In person, I talk a lot about what I’ve ended up calling my “everything manager” rather than “personal knowledge manager” or “life management system”. It really does tie a wide swath of my life together into a manageable set of systems that keep me alive. I built it using a pretty clever tool called Obsidian.
Obsidian, at its core, is a note-taking app available for desktop and mobile. That description, however, is the largest unstatement for any app I’ve ever seen. Through the use of plugins built by both the Obsidian team and the user community, there is pretty much nothing the app can’t be made to do.
One such plugin allows you to create templates that will automatically build a new note in a specific format. It can ask you questions to fill in specific portions, or even programatically calculate stuff to fill in, like today’s date, too. You can even use javascript to make it do even more things.
I’m sure you’re getting the picture that Obsidian at the start really is just a blank slate that you can build just about any way you’d like. With that openness does come a learning curve. Thankfully, there is a helpful community forum where you can go to learn an incredible amount, as well as a lot of YouTube videos, too. While some people have tried to capitalize on the community by offering paid courses and such, I’ve never found the need for it.
One of the main selling points (it’s a free app, by the by) is that the notes are saved in plain text so you’re not locked into the platform if you decide you want to move on. As you add more plugins, however, that can sometimes not be quite the case. For example, using the Dataview plugin adds an insane amount of capability to Obsidian, but if you open your note in plain text editor, you’ll of course see the Dataview code and not the results it would show in Obsidian. That should be expected, and I imagine at some point in the future someone will make an exporter that will convert the “readable view” of a note into a plaintext version so you can 100% take that note to another system. You’d lose the “cleverness” in that exported version, but at the point I think the main desire would be to have the text of the note as you would read it in a book. There’s never a perfect solution in such a case.
All of this is me just giving a little backstory to a little resource I have on my GitHub account. I don’t even know how to explain GitHub. It’s a collaborative repository of all kinds of documents including code, documentation, novels, and more. I use it to share some the templates and css code snippets and pages I use to build my “everything manager”. This allows you to copy and paste them into your own Obsidian “vault”, and then adapt it to your needs.
You can find this free resource at https://github.com/PeterBeckley/obsidian-stuff. I’ve tried to include descriptions of what the different things are for, as well as comment the code to make it easier to understand and use. This is just another way I’m using #thatartistlife to help people interested in how I’m doing what I’m doing. I do update that resource from time to time, and have plans to build out the amount of templates for the various note types and uses of them in own vault. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
