# Obsidian Starter Course The Obsidian Starter Course is a video course to take you from [[Obsidian]] newbie to [[Obsidian]] hero! Note that this product is included in the [[Knowledge Worker Kit]]. Links: - https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-course ## Who is this for? - You are just getting started with note-taking or you've recently switched to Obsidian - You want to discover Obsidian and its key features - You wonder how to take smart notes - You want to know how to properly organize your notes and avoid creating an overwhelming mess - You want a solid system that scales - You wonder what Zettelkasten, the PARA method, and the Johnny decimal system are - You have bought the Obsidian Starter Kit and want a full video course to help you get starte Getting started with Obsidian is not the hardest thing in the world, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how to structure and organize your knowledge base. You have a busy life, and you don't want to spend weeks or even months figuring out the "right" approach. ## What is this? The Obsidian Starter Course is a video course containing 2h20 of content. It's a hands-on guide into the world of Obsidian, Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), and the [[Obsidian Starter Kit]]. Many of the explanations use the Obsidian Starter Kit's vault/structure/plugins, but the explanations about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Markdown, YAML and recommendations can be applied to many other tools. Moreover, if you're using Obsidian but don't yet have a copy of the Obsidian Starter Kit, then this course is still incredibly useful. It will show you how you can organize your knowledge base, how to take smart notes, and much more! ## What's included? The Obsidian Starter Course is a video course (~2h20) of content covering: - Obsidian: installation, user interface, key features, plugins, automation, tips and tricks, etc - The Markdown syntax - YAML metadata - Personal Knowledge Management techniques and principles: the [Johnny Decimal system](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-04-29-johnny-decimal/), the [PARA method](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-04-26-para/) (e.g., the [Zettelkasten method](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-05-01-zettelkasten-method/), the [LIFT principle](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-04-26-lift/), [Atomic notes](https://www.dsebastien.net/the-value-of-atomic-notes/), [Maps of Content](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-05-15-maps-of-content/), knowledge capture & extraction, etc) - [Journaling](https://www.dsebastien.net/2021-10-07-periodic-journaling-part-1/) - [Periodic reviews](https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-05-16-periodic-reviews/) - Templates - Automation - Task management - Best practices and recommendations - Hands-on explanations - and more! ## Testimonials "The perfect tool to start using the full power of Obsidian." — Anonymous ## Course timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:28 Installing Obsidian 00:01:05 Downloading and installing Obsidian Starter Kit 00:02:29 Opening the vault 00:03:40 Obsidian User Interface 00:04:36 Left toolbar 00:04:51 Top left buttons 00:05:09 Editor 00:05:20 Sidebar 00:05:38 Collapsing the sidebar 00:05:58 Editor tabs 00:06:58 Splitting the editor view 00:08:29 View and edit modes 00:09:08 Markdown syntax introduction 00:13:01 Bottom left buttons 00:13:06 Open vault view 00:13:32 Using one or multiple vaults 00:15:04 Multiple vaults vs plugins and configuration 00:15:43 Settings 00:16:35 Community plugins 00:19:11 Keep Things Simple 00:20:59 Obsidian help 00:21:49 The value of Markdown 00:23:13 More about Markdown 00:26:25 Creating links 00:28:20 Local Graph view 00:29:51 Navigating forward and back 00:30:14 Bonus: Zwan 00:30:20 Standard Markdown links 00:33:26 Outgoing links and backlinks 00:36:17 Global Graph view 00:38:23 Configuring the Graph view 00:39:10 Linking to non-existent notes 00:40:07 Creating notes 00:41:36 Hiding/showing ribbon icons 00:41:51 Home note 00:43:30 Finding duplicate notes 00:44:09 Finding orphan notes 00:44:32 Exploring random notes 00:45:37 Quickly opening or creating notes 00:46:28 Command palette 00:49:43 Tagging notes 00:50:00 Searching for tags 00:50:22 Tags panel (Tag Wrangler plugin) 00:50:45 Renaming tags 00:52:01 Search view 00:53:50 Organizing files 00:54:51 Outline view (Outline plugin) 00:56:09 Obsidian Starter Kit folder structure 00:56:15 The Johnny Decimal system 00:58:33 Obsidian Starter Kit root folders 00:59:01 Categories 01:00:06 The PARA method 01:02:40 Benefits of PARA 01:03:00 The LIFT principle 01:03:48 PARA folders in Obsidian Starter Kit 01:04:18 The meta folder 01:05:26 The Resources folder 01:05:41 Obsidian Starter Kit User Guide 01:06:54 The Areas folder 01:07:13 Meeting notes 01:08:32 Creating tasks with Markdown 01:09:09 People and Contacts 01:11:43 The Zettelkasten method 01:14:46 Zettelkasten principles 01:14:56 Fleeting notes 01:16:54 Literature notes 01:20:39 Permanent notes 01:23:30 More on keeping things simple 01:23:56 Avoid breaking the vault 01:24:55 Moving notes automatically (Auto Note Mover plugin) 01:27:49 Templating and template 01:28:12 Using templates (Templater plugin) 01:29:33 YAML Metadata 01:29:33 Notes metadata 01:30:15 Adding tags through metadata 01:30:42 Note aliases 01:31:53 Tags 01:32:28 Additional YAML properties 01:33:39 Benefits of metadata 01:34:44 Templates 01:37:47 Using templates 01:39:26 Periodic notes plugin and daily note template 01:40:41 Book note template 01:41:28 Benefits of automation 01:41:55 Templates overview 01:42:58 Special tags 01:43:17 Dataview plugin 01:44:57 MoCs 01:45:30 Capturing quotes 01:46:46 More on tagging 01:47:42 Nesting tags 01:48:02 Attachments 01:50:18 Atomic notes 01:52:58 Journaling 01:54:08 Planning ahead 01:55:05 Using fewer tools 01:55:45 Daily notes 01:58:55 Changed notes plugin 01:59:33 Notes vs Time 02:01:25 Reflecting on the past using weekly, monthly and yearly notes 02:03:10 Knowledge extraction 02:03:43 Planning ahead 02:04:43 More on Knowledge extraction 02:05:34 Recommendation for tags 02:06:16 Linking discoveries to time 02:07:59 Meta notes 02:08:48 Top of mind note 02:09:32 Markdown: Reordering lists 02:09:41 Outline plugin 02:10:31 Waiting for note 02:10:42 Routines 02:10:57 Task management 02:12:45 Kanban plugin 02:15:03 Canvas 02:17:54 Excalidraw plugin 02:18:55 Conclusion 02:18:59 More recommendations 02:20:43 Obsidian Starter Kit updates ## Course transcript 00:02 hi and welcome to this course about the obsidian starter kit uh in it I will try to Showcase everything I know about obsidian and the starter kit and the methods behind it and the organization so that you can get started as quickly as possible so this will be a Hands-On 00:19 uh video basically it's a one shot where you will get to see everything uh I have set up within the starter kit uh and I hope that you will find it useful okay so the first step when you want to get started with obsidian is of course to install it so how should you add a note jump to 00:35 proceed you need to go to obsidian MD uh that's the website right here and uh select get obsidian for whatever platform you using in my case I'm using Windows so I'm going to go ahead and download the uh XA for install the installer uh once it's saved you just have to wait a few minutes once it's 00:56 done you can run the installer let it install and once that's done uh obsidian should be available in your system all right now that uh obsidian is installed next step is to download and open the obsidian starter kit itself once you have B about the product you 01:15 should be brought to a page such as this one where you can find the read me file of the project as well as a zip file that contains the Vault that we will open so we will download this file I will save it in a folder here OS course but you can put it anywhere on your computer just click on Save once 01:35 it's done you should have a zip file like this you just have to right click on it and extract it so this is really uh specific based on your operating system in this case it's windows and I just extract the the archive uh once that's completed you should get a new folder as this one so 01:57 you don't need the zip anymore we can delete it um and this folder is actually the volt that we will be using in this case there is a sub folder can just get rid of it doesn't matter as you can see and what you should notice is the presence of a obsidian folder inside you can actually rename this 02:18 folder to anything you you want so let's say that I will call M my Vol and once that's done you are ready to open the vault in obsidan itself to open the vault once you have open obsidian you should see a window like this which is the The Vault opener from here you can create a new volt but 02:39 in this case we want to open a folder as V so you just click on open you now go ahead and find the folder that you have extracted in this case my volt there select folder and then we arrive on this starting screen the first thing when you open the starter kit you will get this 02:58 screen uh that asks you to trust the author of The Vault the reason for that is that we include uh a number of plugins as part of the start kit and since plugins can be dangerous it's best for you to know and to trust uh the sources of those plugins so hopefully you do trust me otherwise you wouldn't 03:16 have B the starter kit so you can click here on trust author and enable plugins if you don't do this the starter kit will not work because many of the systems that I have included uh actually require the presence and uh plugins for plugins to be enabled so let's go ahead and do 03:35 this so the first thing that we will take a look at we can close this uh setting screen first thing we will take a look at is the organization of obsidian itself um this is a little issue that I will fix in the next release of the starter kit but by default you will uh get to see the 03:53 recent files view as you can see here which can be quite confusing because actually it's just showing the the files that were most recently touched uh within the starter kit which is not helpful in the sense that it doesn't give you a sense of the organization that's provided it's just a list of 04:10 files so the first thing that you want to do if you are using this specific version is go to this files view which will show you something uh somewhat more organized uh and more useful as well so um let me first um explain the different features of obsidian uh the different views um and how it works 04:32 basically before we dive into the starter kit uh organization the first thing that you can notice is that you have a toolbar on the left these are uh action buttons that you can select and use to quickly perform certain actions and go to different screens we will'll 04:49 take a look at some of those later on we have the different views as you saw we have the recent files we have the files view that we have just uh seen and that we will use mostly there is a search you that we will also explore at some point and ways to bookmark uh see the 05:05 bookmarks that you have created and uh see different plugins so let me now take a look at the main part of the the screen which is actually the the editor the editor is where you will edit your notes so it's where you will spend most of your time you also have a sidebar 05:23 which can contain various kinds of information and you can control what you want to see on the site using those buttons if I want to see the calendar you can click on this one if you want to see a graph view you can click on that one but we will explore those later on 05:37 as well if you are not interested in seeing the sidebar at some point because you want more real estate to take your notes and focus you can click on this icon to hide to collapse basically the the sideb bar we will keep it open during this explanation so that we can uh see and so 05:57 that I can explain different things uh in the main editor you can see that we have a tab system it's just like a web browser basically uh so you can open different notes at the same time so one thing to note let's say that I will open a read me file which comes along with 06:15 the starter kit so it's one of the default files that I have included uh this is where I explain basically where you can find information about the start kit where you can find the user guide which is an important link that we will take a look at afterwards I will open it 06:31 uh so that we can take a look at afterwards um as I mentioned you can open new tabs so this is an important feature of uh obsidian in this case I will open the read me file again not very useful but you can actually open any file that you want so let's say that 06:48 I want to open a daily notes that I have created and and put inside of the starter kit so you can switch between uh editor views like this but uh an interesting in feature is that you can actually look at uh different nodes side by side to do that you just have to 07:05 select one of the tabs click on it hold drag and drop to the location where you want to put it so you can put it on the right hand side on the left side on the bottom and so once you uh release the mouse button you can actually drop it and it looks like this then or it can 07:25 look like this if you want and at that point we have two notes side by side uh one on top of each other so let me do it like this once you have opened multiple notes as I mentioned you can actually open more than than two you can uh even open 10 if you want or more uh not 07:46 saying that this is the best practice as it will get really uh small at some point but sometimes when you edit related ideas it's interesting to have those side by side so that you can copy and paste code uh text I mean between those different views or or take inspiration let's say that this is an 08:04 article that I am reading from and this is the note these are the notes that I'm taking about this then I can scroll there take some notes and go back Etc one more thing that you can do once you have split view like this is actually uh switch this so that you can resize the different noes the way you 08:25 want the different Windows let's say one more thing that I want to mention about the editor for now is those buttons there on the on the top this is the button that allows you to switch from um the sorry I lost the camera yeah this is the thing I'm recording this all at once so there 08:53 might be some quirks at some time but it doesn't matter too much so this button enables you to switch between the Ed editing View and the view uh this means that you have a source View and a live view so the the meaning of this is that in the editor the the code the text that 09:10 you will write is actually marked down this is a syntax that is the the main one supported by obsidian that enables you to express some things for instance here I have the title of the notes which is actually um prefixed by this symbol and this is a markdown symbol that you 09:30 can use to put a heading if you only use one that then it's a top level heading if I had another one like this with two then this is a second level heading as you can see it's a bit smaller it's a bits of it's a way that you can use to organize your text in your notes so third level 09:54 heading and so on we can go on I think it's six levels uh at most almost right so as you can see this I can see the the when I click on one of the elements the markdown syntax that I mentioned appears but you can see that since I did not