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bramses / bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023

A highly opinionated, fully featured Obsidian vault that can get you from Zero to Zettelkasten lickety split!
MIT License
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aliases: [README] tags: [readme] title: README date created: Friday, December 9th 2022, 12:24:59 pm date modified: Saturday, December 17th 2022, 6:15:46 pm linter-yaml-title-alias: README

README

Introduction

Welcome to Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023! Thanks for checking it out.

What you'll see in this repo is a highly opinionated, unapologetic way to use the knowledge base application Obsidian. Note that this is not the only way to use Obsidian, nor is it the correct way. But it is a way that works well, especially once you understand the philosophies behind it.

Some of these techniques may be familiar to you, others may be novel due to the idiosyncracies about how my own mind works. I'll do my best to explain all of my philosophies and lived experience in the creation of this vault. Some techniques, processes and plugins are built into the platform. Other techniques leverage powerful external softwares to greatly enhance the Obsidian experience. I'll argue for those as they come as well as provide potential alternatives.

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 is a fully working vault template that you'll be able to run on your own by using the "Use this Template" button in the top right corner.

By following this guide and leveraging this template, I can promise that you'll be able to evolve from possibly never having used Obsidian to being up to date with the way I think about using this phenomenal software. If you are a current Obsidian user, I promise you'll come away with a few new tricks and theories to integrate into your own vault, or perhaps help you full pivot into this strategy. I hope you enjoy and have fun!!

*NB: This guide is really long, so don't be afraid to use the Table of Contents feature in the top right corner of the README.

Motivation

I've been using Obsidian for well over a year and have developed many experiments, some of which succeeded and many others that have failed. I have tried to compile all the lessons from these experiences and create a vault that mirrors my up to date thinking on how Obsidian can be maximally utilized.

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 (BHOV-2023) will tread the line of practicality and theory. Let's dive in!

Philosophies

Before we get into anything practical we need to discuss the underlying philosophies powering this vault, or none of the implementations will make any sense. Most of these philosophies I've learned or adapted from great contemporary and erstwhile authors and thinkers -- the following is a reflection of both my value structure as well as my take on the works of others.

Philosophies we'll encounter along the way:

(nb: github and obsidian use different link styles for multiple word titles so if you are reading this in Obsidian press the (o) next to the names to jump to the heading, disregard if you are on Github)

Deep Work

To do deep work is to be able to focus on a significant problem for an uninterrupted block of time. As a software engineer and writer, I am dependent on the flow state to create my best work and cut through the noise of digital and physical distraction.

To increase the likelihood of entering the flow state, and enhancing the quality of the flow state while it's engaged, BHOV-2023 has tools to help you cut through the noise and focus on what needs to get done.

Processes:

Plugins:

Related Philosophies:

Time Block Planning

Time Block Planning is the intentional process of giving every hour a "job". This intentional workflow allows for the creator to get a bird's eye view of their active commitments. This methodology bubbles up from daily commitments to a weekly view and a quarterly view. These views allow for enough space for projects to finish, while being short enough to see realistic change.

In BHOV-2023, I don't functionally time block that much. This is because I usually get a late start to the day, and I don't like using calendars that much. I've found writing the time next to notes in my daily page works just fine, e.g.:

1-3p coding
330-5 meeting with [[blah]]
...

if I need a notification for a meeting, I'm most likely gonna be late regardless…

If you are planning on using a daily calendar, I'd recommend the Full Calendar plugin. I hear good things!

Time Block Planning is great for weekly planning and quarterly planning as well. The weekly plan informs the actions taken in the daily plan and the quarterly plan informs the actions taken in the weekly plan. When combined with Templater (plugin) and Periodic Notes (plugin), Time Block Planning gives a great weekly review to look forward to.

Plugins:

Related Philosophies:

PARA

The PARA framework is a structure that utilizes cross app folders with the same names (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) act as buckets to capture different bits of information. The main value of PARA to this vault is the Project and Archive folders. These two folders alone do a ton of work and allow resources to "live" inside their parent project folder. This makes organization much easier, as well as the retrieval of resources used to create old projects.

If you look in the PARA directory (/_PARA), you'll notice a distinct lack of and Areas and Resources folder. That is because in BHOV-2023, I've offloaded a lot of the value those folders provide to other tools and techniques that will be discussed later. If you have well defined areas in your life and prefer to keep non-project related resources in a centralized place, feel free to recreate the folders!

Scripts:

Plugins:

Related philosophies:

CODE

CODE by Tiago Forte stands for Capture, Organize, Distill and Express. Fast capture with minimal friction is a priority goal of BHOV-2023, because you never know when and where inspiration will strike.

To do quick capture on my computer, I leverage Shimmering Obsidian (powerful plugin in Alfred that can be evoked anywhere on your Mac (while watching a video, browsing the web, etc.)) and custom written iOS shortcuts.

