Hey everyone,
Over the last 15 years, I’ve tried most productivity app, task manager, and “second brain” method under the sun.
I’m someone with a bit of ADHD and basically 0 percentile in industriousness, so I needed a robust system just to function in my career. About 3 years ago, I got deep in the Obsidian rabbit hole, and never got out xD.
I could finally include any brain child feature I wanted as long as I could do some JS lines of codes.
How it works at a high level
I use obsidian on all my devices ( Personal computer, personal laptop, work computer, phone, tablet).
I’ve been a GTD practitioner for a long time now, so my workflow is heavily tainted by that method.
I capture every thought, link, idea, things to do directly in Obsidian.
I process all my inputs daily and have a strict flowchart i follow while doing that, takes me around 20 to 30 seconds per file and I usually create between 2 and 10 files a day.
All my routines have dedicated files and recurring tasks on them.
The magic is, when I start my day : I do not look at a task list !!! I’ve suffered for years of the consequences of choice overload, seeing “everything I have to do” was after either a blocker for me and i would just find a way to distract myself or i would get lost in meaningless tasks.
Now I just push a button, and Obsidian directly opens the file representing the activity i need to work on,
It can be a routine i need to do, a project i need to advance, a simple task need to get done, a note I want to read and review, anything. All the necessary “data” about when I should review that file are inputted when processing or when working on it.
I’ll be honest, this is probably the single most effective thing I’ve been able to test for the last 15 years … It’s the first time I’m consistently using any “app stack” for more than 3 month and it’ll soon be 3 years now ^^
Plugins I Use to make it work
I use a bit more than 50 plugins, but a lot are for quality of life. The core ones are
Dataview (obviously) : I use dataview extremely heavily, every query is done with dataviewJs for maximum flexibility, I have dozens of different queries showing all shorts of stuff (numbers, Kpis, lists, trees etc)
Tasks plugin : Just the best for quick task creation and auto-completion. Makes recurring tasks easy and powerful and I do need the completion date for a lot of queries.
Outliner : Just makes bullet lists usable.
Personal OS : My own plugin for everything I could not find in existing community plugins. (Like the automated file retrieval)
Core Canvas : Special mention. I still remember obsidian before canvas. and honestly canvas changed everything, I heavily use it for creating any kind of dashboard I want !
Thank you
Huge thanks to the Obsidian team and this community. Obsidian changed the way I work and think—and honestly, this system is the reason I’ve been promoted 3 years in a row.
If some of you guyz are interested my vault is shared in the official obsidian discord in “Note-showcase”, or you can join my Discord, I’m always looking for people to try it and help me improve it ! I’ve had some fun making a sort of “tutorial” that explains everything there is to know to learn it directly in the vault ^^.