click there I do not see 10:19 it the way that this behaves is related to this button that I mentioned currently as you can see I'm in the editing view this is why I am seeing let's say the source code for the note so the actual syntax the markdown text but if I switch to The View mode you can 10:37 see that those uh hashtags disappear and these are not the only ones so here's another example of something that you can do with markdown you can create lists so this is a list uh in case we have buet points we have first you have second you have third Etc again you can see those uh 10:59 this this is the the the markdown Source it's the Live View mode sorry in this case so I can see this but if I switch to the editing mode yeah no I was mistaken this was the the editing mode anyways um in this case you can see that I can select the text but the bullet points are like outc 11:18 coded again this is because we are not seeing the source of the note but the actual uh rendered version of the noes so this mode um The View mode let's say uh I never use it um it might be useful I suppose if you are just uh interested in reading a note and not changing it 11:37 because this mode is a View mode you cannot write if I write things down nothing happens if I switch back to the editing mode then I can edit again and see the the mark down Source I actually spend all my time using this mode because yeah it's not taking tool so for 11:54 me it makes sense to always be editing notes uh this is a concept that I will mention uh again later in the the explanations but um to me um notes are never final so having a note in uh read only uh doesn't make too much sense every time I open a note I consider that I have the 12:15 opportunity to improve it in some way or maybe I want to complete it maybe maybe I want to explain some things more maybe I want to add links to other not add or or modified tags etc etc so that's why I'm always using the the edit mode okay so this was a small explanation about the main UI of 12:37 obsidian there's actually more that I can show you so on this end you can see that we can also collapse the The View that is controlled by those buttons so you can really gain full real State and really have a a focused writing mode which is useful sometimes because you do 12:54 want to um remove uh the distractions from from The View um so that can be useful uh next what we can take a look at is uh those buttons on the bottom left so these are uh different uh buttons that you can use so this first one normally you have used it only once 13:14 it's how you can open a different volt so in obsidian a volt is a database it's really like a folder a space in which you will store uh your whole knowledge base uh the starter kit is one so it contains all of those folders and notes but you can if you want to have different ones so in this case for 13:37 instance I have my main one this is my private Vault uh this is the starter kit the one that I'm showing you right now this is one that I use to develop obsidian plugins etc etc I know that some people like to separate between uh their work and their personal life and 13:54 they maintain the notes that they take in those contexts inside of different obsidian vot it's not my case I personally like to use a single vote for everything uh the reason for that is that I do not need or uh I do not benefit from separating those notes uh I I simply use folders and tags and and I 14:15 have different systems to isolate things that I would consider work related or personal but if you work uh let's say in the financial industry and you have a strong uh security policies you might might not be allowed to um take the notes away from work on your personal 14:34 computer and simply you might not want to U mix them with your private stuff so this is a personal decision uh my own decision is to keep everything together because I find it much simpler and it allows me to create links between uh personal things and work related things 14:51 which is useful in my case uh might not be yours so uh make up your own mind about how you want to organize your your knowledge base as a single obsidian Volt or as multiple volts doesn't doesn't matter too much just be aware that each volt is associated with a specific 15:10 configuration uh specific plugins so if you install a plugin uh inside of the starter kit uh that plugin will not be installed or available in a different obsidian volt this means that you will also need to duplicate the installations and the configurations between your volts uh if 15:28 you are using different ones uh so all the settings are really isolated this can be beneficial this can be uh annoying my case it would be really annoying that's for sure but again yeah it's a the decision a decision that you have to make for yourself uh next up is the settings uh 15:47 menu uh this is where you can configure um the main features of obsidian itself so for instance the editor feature you can configure different things I will not explore all the options I don't know if it makes too much sense uh I think that it's more useful for you to explore 16:04 those on your own and see uh test things out see what you prefer so maybe you prefer to have the editing view which is uh my case this is actually something I should change in the the stter kit um I did not change it because yeah I I believe that everyone should make their 16:21 own decisions again just explore those on your own and see what makes sense for you what is useful what is not uh another that you can configure in addition to the the core features of obsidian so for instance the hot Keys uh the core plugins that obsidian includes 16:38 you can enable and disable those but you can also um install enable and disable Community plugins uh the obsidian starter kit includes a number of plugins as you can see here the list is actually quite long um the thing is that the community includes uh at at this moment 16:58 more than th plugins uh you can install everything if you want just be aware that the more plugins you install the longer it takes for obsidian to start so just be careful about that but there are really a ton of plugins uh many useful ones many that I still don't know about 17:17 but I've tried to explore uh what I could uh I've chosen uh those that I find really really useful and I have included those in the starter kit uh as I will show later on in the user guide that you get along with the starter kit you will find an explanation about all 17:34 the plugins that I've included uh why they are there what they are useful for I will I also explain uh how I have configured those so that you can understand the meaning of uh me including those in the in the start kit um again I will not explore those right now we can take a 17:54 look at that later on for now let just be aware that in the community space uh Community plugins page you can browse install update uh enable disable and configure uh Community plugins so let's say that I am not interested in in this Advanced tables I can disable it uh if I 18:15 want the admonition one I can enable it and and as you can see once you enable or disable a plugin uh it adds an entry inside of this menu below Community plugins and this is where you actually configure those plugins um as I mentioned you can also check for updates and update the plugins 18:36 I will do the check but I will not install the updates right now doesn't make too much sense you can also configure the built-in plugins so for instance uh obsidian has a something called a command pette that I will show to you later on you can customize it and you have this for all the plugins this 18:56 is quite uh heavy uh you might not need to fiddle with this at all uh it might still be useful in the case that you find that something is not uh aligned with what you need or what you want or just want to fiddle with things just one piece of advice don't spend too much 19:14 time customizing things uh making things too complicated if you're really getting started as I suppose you are whether you are new to these kinds of tools are um are already used to other no taking tools just uh start from the idea that you should keep things as simple as 19:33 possible this is something that I always strive for because I've realized that the more time you spend uh making things perfect in your note taking tool the less time you spend actually taking notes and benefiting from uh this activity so yeah that's my first advice 19:50 around not taking and and tools uh for not taking just keep things simple and add complexity as you need so once you realize that that uh there's something missing uh you you cannot be uh as efficient as you would like to be uh then in those cases you can uh actually 20:07 go further and try to improve your system but don't do it too early on and do don't do not spend too much time on it it doesn't make sense it's not useful and there are many reasons for that beyond the fact that it will uh keep you from uh actually taking notes and 20:22 improving your knowledge base it will also make things more complicated uh more difficult to maintain uh so let's say that you install 20 uh Community plugins then you might realize that uh in 6 months um half of those plugins are not maintained anymore they are not 20:39 compatible with the latest versions of obsidian and so this will uh cause issues and trouble uh it might break some of your notes and so it's really just a source of trouble and and and procrastination in a sense so this is uh what I wanted to say about the settings and uh how how 20:58 to open volts and and these uh you also have the help of obsidian this can be useful if you want to explore um the different features of obsidian more in detail so on the official site you will find uh detailed explanations I can show show this to you detailed explanations 21:15 about the the user interface how you can drag and drop about the windows just like I mentioned using the tabs how you can use files and folders what's what is compatible or not or you can edit at tags whatever it's St in there that's quite nice um you can explore that on your 21:33 own for now what I will do is start uh diving a bit more inside of uh the note taking aspect because I think that's why you are here uh we will explore the structure of the starter kit a bit later but now let's just focus on note taking so as I mentioned um obsidian uses markdown so 21:54 markdown is uh a free uh text editing format uh that is being used by many tools on the internet right now so if you use GitHub for instance if you a software developer then uh when you edit files you can edit using markdown many other tools in the not thinking space 22:12 are also compatible and it's actually something that is useful to learn just because of this uh once you learn markdown ones uh then you can use it in various situations I personally take all my notes using markdown and actually write uh my book using Maron as well 22:29 because I think that it's it's a syntax that is powerful enough to express uh many styles and simple enough to avoid the complexities that you can get with tools such as a word processor like Microsoft Office of or Libra office or stuff like that uh the thing is that you 22:48 really want to um keep things as simple as possible if you want to focus on ideas and and the notes that you are taking and this is not something that you can do if the syntax is too complex or if you spend too much time to edit the Styles and stuff like that you don't 23:03 want to to to spend your time adding colors putting a background adding icons and stuff like that it's really all about focusing on the ideas so let's take a look at the mown syntax uh I mentioned the headings this is the first thing that you should be aware of another thing that I have 23:23 mentioned are lists which are simple enough you can also have numbered lists so if you put one dot space then you can see that obsidian uh noticed it first item here I press enter second item as you can see the list uh is automatically incremented by um by obsidian it has really strong support 23:46 for Mar so you have sorry sorry about that let's just go back we'll explain this to you later uh you have unordered list you have ordered list you have have um also the possibility to make text uh italic so just like this you put an underscore before and after you can put text in 24:10 bold to do this you have to use two actually like this if you use a single one it's actually another way to to put text in iix so I have BS uh and that's actually most of the stuff that I care about with more the rest is all details and it's not very useful uh one thing that you might find 24:37 useful is um the code syntax so you have to use back ticks uh it's actually a key that is not that easy to find on your keyboard uh I actually have to use a shortcut to do it um you can um confuse it with uh single quotes this is not the same thing so this will do nothing these are just two simple 24:59 uh quotes single quotes sorry but the btic uh is btic is a special character and the usefulness of this is that you can write code inside of that so this is useful for instance if you say uh if you're a programmer and want to include some code within your uh notes cons 2 25:21 equals one two three so this is recognized and um displayed differently in obsidian if I go back to the View mode you can see that it there is a a slight background around that box uh this is one way to add code uh code is verbal in text meaning that whatever you paste inside of it uh will be kept as 25:42 this so let's say that I write mark down within those back ticks this will not be interpreted by obsidian as uh a mark down um sorry as an an ordered list in this case I go back to the view you can see that it remained just the way I wrote it down so it's a way to keep text just as is you can do 26:05 the same thing with multiple lines you have to use three btics in that case and you just write whatever you want these are the main things that I want to say about markdown uh actually no I'm forgetting one of the most important pieces of uh note taking tools which is 26:30 that you can create links and it's actually where most of the value lies sorry about forgetting that one so let's say that I have uh this note so this is a daily note dated from June uh whatever and let's say that I want to re uh make a I create a link towards this 26:48 read me note that sits elsewhere in my knowledge base one way I can do this is using this syntax so it's two square brackets and as you can see once I typed the second one like this I get this window uh to appear this window is uh the autocomplete and it finds the files 27:10 in my uh knowledge base as you can see the read me file is there so I I could just click on it but most of the time what you want to do if you know the name of the noes you want to create a link to is just type out the First characters of the name as I can see now the list has 27:27 been filtered and I can really see the read me on top if I click on it now it creates the link so this is a link in my notes if I go back to the View mode you can see it appears the same way and interestingly that's one useful feature of The View mode you can see that by uh 27:44 going over it I can actually see the contents of that not in some cases this might be useful I do not need it but you might and I do not get the same thing in the editing mode uh interestingly if you click on the link nothing happens but if you hold the control key on your 28:01 keyboard and press uh the left Mouse button you will get to that note and as you can see it just opened a new um tab for it so now I have created a link