks. Obsidian treats each bullet as a block, which makes these easy to reference and filter. Dataview additionally enables annotating tasks with inline values like [key:: value]. The keys I use are:

• ask/share/talk/tell
  • [ask:: Megan Smith] about something useful to know
• done/due
  • something that's [due:: 2022-04-10] and [done:: 2022-04-10]

Grooming Notes

My automation creates a file for each meeting, but I may have schedule changes or the conversation may be more organic. The script above also removes any empty notes from previous days.

Task Management

While the contextual tasks above are valuable for discussions, it's useful to have global views into tasks. The TASKS pages, based on taskview.js, provide high-level views into categorized tasks, like this:

Styling

.obsidian/snippets/style.css helps California Coast match my personal preferences.

Plugins

I call out Dataview specifically below, but it may be worth taking a look at the .obsidian/community-plugins.json file to see others I depend on to build this experience.

Dataview

Dataview is an incredibly powerful tool that enables both SQL-like querying of your notes and tasks, as well as writing arbitrary JavaScript that can be included in your notes. I leverage dataview for both the meeting template and well as the TASKS pages.

Other Tools

• Record Types - list any page that is a "record home". I annotate notes with record types like movie, book, quote and create homes that list them
• tool - move notes - use dataview to generate commands that can be copied
• People Missing Homes - identify pages referenced as author in frontmatter that do not exist yet
• shared/scripts/randomNote.js - templater script to grab a random note from the quotes directory