The point of Capture shortcuts is to avoid the Doorway effect. The shortcuts put raw thoughts in our Inbox/ for future processing. The important part is that we can trust that our ideas will land in a place where we can process them later.

A similar process is done on my mobile device leveraging iOS shortcuts and Obsidian Sync.

These apps and plugins serve as scouts, running the long distance of time and space to place ideas in your trusted vault from anywhere in the world.

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

In BHOV-2023, Organization is accomplished using plugins like Dataview and Tasks to surface relevant data from across the entire vault. For example, tasks captured from your mobile device on the go anywhere in your vault will show up in the same place with this Tasks filter:

not done
heading includes todo/mobile

This is a great way to de-stress about open tasks getting buried in some previous note, never to be seen again.

Distill will be discussed in the Progressive Summarization section, and Express in the Digital Garden and CMS sections.

Plugins:

Scripts:

Related Philosophies:

Progressive Summarization

Progressive Summarization is a research/reading technique developed by Tiago Forte. In short, the goal is to read something, look for salient and helpful material, and highlight it. Then a second pass is applied, doubly emphasizing the important bits you find important. Finally, a third pass is done to rewrite the concept in your own words. Let's use the paragraph from above as an example:

Highlighted from source:

…

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

…

Second pass (notice the bolded text):

…

In a nod to Greek history, the first marathon commemorated the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield near the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C. According to legend, Pheidippides ran the approximately 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to some anxious Athenians. Not quite in mid-season shape, he delivered the message "Niki!" (Victory!) then keeled over and died.

…

Third pass (my own words of the passage above):

The first marathon was run not for fun or to push one's body for exercise, but for duty. The messenger Pheidippides made the 25 mile trek on foot to pronounce victory (Niki!) to the Athenian citizens. He then promptly died.

To facilitate this process BHOV-2023 leverages Readwise and Unique Note Creator to do the three passes. Readwise is pass one, pass two is to exract salience and a title and tags (this can be done with AI thanks to GPT-3 Summarizer!), but a lot of the times I do it by hand. Finally, the tird pass is setting the note into it's final Zettelkasten state, and assigning to a PARA project, or leaving it in the root directory.

Plugins:

Related Philosophies:

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten, German for slip box, is the metaphorical glue that holds ideas together that don't belong to a particular PARA project. Zettelkasten is a loose but extremely powerful structure, and a system with few hard and fast rules that can scale magnificently.

These rules are:

  1. Unique Identifier as filenames
  2. Atomic content -- one note roughly equals one coherent thought
  3. Links, tags, and citations are more important than including the knowledge in the note itself

Fortunately for us, Zettelkasten is a core feature of the Obsidian workflow. The core plugin Unique Note Creator will take care of creating IDs. Plugins like Footnote Shortcut and Zotero Plugin make citing external resources breeze. This allows you as the author to focus on two things:

  1. Is this note atomic?
  2. What will I link it to?

In BHOV-2023, Zettlekasten is responsible for ideas and notes that don't fit cleanly into the Projects or Archive folders of PARA.

In other words, Zettelkasten notes are evergreen knowledge that form your lattice of thinking, but don't have specific utility. In BHOV-2023, the goal of the Zettelkasten is to serve as puzzle pieces to help us Express (the E in CODE) ourselves.

Notes like [[202212090137]] and [[202212090136]] live in the root directory, but have tags that serve as "buckets". The page preview plugin allows us to hover over the notes and see what's inside (if you're reading this in Obsidian, go ahead and give it a try!).

Make sure to give context to links when you link them for future reference.

When creating a new file in BHOV-2023, by default it will automatically create it to the Zettelkasten spec. A single Zettelkasten is referred to as a Zettel, so each note is tagged with #zettel by default in BHOV-2023.

Plugins:

Related Philosophies:

Workflows:

New file (ctrl-n) automatically creates a Zettelkasten note to spec, you just need to enter a title as specified by Templater.

If you have content you want to extract from an existing note into a Zettel, you can highlight the text you want to convert, copy it to clipboard, and then create a new note with ctrl-n

You can use alt-shift-z to search Zettelkasten notes by their human readable titles.

Digital Gardening

If Zettelkasten is the planting of the seed of a single idea, Digital Gardening is the maintenance of the whole. It is the work of groundskeeping the entire vault, and finding utility in the edges.

We can ease the "writers' block" of deciding which notes to upkeep by leveraging Random Note Review, which will surface three notes to review in our Daily Note.