between this note and that note on this side I cannot see it right away on this side I do have the link so now I want to show 28:22 you um an important element of the UI of obsidian as I mentioned earlier here on the side you have different views for now I'm looking at the calendar view but if I click on this button the graph view I will see uh a local graph uh what what this is um is um a graph that shows the 28:42 relationships between this notes this note and other notes as you can see this is my note the one that I'm currently looking at and this is the read me that I have just created a link to if I remove this link from here and save you can see that that this link has disappeared from the graph the graph 29:00 view is just uh really useful because it's a way to quickly explore the relationships between ideas and this is also uh one of the reasons why creating links is useful in your knowledge base uh that's actually a big uh value out of these kinds of tools over just creating 29:19 separate Word documents because here you are uh creating what is called a Knowledge Graph you are creating links between different things uh you can do this with uh Word documents or documents in Google Drive or things like that but it's never going to be uh as powerful as what we are uh using 29:40 here so using this graph view I can quickly see the links but I can also click on them so if I click on a readme you can see that it just open a read mey uh it's also the opportunity for me to show you one more feature of this uh editor you have those buttons on top 29:57 this allow you to navigate uh in the history of a specific tab in this tab I was on the um daily note by clicking there I just went back to it and I can go back and forward so this is one another way to navigate between uh the notes it's maybe the opportunity to present my little dogs one I will have 30:19 to take care of him afterwards okay so I have shown you one way to create a link this is not the only one this syntax is uh really specific to uh obsidian it might be supported by other not taking tools but it's just one that U is used with an obsidian a more standard way of creating links that I'm 30:42 actually mostly using for external links I will explain in a second uh is using this syntax so instead of two uh square brackets you have a single one and then you have parenthesis so within the square brackets you will have read me is here this is the text of the link and uh inside of 31:03 the the parenthesis you can put a link in this case I'm going to put a link to the user guide of the stter kit user guide is here and I have created a link as usual you can see that if I click away I cannot see the source if I click on the line like this I can see the 31:25 source that's behind it that's why I really like this um editing view because I get the best of both words so apart from the previews that I do not get I do get the opportunity to see the render text looking nice the ability to edit and also the ability to see the source 31:43 behind uh the view this is uh useful if I click on this link this is an external link you can see it because of this icon right there it will open uh that page within my uh web browser right there so as I mentioned when I'm creating links between notes uh what I do is I 32:04 use this syntax so internally within my obsidian volt I use this syntax when I want to point to a link that sits outside so on the internet for instance I use this syntax uh the benefit of this one is that you can customize the the title but there's actually also a 32:23 possibility to do this uh using those kinds of links you have to put uh type symbol and then you can put the here and as you can see I I reach the same result except that this is uh an obsidian specific link there's actually not much of a difference you can also use this syntax if if you 32:51 prefer this is just another of preference you can say me here this and in this case you would add a link to the read me file again you can see that we get the nice Auto completion all right so now you are able to uh edit notes you are able to um just create links between your notes you know 33:16 a bit about markdown I think that this is already a really good starting point for your not taking Journey with obsidian but I want to go a bit further and explain some more things to you so one thing that you can see uh when you go to the read is the um the the outgoing and incoming links so one way 33:37 to see the links again is to use this uh local graph but there's actually more that you can do so on the top here you have the back links and the outgoing links so the outgoing links is going to show you a list of um links that are created within this node so in this case you can see 33:58 that this is one existing link uh that is an notgoing link so it's a link that goes outside of this node towards another note and this is this one as you can see it it is indeed an external link but you can also see that there are uh what is called unlined mentions so for 34:16 instance the word me in this case is actually uh the name of a note that exists somewhere in the obsidian Vault uh this is recognized by uh obsidian and it proposes you to create the link so it doesn't mean that you have to or that you need to or that it makes sense to do 34:37 it but this gives you the opportunity to discover um opportunities to create links between your notes but this is a useful tool if you want to strengthen the knowledge base let's say that in this case it does make sense uh so I will click on it and as you can see it 34:53 just changed the note and added this link and from now the me that was previously just texted within my notes like this has become an actual link uh within my notes again uh using this view I can click on the element and it will bring me to the note in question so 35:12 these are the outgoing links um but you also have the back links the back links is a useful tool that you do not find in uh many um classical I would say Wiki style note taking to tools uh you usually get uh links and ways to create links between pages and notes but you do not get the 35:34 opportunity to see what other page or note is pointing to the current one this is what this view does so these are linked mentions so here I'm looking at the readme and if I look at the um the back links for read me you can see that there is one uh on this page and indeed this 35:55 is the one that I have created with you and this is a second one this was the second example uh and again there's another one this one I forgot about but apparently in that note uh there was also a link to the read me uh yeah this is actually something that I should 36:11 explain later on okay so we have seen the forward links the back links uh the local graph view uh maybe now it's time for me to show you some of the tools that you have right there on the left so this is the local graph view but you should be aware that there is also 36:27 something called the the graph view the the graph view the main one because this one looks like the one that we saw previously uh ex except that it's actually showing you a graph of all the nodes that are part of the Vault uh this is somewhat useful it really depends on how you decide to use 36:49 it I personally like to use it as a way to uh discover nodes that have been uh abandoned uh inside of the inside of my knowledge base so for instance this one here Sena note that is called Sena is one that is uh really all alone in the graph it might not be an issue but maybe 37:10 it uh could highlight the fact that you have missed opportunities to create links between this one and other ones so this is one of the ways that I use the graph view that I find really useful another one is simply to explore my notes so sometimes I will just take uh a 37:26 look at these and we think oh yeah right Rene the C it's uh someone that I find interesting what did I write about him oh yeah this was interesting but I did not uh write too much things there maybe I should take some time to do research and and maybe I do have opportunities to 37:44 create small links so I can uh go there and and find my bike links view oh no there are linked mentions already uh no un link mentions no opportunities in this case but is a philosopher actually philosophy interest is interesting and uh this is something that I want to explore more so I can go 38:05 ahead and edit my notes so just the like this grav view can be useful as a way to explore just using Serendipity to explore your notes and uh find Opportunities to create links opportunities to explore ideas that you have maybe abandoned or just touch the surface off um yeah basically that's it 38:27 uh on the right hand side of this graph view you have uh what is called filters this is a way to just uh configure uh and change the the way you see the graph so in this case I will see the tags that are being used I can see that I have the contact tag with two nodes that's 38:46 interesting I only have one author mentioned I have many meta notes some routines so this is one uh way that you can customize you can see the attachment if you have attached files this is something that I will show you later you can show um only the existing notes or 39:05 also those that don't exist and this is something that I need to explain to you right away let's go back to to my M notes so I mentioned that you can create links uh and as we saw we can create links to notes that already exist but actually you can also create a a link to 39:24 something that does not exist I do not exist this is a link to a note that is not there yet if I take a look at my My Graph and let's try to find this um where is it yeah let's not try to find it this is a downside of the graph view It's Quickly complicated to find what you 39:51 want in there it's just too too heavy uh it's more of a useful tool for exploratory uh uh Discovery learning uh and finding offer this is something useful but let's go back to to this idea of having links to non-existing noes so this is a link that points to a notes 40:10 that is not there yet in my file system it do it simply does not exist but if I control click on it I will uh get to create it so now that I have done this I have opened the tab and you can see that here the that noes that did not exist before was just created so this is one way to create new 40:32 nodes this is actually my preferred way in the sense that I don't have to fiddle with the UI to find oh yeah where is the the create button again oh yeah it's this one new note okay I have created new note oh it doesn't have a name I need to right click then and rename it 40:50 should be called this blah and and that's it and now I can start taking notes no this is not practical what I prefer is really using this syntax because now I can create what I need when I need to much more useful and this is done and I can start writing this is much more 41:15 efficient so yeah we have created uh links we have seen the graph view now maybe it's time for me to show you a bit more about the um the different um options and buttons that you have there I will not explain them all because doesn't uh make too much sense it's not 41:35 going to be relevant or useful one thing to know is that if you have too many or you realize that yeah this is something I never use I do not need it you can right click on that toolbar and you can can show and hide uh what you don't need so this is useful uh one that I want to 41:53 show is this button the open homage the homepage is um a specific note as you can see it's part of the uh stter kits default structure it's right there uh but instead of having to open this folder knowing where it is and uh clicking on it and opening it there is a 42:13 practical shortcut which is using this button there the homepage is uh special notes uh this is one of the rare ones that makes sense to be used uh with the uh View mode rather in the uh editing mode why because it includes a number of uh information and queries that needs to 42:34 be rendered so in this case you can see that the statistics part shows you information useful information if I go to the editing mode and I take a look at that uh I actually also see it so this is something new it was not possible before so yeah this is One Less Reason 42:50 but in this case you can see that I do not see the information for the MOX section so this is not perfect compared to this other side where uh if there was uh a mock inside of my knowledge base which is something I will show you later then I would see those right there all 43:08 right so let's go back to here I'm going to um show you one more thing so this was the homage uh as you will see later on the homepage is um a special note that I have included that uh includes a number of tools that you can find useful for different purposes so this is just 43:27 for fun you can see some stats about your uh your your your Vault you can find also utilities such as this section in which you will find duplicate nodes so you have if you have two nodes that have the same name within your obsidian Vault then it might mean that you have an issue in the sense 43:47 that you will um you you you might create links to uh things that you think are something but are actually something else so using this duplicate notes as you can see now I have two read me notes in my in my Vault I can see where they are located so this one is at the root this one is 44:06 within the 10 meta folder this is a useful tool uh you have the often notes um section which you can use to find notes that are not linked to anything uh things that you have uh modified uh the longest time ago uh the quotes that you have had it uh literature knowledge in box this is 44:30 these are ideas that we explain in a JY uh some random notes normally you should see a list of notes taken at random within the The Vault notes that have task that have not been completed stuff that you have modified recently etc etc so this is just uh actually a note with 44:48 some queries uh whose goal is to try and help you uh do useful things with with your Vault easily uh so I do not use it all that often but sometimes when I want to do cleanup or want to just uh explore things at random I use this uh another way to see things at random is using 45:09 this um open random node button so it's a dice if you click on it you will get to see just one random note that is part of your Oban volt it's useful I find it useful for sometimes when I search for quotes within my vault uh or or search for a note that I would 45:29 want to edit when it's uh I mean say fun mode the graph view we have seen a bit earlier we have the quick switcher uh so this is one way to show it but I will show you a different one the quick switcher is a tool that you can use to quickly find open or create a new note 45:50 so if I want to open this not I can click on it but I do not want to go there each time so you can actually use control o and it will uh control or command o depending on the operating system that you are using and as you can see it's actually super fast to find an open Notes so 46:11 morning routine I can go to read me but I can also create this is a new note again this is one easy way to create an open you notes uh but there is actually a second thing that we can use which is called the comment pallet which you can find here I will put it right there on top you can 46:33 see you can or also drag and drop um those the command pallette is different the command pallette is not acting on nodes it's uh allow it allows you to find and execute commands so the core uh of obsidian includes a number of commands that you can use so for example the split