My Obsidian Process

#garden
Posts

Current Set-up and Problems

My writing, inspirations, thoughts, lives on various platforms and/or in various services, and apps. It

My Goals

My Wants and Needs

My brain and my heart like systems that

Solving the Problem

Many of my clients ask me to recommend the best planner or software to help them reach their goals. I tell them what a friend once told me:

The best system is the one that gets you to do whatever you need to complete. The best is the one you will use.

Current Tools:

Hardware and Peripherals

Software

Analog

Pasted image 20261006173453.png

Several leather notebooks made by my friend, V3 Leather Journals.

How It Works Now

Everything lives in one Obsidian vault, and the vault runs on a few rules instead of a tower of folders. The bones come from Steph Ango (kepano), who runs Obsidian, and his post on how he uses Obsidian. The trimming came later, from Ryan at Stimpunks.

Two questions per note

Every note answers two questions in its properties:

  1. What kind of note is this? That's categories:
  2. What is it for? That's `projects.

Folders barely matter. A note shows up in the right table because of its properties, not because of where I dropped it. Tags carry topics that cut across projects, like my cult series.

The projects

Where things land

Anything I stopped using went to an archive folder. Nothing got deleted.

Sources stay sources

A Clipping is a copy of someone else's work, so I leave it alone. My reaction goes in its own note that links back to it. Later I can always tell what I read apart from what I thought about it.

Commonplace Notebook

The rules come from the Stimpunks Zibaldone:

The spine of this is TASL — Title, Author, Source, Licence, which is Creative Commons’ own shorthand for crediting something you have reused. It is the right skeleton for a photograph, where the thing you are pointing at is one file at one address. A quotation needs three more, marked + below: which printing, where you found it, and what it is for.

A small script refuses to save an entry that breaks a rule. That helps on the days my brain wants to skip steps. Older Commonplace Notebook entries (before October 1, 2026) don't follow these rules.

Concepts

One note per idea: examples: DARVO, triangulation, UDL, monotropism. Every draft or lesson that uses the idea links to it, so each concept page gathers everything that touches it.

Daily notes

Quick thoughts land in the daily note with a timestamp. At the end of the day, one command saves a list of every note I made or edited. If I forget, it catches up the next time I open Obsidian. The system is built for the days I'm running low, not only the good ones.

Publishing

This site is the public slice of the vault. A note stays private until I check a box on it.

Related notes
Too much and not enoughAbout MeBe Shameless About Caring Too MuchThe Emergent Power of a Web of Notes with Links
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