2026 is here, and I have been using Obsidian for few years now. It has been my 80% part of my notes (the other 20% are scattered throughout spreadsheets, sticky notes, and some Google Docs). So I am sharing my few thoughts on what I did to improve this year
I am a somewhat has AI engineer works on my company I work at, and therefore I saw one of the chance to wrap my 2025 year in review for ai to see my behaviour of using Obsidian itself. Just a simple step really.
I analyzed my own workflow of plugins that needs some improvement (I improved the calendar Plugin to have easier UX and able to create monthly/yearly/quarterly notes from the calendar and show whether it is created or not.)
I noticed back in 2025, I was using mainly daily notes only (I have Periodic Notes Plugin on), mostly, with sparse usage of Monthly notes. Thus I asked AI to see my templates and my behaviours on using it, and I am honestly quite happy to see the improvement of AI lately in late 2025, so I did use the 4.5 Opus to scan my templates and see some of the periodic notes and see the overall amount of files for each periodic.
(I don’t really care about daily notes being in training data, cause I know myself I am using it not for really personal stuff, I have personal folders separately)
(yeah I totally overdone the templates periodic notes in the past, I thought having it like a work environment would be beneficial for my productivity. but it turns out I felt like double working and only fill these periodic notes mostly on working hours too)
I am thankful for highly customizable vault and the simplest markdown formatting on notes app like Obsidian, it’s heavily helping me in just focus on action and writing and ideas, and not worrying about uncertain file format and backup method in the future <3