right that we have done 46:53 earlier we can use it using this uh uh command pette uh yeah to open quickly so I as I showed you can click there but you can also hit uh command or control p uh P for command obviously uh and you can do everything that can be done or most of the things that can be done within obsidian using 47:21 this let's say that I want to open link under cursor or new T so let's say I have link and I hit yeah like this open link and cursor to the right bam it just did so it's just one useful way the thing is that to use this efficiently you have to uh know those commands this is not something 47:48 that I can explain it will just take you a while to discover what you care about what you do often but my recommendation is to try to take note of the thing yeah indeed take note to take note of the things that you do often and that you spend too much time doing so if you 48:05 realize that you are uh constantly right clicking on things and finding oh I need to do this one there or you are finding a button and clicking on it then consider that you can use this command pet to do what you want uh more easily uh this is uh nice because for example 48:24 homepage that I mentioned it's right there uh and the thing is that the the homepage there is actually um related to a plugin it's the a command that has been added by um the homepage plugin I think so if I look at my uh Community plugins I should find there home yeah 48:45 homepage this is a plugin that I have included in the starter kit um so each plugin adds um Behavior to obsidian but it can also add uh menu icons it can add commands and the thing that you get with the starter kit is not only uh the contents and the structure but uh as I 49:09 try to to convey on the on the sales page it's also a set of plugins and this behavior and commands that you can use uh for instance if you want to use another Vault you can use this command it's part of obsidian but if you want to just open a random notes and you can use 49:27 this command in instead of the button right there and this is again added by um an obsidian plugin all right um this is uh quite useful and important now I want to come back to something I have forgotten to mention uh in the markon syntax that is actually also really 49:46 really important it's the possibility to add tags to your notes so the tags are preceded by the ashtag symbol and then you can write anything you want so B if I add this French word for thing um once I have created a tag you can see that it appears like this or there's a a little 50:08 thing over it and I can click on it if I click on a tag what happens it's that it's going to the search View and it's trying to find all the nodes that I have that contain that that specific tag I will come back to the search you in a minute but now let's let's focus on tags 50:26 uh as we have views for outgoing and incoming links there is also a view for the Texs so here I can see the lists the full list actually of Texs that are present inside of my complete knowledge base uh this is actually something that is provided also by a plugin it's there 50:46 by default with obsidian but the plugin that I have uh included in the stter it allows you to quickly rename tags so let's say that this ble tag is actually uh misspelled shouldn't be B it should be thingy I can go there rename and you can see that this note has been modified and 51:07 actually if this same tag was used in other nodes then it would have been change everywhere uh the usefulness of tags is that it adds one more way to find notes inside of your knowledge base so first you have this TX view which is useful and you can use to find quotes for instance or weekly notes or 51:26 philosophers or whatever uh tags you have used in your knowledge base you can use to locate and find uh related notes using the search view or using this TX view but it's actually just metadata that you're are adding to to your notes uh speaking of metadata one more thing I 51:45 want to explain later is this uh metadata there that you do not actually see inside of this View at least for now it's it's going to be visible in the US user interface with the newer versions of obsidian but for now it's it's not there yet uh let let's now Focus for a 52:03 minute on the search view so uh as you can see here uh the r mey can be found like this there I found some results but I do find actually all the nodes that contain the text read me as well so uh let's say that this one is this is one this is my daily note and it contains indeed the reading text 52:26 uh this is um not get sensitive but you can make it so so if I really find where it's written like this and not with lower case then I can enable that there are some settings that you can use you can collapse the results and what not uh you can explore that on your own it's 52:42 not really relevant or useful one thing that you saw and that I mentioned earlier is that you can uh also use specific syntax within there to find nodes that have specific tax I do believe that there are other ways to uh use this uh right there actually so you can find U tags you can find uh files so 53:05 if you want to find a file then you would use file read me and then in this case you will not find notes that contain R me but actually only files that contain R me this is one more useful pattern you have the pass so you can find notes that are located for instance in the project folder and you 53:25 can find them easily uh it's actually not something that I use all that often most of the time when I need to find something I would just use the quick uh switcher there uh to really find what I need it it's what's most efficient to me uh it works fine I do use a search when 53:44 I really want to search for specific word across my whole knowledge base all right so we have seen search we have seen uh the files list here you can explore the contents of your knowledge base you can organize also the the files so uh the philosopher note that is right 54:02 there I can right click I can delete it I can rename it I can copy it I can create a bookmark if I do so then uh F that uh if I go there I will find the bookmark that I have created which I can remove this might be a bit fast but I just want to showcase some features you 54:25 can click drag and drop to move the notes within your folders for example let's say that this is aive now it can go away all right uh I moved it I shouldn't have I want to put it back at the root I just put it on the name of the Vault etc etc you can do the same with folders so you can re reorganize 54:48 your knowledge base just the way you want uh so yeah that's basically it uh I've shown you uh many useful tools um just one more here that can be useful sometimes it's the U um the outline structure so this can be useful if you have long a long notes that you are uh that you want to make sure you are 55:11 structuring correctly and it can also be used as a way to navigate within long notes so let's say I want to go to third uh level it might be 10 pages down I would have got them right there uh in a JY that's useful uh I do not use that all that often and the reason why I 55:30 don't is that I prefer to have really short notes most of the time uh and I will explain why later all right um I think that it's no time to uh take a deeper look at the folder structure that is uh included in the starter kit there's much more to say about the the features of obsidian and 55:52 the features of all the plugins I will mention some of the the plugins and some of the features as we move forward with the explanations but for now I will focus on the the starter kit and the the folder structure because it's actually quite Central to um what you will be doing within 56:09 obsidian all right so uh the first thing to notice is that there are a number of folders with specific names and there uh specific purposes uh there is a specific numbering system so the folder structure and the numbering system is based on what is called The Journey Decimal 56:28 System it's something that I have written about on my blog I have also mentioned actually in the um the stter kit user guide so the journey Decimal System just to explain to you uh that in a JY is a way to organize information so it's not only made for obsidian or 56:48 specific tools it works in most tools where you can create folders and organize information uh and so it's actually something that I use uh not only in the starter kit but actually on my file system on my Google Drive uh to organize my projects uh to organize the 57:06 files on my uh my personal Nas uh it's it's a way that I find really useful to organize information efficiently and the way it works is that you just uh have uh two digit codes uh for areas areas are the main uh let's say zones in which you will organize information and the idea of the system 57:29 is that you can have 10 areas at most within each area you can divide the content in 10 categories at most which means that at most you will have 100 folders in which you can organize information this is more than enough for most cases and actually if you need more 57:48 than that then you should ask yourself questions because it probably means that you are creating uh a structure that is way too complex so at the first level for the areas you use two digit codes and you start at 10 so you will go 10 20 303 uh 30 4 40 Etc and within categories it's also a 2 git 58:09 code and you start at plus one so if you are in the area that is numbered 10 then a category within that area will be uh numbered 11 and if you have a second one it will be 12 etc etc etc and and there are some details about the numbering system behind but as you 58:28 can see I actually took the example of the starter kit let me go back to it so just to show this to you more in detail uh I will go in in detail for those later but let me just focus on the structure for now you can see that the uh obsidian starter kit is quite well 58:47 organized so we have uh different areas we have meta we have projects areas that I will go back to this is different concept the journal resources and archives So This Is 2020 etc etc within meta we have different categories and you can see that we have only a few I try to uh keep that to a 59:08 minimum to organize information further so the idea of this organization system is that all of this is meta but these are uh personal uh things uh within meta we have the routines category Etc so this is our organized same thing with my projects I could go further and have 21 59:30 project a 22 Project B and this would allow me to uh organize all the information for projects uh in a a structured way uh areas we have different areas and it's actually one of the bigger ones we have seven categories within there we have the journal we have few categories as you can see at the top 59:53 level we have different areas and categories the Jin IND decimal system is the first system that I am using but there are actually two systems that I'm combining to organized information in the starter kit uh the second one is called para it's also something that I 60:11 have written about on my blog uh it's a method for organizing information that was created by um Thiago Forte uh which is well known in the productivity and not taking space is actually the author of the building a second brain book uh and actually the Pate book that just came 60:31 out um but the the method can be explained quite simply uh the way it works is that you organize all your information in four main buckets you have the projects the areas the resources and the archives if you pay attention to the the organization start kit you will have noticed that those 60:50 folders exist in the St kit uh the they are just number numbered according to the uh Johnny Decimal System so you could think that uh the organ the main organization system of the starter kit is the par system so organizing information in projects areas resources 61:08 and archives but the numbering system is the one offered by uh the journey Decimal System uh so let's focus a bit more on par and what it means projects are uh things that you are uh currently working on so this can be uh a work project uh personal projects Etc um the areas are things that you are 61:35 either responsible for or interested in so let's say that you are interested in not taking you could have an area for not taking if you are interested in software development it infrastructure or whatever you can have different areas for those things if you have an ongoing 61:52 project obviously you would uh put it right there if you have resources so resources should be taken broadly these can be uh attachments so files that you include in your obsidian Vault this could be um images that you include this could be scripts this could be template 62:12 this could be whatever so things that you uh use or uh refer to at some point that you need and you have the archives for everything that does not belong there anymore so once you have you are done with a project check and it moves to your the archives if you don't need 62:27 some of the attachments that you had previously either you delete them or you put them in in the archive and as you can see it's quite a simple system it's just four folders that you can again subdivide uh in different things uh the the benefits of the the par system is 62:44 that it's really simple as you saw there are four main ideas that you have to follow it's quite flexible because you can organize the information within those four main uh buckets uh any way you want and you can really uh quickly locate things so it's another principle 63:02 that I find useful and relevant that I try to um apply in the in the starter kit it's the the IDE of the the lift principle uh and the lift principle uh is really uh the idea that you should easily be able to locate information you should easily be able to identify so 63:20 recognize information you should use a structure that is as flat as possible meaning that you do not want to have a 10 uh 10 folder deep structure uh to find a locate information because this will be unmaintainable unmanageable and will drive you crazy and try to straight 63:39 dry in the sense that you do not want to have duplicate uh all around now we can dive into uh the contents so we have at the top level uh the four main folders of par so we have Pro project this I have explained already so if you have a project you can either have a simple note or you can create a 64:03 folder no for instance this is one of the project that I'm working on right now and if you do that then the benefit is that you get to um you get to organize all the information about that project uh inside of that note uh The Meta folder is for everything that is uh 64:23 Meta Meta in the sense that it's either um configuration wise or information wise tangent tangental tangential sorry to the the the knowledge base so for instance uh the the personal folder is something uh in which I uh keep track of my short and long-term goals um things about me my health my 64:48 career what I have on on the top of my mind at the moment but basically uh you can find also some routines also maintenance notes so how to find duplicates find orphans um tasks so this uh can be used as a to-do system anyways these are not really notes in the the 65:09 the purest sense uh what I mean by this is that I do not consider that I would want to create many links from other notes in my knowledge base to notes in the metaspace that's the main thing behind this folder then we have um the resources that I mentioned so in this 65:31 case it's organized for attachments so if I include images in My Vault