<%* const files = app.vault.getFiles(); const random = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const random2 = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const random3 = Math.floor(Math.random() * (files.length - 1)); const randomNote = files[random]; const randomNote2 = files[random2]; const randomNote3 = files[random3] -%>

- [ ] [[<% randomNote.basename %>]]
- [ ] [[<% randomNote2.basename %>]]
- [ ] [[<% randomNote3.basename %>]]

<%* const todayIs = tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>

The side benefit of all this work is that it publishable! Since a garden is a collection of linked and curated thoughts, a published garden serves as a public utility similar to maintained gardens in the real world.

Visitors can meander around your thought garden, stopping to marvel at the hydrangeas, or beelining straight for the mini pagoda and water feature in the corner.

Later, we'll address how to separate private and public, but for now, assume any note that you do the work to Zettelkasten-ize, will eventually have some sort of public value.

Plugins:

Related philosophies:

An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

Daily journaling is a meta habit, a habit that anyone can apply to their existing life at any point for an improved experience.

Journaling allows for reflection and revisitation of past thoughts and events, planning and decomposing future desires into attainable goals, and most importantly, journaling serves as a conduit for thought in the present.

The self-Socratic method undertaken by a journaling exercise is both a form of catharsis and a tool for unabated growth.

In BHOV-2023, the dashboard is the daily note. The daily note is the reflection of the driver, a trusted sidekick in the goings on of the day. In addition, thanks to Time Block Planning, BHOV-2023 has weekly and Quarterly notes as well, which are linked to the evolving daily note.

Leveraging Templater and Periodic Notes, BHOV-2023 creates a flexible daily note template that can easily adapt to the owner's life.

Plugins:

Jamming

In music production, jamming is getting together with some like minded individuals to create a creative output. The goal is to have fun and find a riff that everyone can groove to, and bring out the best in their instrument.

Obsidian is first and foremost a single player experience. There are ways to engage publicly, but many of these techniques are readonly.

Indeed, the best jamming sessions in Obsidian come from the notes that already exist in the vault. We can use random notes to surface and inspire thought, to break existing thought patterns and introduce new concepts into our line of thinking.

The goal of jamming is to have no goal. The idea is to have fun, to explore the vault for interesting ideas or concepts to snowball off of later.

Plugins:

AGILE

In technology, AGILE is the process of splitting software development work into two week sprints.

The AGILE methodology pairs well with PARA and Time Block Planning because it forces us to prioritize elements of a project that can be delivered in two weeks.

In BHOV-2023, Weekly Notes (/Calendar/Weekly) highlight active projects, as well as when they were started to give a high level grasp of management. In the projects themselves, there is a QuickAdd: Add to Project Kanban option, allowing you to quickly add new to-do items to the project.

Quarterly notes (/Calendar/Quarterly) track the opposite. The quarterly note tracks how much was achieved in the quarter. This is good for feeling accomplished. The Quarterly note also stores projects you want to accomplish, but don't have time for right now.

Plugins:

Metcalfe's Law

Metcalfe's Law is a concept that says that the value of a network is the square of the number of nodes in the network.

In the parlance of Zettelkasten, the more connected notes you have, the higher the value of the overall system.

Processing notes from Readwise and Daily Notes will automatically put you into Metcalfe Law category, over a long period of time. The goal is to keep showing up, and to keep expanding your network whenever possible.

Related Philosophies:

Atticus Finch is the Same in the House as He is on the Public Streets

Being a local device first application, Obsidian is "private by default" (well, at least as private as everything else on your laptop).

Obsidian also has tools for publishing public notes that we saw in the Digital Garden section above, namely the Publish plugin.

BHOV-2023 acknowledges the need to keep certain things private and has a Private folder that uses Supercharged Links and Style Settings to visually warn you if you are linking to a private note in your shared section. In addition, in .gitignore there are a selection of files you may want to consider keeping Private and not committing to version control software (discussed later).

Plugins:

Large Language Models and Transformers

AI has been taking over the news lately, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs). These models serve as transformers, meaning that they can embed any type of data (code, text, images, etc.) and use a strategy called attention and a bunch of data to predict the next token using probability.

How and why this works is beyond the scope of this README, but know that we can use LLMs to our benefit.

Thanks to Zettelkasten, we have perfectly cordoned off atomic thoughts that can be embedded for semantic search.

Semantic search is a powerful type of search that indexes across meaning instead of full text searching. For example, I might be able to search singer and retrieve "Taylor Swift", but if I were using full text search, singer and Taylor Swift have no letters in common so I would return zero results. This is not relevant for BHOV-2023, but I'm actively working in this area, so hope for good news on this front soon!

Plugins:

Related Philosophies:

Automation and Scripting

Automation is useful because it prevents the creative, energy-requiring human from having to do repeat, boring work. By abstracting away a problem, we can simply press a button that will fire a bunch of processes in the background to do work for us.