I will organize and put them there excal R is if I want to create drawings um the the idea of uh incremental and uh iterative not taking the zle casting method that will explore uh maps of content etc etc 65:53 using the US guide you will be able to read at East the information really depends on how you prefer to to consume it so there's a ton of information about the theory um I've explained the the design principle that I've used and this is something that I've mostly already 66:11 mentioned the folder structure is fully documented there so what I'm am going to explain right now is is actually detailed uh right here so you have a reference point same for The Meta folder uh I I told you but there is also uh a list a full list of the plugins that I 66:28 have included in the vault along with explanations why they are useful I also have included a number of how to guides all right so uh different things that you can find there uh a number of uh tips that you can use um frequently asked questions Etc so this is the user 66:49 guide we can forget about it for now and let's go back to our what we were doing so we have the uh areas uh inside of the areas which is actually where most of your knowledge base will lie uh you will find different types of notes so we have fleeting notes literature notes 67:07 permanent notes we have maps of contents we have contacts people and meeting notes I will start with meeting notes because this is the easiest uh many people don't take notes during meetings I think that they are missing out and they they fail to share information uh and capture information 67:27 and decisions and actions and so inside of this data kit I have included a space where you can take notes for your meetings so if you do have meetings you can create notes inside of here and you can take note of the participants the agenda the minutes the decisions the 67:44 actions Etc uh the the structure is actually something that uh you do not have to type all uh yourself so let's say that I am just starting this obsidian intro meeting uh I will do this fast and I will explain this later but just so that you get an idea I want a meeting I have a meeting this is the 68:05 participant there's only me today and you I don't know who you are but you are here with me today it's quite nice we are going to discuss about obsidan we are going to discuss about pm and that's about it uh the minutes I would capture what was interesting I can capture some decisions that were taken 68:30 and I can take note of actions which brings me to one more Point called the obsidian markdown syntax it's the Syntax for tasks so to create a task you just open the square brackets put a space and put a space afterwards doesn't work because there has to be follow list that's wait how you do it 68:56 so point you open the square brackets you put the space you put one more space and you write things down all right uh let me go back to the structure so we mentioned the meeting notes we have notes about people so uh in companies people like to do uh what is called customer relationship 69:19 management uh I personally like to do quite something quite similar uh but separated in two different concepts one is uh contacts so contacts are uh people that I know uh people that I've met people that I care about uh it might be a friend it might be family it might be a business partner 69:41 a business contact future client a prospect uh I will take notes any kinds of notes so for instance personal information yeah maybe they had the baby on this date maybe this is the date of their birthday uh I've met them this last time etc etc uh one uh useful uh 70:02 thing or point about uh creating contact notes is that for instance within the meeting notes you can create links to uh a person a contact castian so contact for people you know and people for people you don't know but find interesting in some way so for instance here I have created an 70:26 example note for Ren deart which was a French philosopher mathematician and scientist uh I find this useful for different things for first I can capture what inspires me uh so if I find uh someone that is interesting I can take notes about him I can capture the things 70:46 that I do find interesting so my goal is not to create a copy of uh Wikipedia But to capture things that I do find useful for myself uh useful or relevant or interesting this is really up to you but also this creates opportunities this is also true for contacts but it creates opportunities to 71:08 create links and as I mentioned uh within a uh personal knowledge base and actually in all knowledge bases links are really uh key because they they add a ton of value they they allow you to explore to navigate to discover to strengthen to to complete to extend expand there are so many benefits to 71:30 creating links that I I I just canot over State how important it is and so creating uh notes about people will allow you to um capture uh information about people uh but also to create links now I will focus on these three these are actually the three most important 71:49 folders within the obsidian starter kit why because this is really where you will store most of your knowledge of course you can have information about projects and related notes and attachments and a personal Journal which is as important maybe even more depend on on your own personal goals but uh 72:11 knowledge wise this is where you should find most of the knowledge that you have uh captured within your obsidian Vault uh it's organized in three folders and these are based on what is called the zettle Caston method uh so the zettle Caston method is quite popular in the um 72:31 the knowledge uh management space because um it's it was created by a a sociologist who has written many books and was able to organize an incredible amount of information using the system that he has created he was doing it on uh little cards right there uh like 72:53 those uh organized in a slip box and he basically created uh an ancient version of what I would call uh a Wiki system so each note add a unique identifier a number or something and he created uh the text and created links between notes together also he U identified different um types of 73:20 notes and those are uh what in rests me uh right now what I want to explain uh to isolate uh content that he uh created himself and content that he captured because he find it uh he found it sorry interesting useful relevant uh inspiring Etc so so this uh separation of uh 73:44 information is useful it might be not be the case for you it really depends on on what you do with what you add to your knowledge base uh if you are like me and and publish content then it's really important when I when I publish an article I do not want to steal um to to steal what was created by 74:05 others I don't want to have legal issues uh and it's just by principle it does not interest me to publish something from someone else as if it was uh written by myself I do not want that to that's why I find the Z cast uh method interesting and it's actually two things 74:23 the Caston uh is actually a um a method that you can use to take notes and it's also a system in the sense that uh we will organize the different types of nodes according to the zcast uh system and we will use the Z cast method to take our notes so the principles are quite simple 74:50 you have what is called an inbox uh inside of the inbox you put what is called fleeting notes fleeting notes are notes that you just uh have written quickly because you don't have much time uh let's say that I want to write some stuff about software software B I like uh 75:11 infrastructure I like uh it security I like uh service management I like software development I like uh prect whatever I will complete this note later on I do not have time to finish it right now it's over I'm gone let's see that later this is an inbox it's a temporary 75:38 space uh ideally you should try to uh clean it from time to time so maybe later on you will come back to this and say n don't need this it was not relevant or no I need to complete this right away there is also a soft solution architecture I need to speak about to 75:55 write about uh and I need to complete this section because this is interesting and I want to explore this concept maybe as a separate note because it's something useful and you might either delete those notes or you might complete them when you complete them and you 76:10 consider that you have like V1 of a note whatever that means you should then move that note to another space so if it's something that you have created yourself it goes to the power notes if it's something that you have taken from elsewhere let's say that this is something that I just found on the 76:31 internet or let just say uh not even sure how that's written uh or dual leg set legs uh this is interesting this is not from myself I did not uh create this uh I will just um move it to the uh literature notes literature in this case means things that others have created so few examples 77:02 of literature notes you can uh capture a quote for instance a quote that someone else has created like conquer yourself rather than the world than the world so one example is a quote another is an expression like uh this one it's not a quote it's an expression anyways uh 77:24 you have uh booknotes so if you are reading a book and you are just capturing Atomic habits for instance by James clear and you're capturing information from there then in that case if you take uh really uh verm quotes from the book and you just copy paste sentences I would do this as part of a 77:46 literator note actually I always take my book notes as part of literat notes because I consider that most of the the things I capture is not my own uh thinking and writing even if I write it down within using my own words but it really depends sometimes it does make sense to um um to to to capture 78:07 booknotes differently all right so uh booknotes is one thing and content as you can see it's a single folder in which you can put all the rest all the rest meaning uh something about uh bb bb so building a brand these are ideas and framework and methods described proposed and told by again 78:47 this this was quite fast I know uh it's on purpose it's because I wanted to explain something so in this case I have created uh what I consider to be uh a literature notes so these will be not notes that I capture uh for instance from a Blog article by Thiago Forte about the building a s brain method 79:08 these are not my own words I will just capture uh maybe I will copy paste stuff from the internet like this and uh this will be stuff that I do not own uh in that case I will keep those under literature notes again if I don't have much time I can also uh put things 79:26 inside of the liter literature inbox it's just an idea I don't use it all that often but it can be relevant or useful but in this case this is linked to another note Cho Forte which is a person which is located in my uh people folder there and now if I create another note uh for instance about the th 79:49 method I just wanted to highlight this because I think that it's a it's relevant it's a little to note this is something that I did not explain already but again it's created by all right so what I have done here is I have created a literature note as you can see there's something more there 80:12 that you did not see before I will come back to this but for now let's just focus on the ideas so if we Zoom back a bit we have fitting notes temporary stuff not complete um maybe it will be deleted or completed and moved to another section we have literature notes 80:30 stuff that is coming from the outside it's not from you it's not yours it's just content that you find interesting useful relevant Etc and then you have permanent notes permanent notes this is where you uh store your own Creations so these are the notes that you take 80:49 yourself that you create yourself it's your thoughts your ideas your projects or maybe not your projects maybe your future projects articles that you write books that you write if you do write books or articles the quotes that you have uh created uh willingly or uh by 81:09 mistake sometimes it happens and it can be fun uh for instance this one I can think one I can I think once therefore I think twice and then gets me thinking so might not be complete yet and again you have uh in the same way you have a Content folder within the literature notes you have a Content 81:29 folder within the permanent notes again coming back to what I said at the beginning about the folder structure the goal is to keep things as simple as possible and as light as possible I could create there uh a folder called uh personal Knowledge Management because I 81:47 write about this I could create a folder productivity because I have talked about this I could create within PKM a folder called processes I could create a folder called I don't even know uh whatever but it doesn't make sense why doesn't it make sense because it will get too complicated 82:08 unmaintainable and and most importantly once you put a notes inside of a folder it cannot be elsewhere and and it can be an issue because if I have uh something about productivity I have something about personal development I have something about health the thing is that maybe one of 82:30 the notes I'm going to create will make sense to be located in two different folders but then what do I do do I create a duplicate do I create link do I uh you know you cannot make the good choice in that case and and the solution to this is to actually as I said 82:50 multiple times already uh the solution to this is to keep things simple I do not need to have subfolders there I just need to have content content is all I need everything will be in there and it's simple it's simple to find it's simple to organize it's difficult to 83:09 misuse it's difficult to misor content and it's also difficult to create duplicates because apart from creating one there and one there uh there's not many ways in which I can create duplicate noes and create myself issues so this is the main reason for for this Simplicity we do not want to add 83:29 complexity to the F folder structure this is already actually quite complex and and one recommendation that I would have is if you are not writing books then get rid of this if you are not writing articles then get rid of this if you don't want to Capt your own quotes 83:44 then get rid of this you don't need an inbox get rid of it just keep the content and if you only have the content then let it go you have permanent nodes that's it you should make it as simple as you can now I will add one little caveat to what I just said it's the fact 84:02 that the starter kit includes a number of plugins which I have already mentioned and one of those plugins is called the auton note mover plugin uh it's not something that we have seen so far but it's really important to mention because if you do reorganize the folders 84:19 change the structure rename things uh you you might and you will probably break uh some of the features of the starter kit uh the reason for this is that some plugins including this one that I'm going to explain include re um um references to uh specific folder names and specific uh subfolders but 84:41 also to specific tags so the same thing if you change the tags that you use within the uh the Vault so let's say you don't want to name these quotes but uh word or whatever you will break the starter kit so let me explain the auton note mover plugin you will uh love this 85:01 one you will love this one because so far I've shown you the folder structure which is light but still a bit complicated uh the thing is that you do not want to spend time manually moving things around within uh your Vault you don't want to drag and drop to say okay 85:17 this is a literature note so I should put it uh there if this is a quote it should go uh there doesn't make sense it's really boring you will spend too much time doing that at some point you will not do it anymore or you will forget to do it and your uh knowledge base will become messy the auton note 85:37 mover is a plugin that makes it easy to uh organize the Vault automatically so you do not have to fiddle with the notes and and move them around manually the way it works is this if a note is found with the tag contacts in this this case then it should move automatically to 85:55 that folder if a note is found with the tag permanent notes then it should move to uh the permanent noes content folder if it's a fleeting note same thing literature note same thing book node same thing the quotes same thing you can do this for all the tags that you want 86:13 all the concepts you can also do this by title of or with a regular expression which is a bit more complex uh you can include exclude folders so in this case the star kit excludes some of those folders so templates for instance Etc uh this means that if I create a node right 86:34 now at a root let's say here I have a Noe that I will call this this literature notes for now it stays there why because it does not contain the tag if I add the tag sorry L notes and I save my note as you can see it just disappeared and it went over there and this is exactly what you want 86:60 you want a not taking system that auto organizes itself this is why the starter kit is valuable to me and that's also why I believe it will be valuable to you it's it tries to automate different things and and the main one is really moving notes around based on the tax I 87:19 really like automation so I don't want to have to to type those tags myself manual manually all the time because I could make a mistake because I I could write it with two T's for some reason and then it gets broken because this note will not move and it will not get 87:35 where it needs to be and so uh instead of doing that um I have included inside of the St kit some templates uh and plugins that enable uh templating so I I showed you that we have uh inside of the Vault different types of notes we have meta notes we have project noes we have fleeting notes 87:60 literature permanent Mar contacts etc etc as I mentioned I do not want to have to um name those myself all the time correctly or tag those rather and instead we will do this let's say that we want to write about psychology and let's say that it's something that I 88:19 want to uh write myself these are my own words so this will be a permanent note what I will do is either hit command on contrl P and type templator really be careful because it's not it's not template that's not the same thing it's templator the reason why it's because templator is a plugin 88:40 template is a built-in feature so templator uh offers me a number of commands one of which is open the insert template model this is the tool that you can use to insert a template inside of a note I'm going to click on it I get to a new window and if now I uh select uh 89:02 permanent note here these are the the all the templates that are included in the starter keit if I click on permanent Noe then I will insert the per permanent node plugin bam that's it as you can see there are multiple things that have happened the note was called psychology 89:20 and for that reason there is a heading psychology there I can start taking not but in addition and this will bring me to another point that I want to mention uh there is some metadata there uh this is really important uh I mentioned earlier one way to add a tag to a notes 89:39 and we saw it multiple times already it's like this permanent notes but actually uh you can also ATT text to a note using uh this yl metadata again for now this is not something that you see in the Live View mode but in the editing mode so the the way um metadata works is 89:59 you use three dashes three more and whatever you put in there is called yaml it's another syntax it is not markdown it's a something else you can look it up on the internet uh but it's quite simple let's say it's not the best but it works so you tag uh colum and then you list 90:20 you create a list below and this list is all the TXS but as you can see doing this way the advantage is that you get autoc completion so if it was about books this case it's about typology it makes sense to add this all right so now you have learned about uh yaml pentad data what more can 90:42 I say uh I can mention the Alis the Alis is a way that uh obsidian provides to uh Define find different names for a note uh and as you can see the template that I have included here so when I did contr templat open insert lerat not it added a few alas for many so one is all 91:09 uppercase one is all lower case and the last one is with uh title case uh the reason for this is to enable creating uh links that go with the flow I would say you put a pipe we have the the note name pipe and then the alas that you want to use in this case I want to use 91:38 the uppercase one you have a normal link you add a pipe and then you can select the alas that was defined there that you want to use so this is really a really specific feature of obsidian again the tags it's also recognized and uh used by obsidian so if I look at my um my tags I can I 92:01 can find it there literature notes will be there here and I find three notes and you can see the psychology has it even though I did not write it like this so this is the same thing you can you can write it there or you can write it there I personally prefer to always have my 92:20 tags as part of the metadata and I think that with the newer releases of obsidian it will become uh even more relevant uh now one more thing to mention is that you can have additional properties in inside of your notes so I will take another example I'm going to show you a daily note if I find the 92:42 pattern it's not search daily daily notes this is uh daily note for to today I will come back to this later but you can see there that I also have metadata in this case we are using the tag daily notes and daily note 2023 because it's this year and I also have additional 93:06 properties and so I could rank my energy level for the morning for a 10 and now in the evening it's a one or maybe it's was a one and it became seven but I can also say uh friends and have a list of things uh B I can also have just property like first day and the DAT in 93:36 there and this is useful because this adds uh metadata to your not so it's information about your note it's not part of the note it's like a side car it's just a side of the note not but um metadata like this enables many scenarios so for instance in this case I wanted to capture information about my 94:02 energy as part of my daily notes and if you do this for a while then you will have many notes with those those uh metadata fields and the thing is that you can use some plugins to uh extract that information make calculation create graphs uh find nodes that have a 94:21 specific property with a specific value etc etc so you you should consider the metadata as a way to uh make your knowledge base uh more uh valuable in a way and uh more powerful because you will enable different scenarios so that was a small aside to discuss about the metadata the reason 94:45 why I wanted to explain metadata is because the templates that I have included in the starter kit and the templating system heavily relies on the metadata so let me now show you the contents of the different templates so templates that you saw in the list earlier so I will show you another way 95:04 to um to to show those I will create a new not um not this is a new not it was already there so if I hit uh alt or yeah alt e on my keyboard I will quickly open the template so as we saw earlier one way was to do this templator open insert but if you look at it uh right there you can see the shortcut 95:35 in my case it's alt e on Windows the the the useful uh thing is that I can easily insert a template if it was a daily note I could do this if it's um known quote you can write yeah I will showcase every type of note that you can create with the template in a second for now let's just explore all 96:00 the templates that are available with the STA kit and how they look like so when you insert the template it gets interpolated uh interpolation is a concept that comes from uh I think uh software development where uh a template contains um meta tags or or um keywords 96:21 or structures that don't make too much sense but are actually programmatic they are intended to be replaced by something else so let me make that clear by showing you an example so this might be a bit scary this is not kind of thing that you will do very often unless you 96:37 get interested in building template yourself but basically this is a template it's just a standard note as part of my note taking system it contains metadata and this is uh the tag that we saw earlier but as you saw there was uh daily noes and daily noes 2023 so actually when you insert this 97:00 daily note template inside of a note it gets interpolated interpolated means that Expressions such as this one or such as this one will get replaced by uh the result of executing or replacing them so interpolation of this expression will uh call yeah it's actually software 97:26 development at this point but basically it uh generates uh a date and formats it to only keep the year that's that's it uh this creates the section with all the links to navigate between daily notes this is something that I will show later and most importantly the rest of the 97:43 template includes the structure that should be included in notes so let me do it again I will open um a daily note not not now I'm going to delete it completely so I have an empty note uh what is important to to observe here is the name of the file it's really important to be using this state format 98:07 I will explain why I'm going to to it half e uh it's the I have inserted the interpolated template so this part of the template that we saw earlier it was just copy pasted so if I I were to replace plan of the day by blah blah and I do it all again notes you can see that 98:29 blah blah what just copied there not purpose so let's go back the expression that we saw earlier in the templates file itself as you can see was interpolated so replaced and we get 203 2023 this whole complex uh stuff was replaced by this thing there uh and as you can see the templates enable 98:56 creating uh some level of automation so I do not want to have to type the structure for my daily note each day instead I just want to rely on the template to do this for me and even better I do not want to have to create um The Daily note myself uh I can use a plugin to do that 99:18 so I'm going to delete uh those folders I care and I'm going to just hit again D notes open D not and voila as you can see Not only was my note created but it was put in the correct location in the year the the week and the file name and the template was inserted and interpolated how does 99:48 this work might be interesting to know it's again uh thanks to a plugin that we have included that I have included in the starter kit with a periodic nodes plugin this is a plugin that is uh taking care of daily notes weekly notes everything that relates to journaling uh 100:05 and it knows that when I want to create a daily note then there is a template that should be used and this is the one that's how it works again if you rename the folders or delete stuff you will break the starter kit so that you know uh if you don't respect the naming 100:24 convention this is like that then it will break again so these are a few uh constraints on on the content that you put but I think that it's useful because it enables uh creating things way more easily so if I want to write uh a book note about Atomic habits that actually 100:46 already exists uh what else could we uh book by um stand stand is a really wonderful book I create a notes and I H Hal e and use template book Noe boom I get the basis for my book note I have the tag actually different tags I can add a summary I can add a link to Amazon or anything I can 101:12 capture uh important quotes from the book ideas and take notes by chapter blah blah blah and the note is not in the root but it's located where it belongs so it's part of the if I'm not mistaken the literature notes here and actually I don't if you've noticed but most of the time based on the system 101:34 and the way it works I do not even need to care all that much about the folder structure I can forget about it and that's what I wanted and that's what I needed to do with my not taking system I do not want to have to um worry about the f structure I just want to take 101:52 notes and and that's what I do with this system first template is for booknotes this is the one that I just used just a minute ago it uses those tags by default again booknotes is a special tag why because we have the auton note mover which moves uh books normally there to 102:14 this folder this is the way it works for all of those basically so we have contact contact as uh a location an email a phone if you want to capture more metadata as I mentioned you can add more fields to this this yl it uses the tag people and the tag contact oops just broke it uh we have 102:39 the daily notes with have the daily notes tag Expressions we have fleeting notes I I mentioned literature notes the permanent notes meeting notes mocks I will explain in a jfy um we have monthly notes um project person etc etc as you can see each of those has a specific tag and the 103:02 specific tag is most often linked to automation rules within the Vault and actually it's not only uh linked to the auton note mover plugin there's a second plugin that is uh quite heavily used within the starter kit but the data view plugin is a really really powerful one 103:21 that enables uh finding and um inserting information in nodes based on what exists in the vault this is an expression uh that uses the data view plug-in again it's a between btics it's um basically programming within obsidian and this uh gets the list of all pages in The Vault and just calculates how 103:50 many are there and that's how we know that there are 64 nodes in The Volt the nice thing about data view as you can see is that it's uh re-evaluate all the time it's not static information it's Dynamic and the dynamicity is what we are interested in it's another uh 104:08 benefits of improving the the volt with plugins is that we can add Behavior Uh in this case we just calculate automatically and it gets updated the duplicate nodes that we saw earlier let's say that I remove this duplicate bam it's it's gone and it's not something that would be possible 104:28 without a plugin such as the data view plugin maybe later on obsidian will include more features for automation like this but for now uh the data view plugin is one of the most powerful ones basically uh using the data view plugin you can find notes uh that contain or 104:48 don't contain tasks or tags or whatever so in this case I look at all the page that contain the tag too and it will find those one more tool or way that you can use to help you find locate information is maps of content a map of content is basically an index of notes 105:08 about a certain Topic in this case it does not work because I have a space and this not doesn't work with spaces so I need to actually do do it again um there are no results for this query why because we are looking for notes that contain the tag personal development so 105:31 let's say that you want to capture a quote that says uh live never ends can I multiple times physically and kind of weird I'm just inventing something let's say that this is a quote I'm going to add alt e and there are two separate types of quotes that's why there are two templates uh the first one 106:05 is a quote from someone else so this will be a liter to notes and this is a own quote so one that we have created yourself so this is mine I will just do it as as such and actually it also highlights one more feature of markdown uh in this case you can see that the um name of the note was used as 106:28 the text for the quote and actually a quote in markdown is created like this so you have an angle bracket and you write things down and it just highlights that thing with an outline there there's more there's more about the editor but that that should be enough to get you 106:46 started so this one is about life it's about death it's about memory and it's about assistance and whatever we can add and I actually advise to add as many texts as you can because those have value and um and again they provide ways to find uh information in various contexts but if I 107:11 know right something about death then I can find this quote back uh but I wouldn't be able to if I did not add that the tag so those people that don't like tags yeah I I do think there is real value there there are challenges too because if you have too many tags 107:28 and you have tags that uh look like each other like personal development uh personal development there it it can get quite messy uh quite fast my my convention for um tag names is to use underscores but know that there's it's possible to also Nest tags something I did not mention uh so I could do 107:49 psychology and uh mental health instance this creates a structure of for my tags and actually if I look at Psychology there you can see but the structure is visible which is quite interesting you can actually add files to uh your obsidian fold files and images I just drag and drop it inside of 108:10 obsidian and boom I have my image as you can see uh this is the the default name but if I right click on that I can rename it so this is uh anak vo and I've just renamed the file the file is here at the root my recommendation is to store all the images do not try to organize them too 108:36 much again Simplicity personally I put them all in the attachments once you have an attachment inside of the Vault it can be reused so the same image that um sorry I move it back the same image that I added to my other notes I can not only open it to just see it within 108:54 obsidian but I can also drag and drop it on different notes so it's not uh part of a specific note it's part of the Vault and it's actually a specific uh type of link as you can see it's just the name of the file and there is an exclamation mark in front to express the fact that 109:14 it's something else an image in this case uh it's not the only type of file that I can add to my actually I can add uh other type of files presentation here from uh member of the community uh that I found interesting as you can see I just added a PDF file to My Vault you 109:35 can recognize it here PDF I will put it in my attachment but interestingly uh when you have a embedded PDF you can actually see the contents and this is quite cool because I could have this uh opened I can do it in different ways so I can have my tab with the PDF on the 109:55 right and I can take notes on the left or I can uh have the embedded view of my PDF right in the note and if I take a look at the source it's actually again a link with the exclam exclamation mark pointing to the file which I can also rename if I uh quite cool really really really 110:18 really cool the idea of atomic nodes I have uh on it a bit earlier uh I mentioned this because it's really important I think for uh creating more value with your knowledge base to create short notes so whenever you have the opportunity uh create notes that are really focused on a single idea and that 110:39 express it as simple as POS as simply as possible so earlier I created a note that I call psychology uh I I wouldn't actually create such a note in my own knowledge base uh the only note that I would would call psychology in my knowledge base would be uh a mock a map 110:55 of content because I would PR much rather create many notes about specific ideas in Psychology rather than have a note psychology in which I put everything because the thing is that once you have a large notes it really it's really too long then how do you create links towards it I mean it's too 111:16 General it's much better if you can point towards a really specific idea and that's where you create value because that's how you can create links between Concepts uh in in unrelated domains or or related domains depends uh but so yeah do try to create Focus notes 111:35 focusing on a a single idea add uh as many tags as you can think of I mean those that are important and make sense and can be useful and and in that way you will see that your knowledge base will be much more valuable you have you will have a lot more opportunities to 111:51 create links between notes you have you will have many more uh opportunities to uh improve the content uh the maps of content and other tools will allow you to um uh find your notes and and still make keep them usable uh but actually I've written an article a while ago about the 112:12 value of atomic notes uh I really advise you to take a look at it it's on it's on my website uh by the way if you want to to subscribe if you have haven't subscribed already uh know that I regularly write about uh personal Knowledge Management and note taking not 112:29 making these are topics that I uh really enjoy uh creating and writing about and you can also subscribe to my my newsletter uh I write it each week there are personal stuff and professional stuff uh things that I do for uh creating uh but I also share uh interesting resources about uh thinking 112:49 learning personal Knowledge Management science really depends that's me and my dog that's F and yeah all right so as we saw in the structure you have the journal part I have opened the daily notes many times it's right there open today so open today is my favorite Link in 113:10 obsidian that's how you use uh the periodic notes plugin to open the the current daily note if it doesn't exist it will create it with the and date you will see the day and most importantly thanks to the template you also have links to navigate between the year the 113:28 quarter the month the week and you can go uh between the days so if I go back in time 22 there was no notes but maybe there was one if I go 23 there is one it's today and I can keep going back like this and the thing is that once you start journaling for a while then you 113:48 can explore and you can go go back to August and find your notes etc etc etc uh it it's really cool in the sense that taking daily notes to create Journal is a great way to uh capture what happens in your life can be personal it can be professional it can be B it can be 114:07 whatever you want uh it's also a great way to organize yourself I personally organize my days like this so for instance if I was uh this evening I would click on the notes for tomorrow I would insert temp play for daily note and I will just write things down I write my list of tasks for tomorrow so 114:26 tomorrow I want to publish this uh the o video I want to market the video I want to add an Abell on g mode and these are actually things that I would write down as part of my to-do list for the day uh the thing is that in the morning first thing I would do is open obsidian click 114:48 on my open today and what I would see is and this I would know what to do and it's a great uh it's of great utility for productivity it's Focus because I know what I have to do and I don't do not have to use different tools for for that it's also a benefit of obsidian I 115:08 think that you can use it not only for not taking but also for personal organization productivity personal development it can be a tool for many purposes uh and I do believe that it eliminates the need for having uh separate tools for uh some of those things so journaling as I told you you 115:27 can create daily notes but you can also create uh weekly notes so for instance this is week 11 it's just an example uh if we were in the week 13 then I would quickly note here um let me just continue a bit on on The Daily notes first so you have the plan for today 115:48 notes of the day would be uh things that you want to to remember because uh it's useful you just discovered it and yeah need to think a bit about it a bit later what you have achieved so you can take note of your achievements I finished recording maybe soon um uh what you have discovered so 116:12 usually uh this is the place that I use to uh capture everything that I have discovered in uh during the day uh basically the way I ingest knowledge in my knowledge base is I take notes so U maybe I read something interested interesting set method I have discover this method today I don't know and uh 116:39 there are uh three methods Sy them three types of notes notes literat notes you have the per not digital okay continue that that's what I would write down during the day I would take my notes like this as an outline simply just not creating actually separate notes for for those things the 117:17 reason why is I want even though I have automated most of the the boring work of creating and organizing notes I do not want to have to um have the um extra mental uh energy used to create notes and think about creating notes and the title of the noes instead I prefer to focus on capturing ideas and 117:44 this is one of the keys of journaling to me it's that it enables me to do so easily without losing focus it's just one window that I keep open all day long and whenever there is something new maybe I discover the power meod today and it's interesting and blah blah blah I can 118:01 take and keep taking notes throughout the day if I find an interesting link I will capture it if I'm grateful for uh the sun is out there today and it's wonderful then I can do this I can capture it uh um I know it's not a personal development course but uh taking note of the Small Things is 118:25 actually one of the great sources of joy in my life um and and I do recommend anyone to consider doing it it doesn't take long it's just like one minute a day or something these are stupid things they don't matter all that much but actually at the end of the week if you 118:42 do a weekly review or just take a look back at the past notes you would be surprised at how good those uh little notes can make you feel so um I've explained a bit the structure of the daily nodes uh this changed notes Here below is something that might be quite surprising uh but it's actually 119:02 something I find useful you you might not like it so you're free to disable the corresponding plugin but it automatically adds any notes a link to any notes that you have edited today so if I were to edit uh let's say that I go to to the 25th that's da note if I go back to my note of 119:25 today so the the 23 you can see normally that the 25th has been added to the list of changed notes uh one benefit of this is that if you take a look at the graph so yes it will add noise to the graph in a sense but it will also uh create the opportunity for you to see On Any Given 119:47 date uh what have you touched within your knowledge base and this can be quite cool as it creates visibility over uh the expansion of your graph uh of your knowledge base over time and and creates a link between the evolution of your notes and the different points in 120:05 time at which you have touched those notes not saying that this is mandatory or incredibly incredibly useful but I do find it uh somewhat relevant because for instance let's say that this note has been t touched uh 20 times uh maybe it's an important note for me whatever it is 120:25 maybe I've touched it uh 20 times over the course of two years I can go back in time to the Daily notes corresponding to that note I mean when when I edited it and ReDiscover oh what was I working at the time oh yes indeed so I I have link over there so I touched it on that date 120:46 but what was happening ah yes I finished recording so that yeah I did that when I was recording my course and it was relevant because of this and this is a way to to create temporal links and I think that the the the temporal aspect of the taking is um undervalued I I do 121:05 think there is value in knowing and then keeping track of of the the time aspect periodic notes is uh um the idea of doing periodic reviews so you you take notes each day maybe you do maybe you don't but it's kind of useful and I find it incredibly useful actually for myself 121:24 from a productivity point of view to reflect on what has happened in the past days in the past weeks Etc and this is what the the the weekly monthly quarterly and yearly notes enable you to do so in a weekly note you will get a list of all the days within that week 121:44 with the links so supposing that you have um created corresponding notes here you would be able to right click and open those easily I will just create those just for the sake of the example vo so now I have two uh I could Click on each and see oh what did happen on Saturday what did I do and then I 122:06 would have my my daily note there and I would know okay that was my plan and that was I what I actually achieved oh maybe uh I I tried I was too optimistic maybe I could do uh much less than what I anticipated and it's not that I'm disappointed it's just that maybe I was 122:24 overc confident or maybe I I had some distraction etc etc and so periodic reviews is another thing that I have written about and that I do recommend I will not go much more in detail I did write some things about that in the user guide um but it's a way to um review uh 122:44 from a perspective point of view from a personal development point of view in a goal or oriented way uh basically see your progress and be more objective about what you did uh it can be useful for work it can be useful for personal development for relationships whatever it's just taking the time to 123:03 look back doesn't need to take long but uh really uh getting back to to note taking and and personal Knowledge Management what I want to to mention and something that I uh do when I perform my weekly review is that I create the the note for uh weekly review and then one 123:21 by one I open the links of the notes in the week uh I put them aside like this and what I do is I um take uh a snapshot of everything that I did everything that I uh found interesting uh uh just track the completion of my goals so I can do this in two ways I can do it after the fact 123:42 of or before the fact uh most often I would create the week note uh the the day before the week start starts and I I just list my main goals for the week like it could be record a PKM course I should do this at some point uh maybe I should be uh publishing two new articles 124:03 because I love writing and these would be my goals for the week at the end of the week so this is after all those days have passed I would go back to this and I would see okay I did manage to do that I did manage to do that oh that one I did not do I I I I achieved something 124:20 cool I reached I don't know 100K visitors a day on my website I don't know if that will ever happen but whatever uh and I can also capture uh the discoveries that I made during the week uh and this is a concept that I find interesting this is what I consider to be the rollover of knowledge 124:40 within my knowledge base as I mentioned earlier I have this notes about the settle cting method that I added on one of the days of during that week let's say uh during the day of that week I did have much time or didn't want to create a separate note but in practice I know 124:58 that it's something that I find relevant and by looking back at it I think yeah this should be a note so this is the moment where I do take the time so during my weekly review to extract the knowledge how do I do this I just create a link to the top like this for 125:16 instance I control click on it as we saw earlier this is Peron note because let's say that it's mine whatever and I just organize the knowledge and this is about PKM this is that cast methods yeah just small recommendation about tags uh while I'm thinking about it uh use the 125:40 plural when you are uh using tags this way it can it can work whether you look for method or methods and this will avoid uh some mistakes around tax so this is the uh what I call the knowledge extraction uh principle let's say that I want to delete this and at the end of 125:59 the day I just keep this part zle cting method is something that I discovered on that day and So within the list of the discoveries for that week under the specific day I would just copy the link and why is that useful or U relevant it's because if now I take a look at week 133 in my 126:22 um in my um my graph view uh if I find it back of course that's always the fun part um right there I can not only see um the different links there are I mean I do see all the links but in addition to seeing the links uh between the dates so all the days of that week uh the link 126:46 with the year the quarter the the week Etc I can also see the link towards all the knowledge that I have accumulated or uh integrated in my knowledge base during that time frame and that's quite cool I think that's quite cool I think that's quite useful and relevant why 127:05 because it's a rollup of knowledge and it it creates uh again an anchor in time I can do this for a week I can do this for a quarter and I can also do this actually for a year nothing prevents me from creating a yearly note in which I just keep track of all the discoveries I 127:27 made during that year and it can be a useful tool to take a look back and yeah think these are the things that I have explored last year am I missing something did I go far enough on those topic topics uh maybe I should expand maybe I should add this to the list and 127:46 I I think that this is a useful tool so enough about um journaling and weekly reviews and periodic reviews in general I think that I I I made the point I wanted to make um now we can take a a quick look at meta noes and tasks those are two small things that I wanted to mention 128:07 it's not mandatory at all so you can get rid of those if you don't care uh but in the meta notes I have created uh examples for uh personal information so you have the goal where you can keep track of your short medium and or long-term goals uh information about 128:24 yourself maybe sometimes it's useful to keep track of of your health the evolution of your health your your personal your your state of mind uh the evolution of your career try to think about how to move forward what you want next what you don't want anymore um so you have goals but actually I should 128:42 have non goals to the list it's something that I forgot and that's really relevant as well anyways you have also the the top of my note uh I I wrote an article about that on my blog if you want to look it up but the idea there is to um keep this note open uh quite often not aside to the Daily 129:02 note basically and whenever there is something that you know you need to uh not forget about and that you will need to get back either today or in the coming days then add add it to it just back of the napkin notes just whatever you want put in there you put in there it doesn't 129:21 matter and the idea is that you you should clean it up from time to time maybe the things that you have there are just deleted maybe you just create notes and move them around Etc reminds me that I have a feature that I did not show is that you can reorganize the bullet 129:38 points in the list you just drag and drop and and one more is that you can take a look at uh one point and focus on it this is done by a plugin if I click left click on this one I will get into this bullet points and this turns obsidian into a nice outliner actually 129:57 because I can do this at multiple levels and I can keep doing it and expanding ideas and it's just like working on a mind map it's quite cool I think that it's a great way to be able to focus on ideas I think that the plugin that um was created and added to obsidian here 130:19 is inspired by uh work flowy which is a popular noting tool and basically I get the same behavior as work flowy within obsidian that's that's really so cool all right waiting for is a list of things that you are waiting for I use this to keep track of uh money that 130:38 people owe me uh the things that I have learn etc etc routines yeah basically just uh writing down things about your own routines uh in the morning in the evening at the end of the week things like that uh and finally tasks the tasks uh we did not discuss too much I showed 130:60 you that inside of the daily notes you can add tasks you can actually add task wherever you want it's just nice to limit the places where you add task because otherwise it become it can become messy even though you can find I think tasks using some syntax here or or using commands like 131:21 T yeah I think that there are ways to to find those I do not do that myself but it should be possible but yeah coming back to tasks so you have Journal tasks is a special note that I've have created that again broken because of the data view plugin I will fix this soon but uh it shows you 131:41 all of the open tasks inside of your uh journal entries so normally what you should see there is the the current date and there is the the task and you can mark them as done from here but it's nice because if you forgot about task a few days ago instead of just copying 131:59 them over and over you can just keep them where they are and just come back to this and and just complete things or or mark them as done when you don't care about them anymore but the nice thing is that any task that sits within the journal so that contains the tag 132:15 um daily notes it's inside of the daily notes sorry will be added to uh this uh special note uh another thing is meeting tasks same idea but focused on uh the notes that contain meeting notes so basically all actions that you have decided uh as part of a meeting you can 132:36 track and quickly find back from here same for projects and finally a kban board so uh kban is a a method to uh keep track and and organize work and know in which state each part of the work is is and also to put limits on on specific States so for instance you you could say uh 132:59 this month in the this month's column there can be at most uh two tasks things like that uh and within a canand board which is a bit like Trello if you you if you know about it video Etc I can uh keep track of a backlog of tasks actually I should have created those there uh and uh the propos 133:33 proposal that I made but you can customize it any way you want is that you have a backlog with all your tasks and then if there's something relevant to do this month then you move it over there and then if a week starts then maybe uh you know that this is one of the things that you need to be doing 133:50 etc etc and it's a simple uh personal organization system that I use and find quite useful uh thanks to this I can organize work I can do this uh by quarter by year by project whatever uh this is just one but nothing prevents you from making copies uh changing the 134:10 source code of that note I think that you have to this wait open as markdown voila and it's actually just a a classic note it's just a specific notation of this can ban plugin that I have included uh but then you have to switch to um yeah I think close it and open it 134:31 back to see the Canan ball again but you can use those tools here to add a list you can also clean things up archive completed cards you can rename things you can delete cards rename Etc so yeah canand plugin is quite useful for task management that's what I wanted to say 134:55 about that uh one more thing the canvas so canvas is uh a feature that was added to obsidian a while ago and it's a way to uh create visualizations visualizations in the sense that you can uh create uh fake notes I would say I would call them fake notes so personel is a fake Noe so it's just a 135:23 box that appears in this map uh interesting part is that I can create new cards uh health is related to personal development uh you have yeah I'm tired anyways blah blah blah as you can see inside of those cards you can put links and and this becomes interesting because this is a 135:50 link to an actual notes this is quite cool you can link things like this but note that if I add a cards like this and Link the link will not exist let me clarify what I mean by this if I uh put a link there to the too notes which is another one exists um if I look at the back Links of the to not 136:18 not you can see there's nothing why because the the canvas which is there I will rename it canvas um these are just cards those are not notes in a card I can add a link but that link is not a standard link so just wanted to make the con clear up some confusion that you might have but 136:44 what you can do is create not a card but adding a not from this the volt in this case I will add to do and as you can see it's even more powerful than that it's that you can actually see the note and in this case I think that if I do this and add another note blah blah let's forget about that 137:06 stuff for now uh I have a link between those two and even if it's not the case today I'm pretty sure that in the future those links will actually be part of the links that you can find so if I do go this I have a link there but I'm not sure it's the one no it's not the one so 137:25 these links are still not at this point in time actual links between the notes but just uh visual links uh inside of the canvas anyways canvas is a wonderful tool to uh create visualization you have a ton of space you can create links organize information move things around 137:46 align just re size also being a line so you can make nice things with this excal dra X new drawing and I just wanted to mention uh excal dra which is another um plugin that I have included in the stter kit so canvas that you saw just a moment ago is built in obsidian uh it's part of it but uh excal 138:13 is another way uh you can use to create visualization uh VIs ations that I think is more powerful uh but is uh coming through a plugin uh it's more powerful because you have uh different tools you can draw uh different shapes forms you can add colors you can add actual links 138:36 um and um you can embed from the web directly and so yeah not perfect but could be useful in some cases to embed information coming from the web so yeah that's I think that's yeah pretty much what I wanted to explain to you today about the start kit I know it's a lot of 138:55 information I did not think I would record for almost three hours uh just one last thing be before uh I leave you um yeah just again I insist do consider journaling uh periodic notes maybe consider uh managing your tasks within obsidian but mainly about note taking uh do consider 139:17 consider the dichotomy between permanent noes and literat noes if it's relevant to you but in any case uh keep the simp the system simple do make use of the automation customize it if you want expand it if you want doesn't matter it's all yours when you are taking notes 139:35 do add metadata uh add uh tags uh try to use the plal for tags um create links as many links as you can I mean as much as it makes sense create maps of contents if you want to have an index of notes on specific topics uh really avoid uh long notes like hell because these will just 139:58 uh reduce uh the value of your knowledge Base by a large margin um do update your plugins from time to time as you saw in the in the settings screen it's it's quite simple things might break so that that happens uh I cannot unfortunately uh prevent that from happening I don't 140:16 have control over all of the the plugins uh be careful with plugins as I mentioned from a security point of view uh plugins can actually do anything inside of your Vault and on your computer so don't don't trust everything that you see in the in in the community 140:32 uh plugins list even though every plugin is reviewed but the risks always exist and uh also about the the starter kit please note that um the starter kit is updated from time to time and when it gets updated I usually send out a mail through g Road to mention what changed 140:52 uh and how you can update uh there is no automated update process you have to perform the updates manually the reason for that is that um the each volt is different as I mentioned you can customize it you make change to the structure you rename tags whatever you want to do you can but it means that 141:12 from my end automating the whole process is near impossible it would be really complicated I do have some ideas about ideas about automating part of the updates but I did not have time to um uh explore that yet so uh the the main reference point for for the changes that 141:29 you need to do uh when you perform an update is inside of change log and you will receive a mail and a links all right so I really hope that you found this video useful and finally uh what I want to leave you with is my hope that uh the the starter kit and obsidian will 141:46 be useful to you that it will enable you to uh really uh leverage Knowledge Management and that it will add value in your in your daily life uh help you make uh move forward in moves forward in your career have more success um and and I really really wish you uh the best of 142:06 luck with whatever you want to be doing and if you have remarks ideas uh commments if you face issues uh do know that I am always available I'm on the slack community on the on the PKM Community uh you can reach me by by email you're one of my customers so I cannot thank you enough for for your 142:27 trust uh because it's really important to me it enables me to uh continue working on these kinds of interesting projects uh I'm really passionate about this topic and I hope that you can feel it and I I do hope that it will have the same impact on your life as it had on 142:44 mine so uh the last thing I want to uh leave leave you with is uh again a thank you uh if you have the opportunity to talk about uh the obsidian stter ticket to colleagues or friends please don't hesitate it will really help me a lot uh you could also if you can uh and if you 143:03 do like what you have received and seen uh leave a review on the uh product page on on gumroad uh and yeah it's about it uh don't hesitate to subscribe to my uh newsletter my website uh come join us in the in the community I will be really glad to have you uh there with us and again thank you and 143:26 have a great day byebye ## References - Official product page: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-course