Automation provides leverage, which is desperately needed if one wants to get serious work done. In BHOV-2023, automation can be found everywhere, from the templates to the commands in the ribbon; each automation is meant to save you time and to allow you to put your energy where it really matters, forming new ideas and finishing quality projects.

Plugins:

Content Management Systems

Posting content on the internet has become a very normalized thing to do -- whether you post on your own domain or a large website like Twitter. Sharing coherent and well structured thought is rapidly becoming a necessary skill to survive in the 21st century.

Fortunately for us, we have a whole databank of really good thoughts to pull from! With structured data sourcing from PARA and "unstructured" data emerging from our Zettelkasten, creating long form content is more about stitching together existing raw material than creating from scratch.

A content management system makes the process of posting easier taking care of boilerplate, formatting, serving to readers, etc. The most popular example is Wordpress, though many tools like Ghost/Substack serve similar roles these days.

Obsidian can also be used as a full e2e CMS. I know because I built one into Obsidian! The plugins required to make a full CMS are outside the scope of BHOV-2023, but if you'd like to see the code that powers my Obsidian backed CMS you can click here and here, or if you want a deep dive on the process of building a CMS into Obsidian, click here. If you use Ghost as a CMS, I also wrote a fork of the Obsidian Ghost Publish here

Plugins:

Related philosophies:

Antifragility

Antifragility is a concept by Nassim Taleb that states that certain systems can get stronger in response to minor crises. Antifragile systems don't just recover or rebound from stressors, they thrive. Examples of antifragile systems include animal muscles that get stronger when put under stress. The immune system is another example of an Antifragile system.

In BHOV-2023, Antifragility means that as your vault evolves you shouldn't feel ashamed or embarassed if a project fails, or an experiment with a new structure backfires. One of the top priorites of BHOV-2023 is to be flexible and adapt to your system. Remember, many/all of the items I'm suggesting are optional, but the stress of trying to make them adapt into your world view will make you and BHOV-2023 a stronger system. Fight what you see, be skeptical, make it better!

Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own

  • Bruce Lee

Related philosophies:

Version Control Systems

Version Control Systems like Git and SVN are specialized programs that track in history what happened to a particular file. For example, click this link to see a secret sentence that used to live right here: https://github.com/bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023/commit/bbb68cbfd5e224f3a2a4b3022afc73364c236233?diff=split

These changes are particularly useful to software engineering teams who need to trace the history of a working block of code. For our case in BHOV-2023, Git is mainly used for two things: file versioning and light publishing capability.

Git very easily can monitor the state of the vault at any period of time, creating a snapshot of connections, notes, and plugins at a given moment in time. This means that we can update our files without fear that we'll delete something important.

Git(Hub) also serves as a light publishing tool because you can have a public repository and GitHub has a Markdown renderer which means that when people visit files they will render in Markdown -- example.

Plugins:

External Software:

Related philosophies:

Causa Sui

In the Denial of Death, philosopher Ernest Becker discusses the idea that we all knowingly or unknowingly undergo Causa Sui projects, or immortality projects.

An immortality project is the desire for one to create meaning past their own life span, using their work, genetic progeny, or cultural beliefs of an afterlife.

As a daily journal system as well as a project management system, BHOV-2023 attempts to help spark and foster creativity, allowing the Causa Sui project to emerge organically through your thoughts, daily goings on, and work.

In addition, publishing Zettelkasten notes allows you to be highly productive, without doing extra work.

Related Philosophies:

Linking Your Thinking

Linking your Thinking by Nick Milo is the concept of using emergence to discover relationships between your notes.

I think of MoCs as directionally flexible Table of Contents. You can gather together a case from across your notes and link them in one space.

Automatically, Folder Notes include the Waypoint plugin which will keep a live version of all children in a folder. This is great for Parent level folders like Projects and Archive.

Manually, you may also look to create your own Maps of Content (MOCs) from a particular tag, or create a Zettelkasten note that is a map of other Zettelkasten Notes. Meta!

Plugins:

Implementation

Now that we have examined some of the philosophies that power BHOV-2023, we get to go into the gritty details of how to set BHOV-2023 up, starting with the Big Three Workflows.

The Big Three

Most interactions with BHOV fall under three categories: project related work, daily notes related work, and Zettelkasten related work. Each has its own set of workflows, and particularities. Let's dive into each and see how to work with each of them.

From Capture To Complete Thought (Zettelkasten)

There are numerous ways that new information comes into the BHOV-2023 vault. As long as we can trust that items will enter our vault, we can deal with them whenever. Since obsidian is folder backed, anything that can insert a file into BHOV-2023 will show up in your vault. If a note has the #to-process tag, it will show up in Computed/To Process.

When you open a note that needs processing, take a second to think about the note that you are looking at. Is it missing information or context that you can provide? Is it too long? Can it be shortened down to something more pithy?

To me, a note is "Zettelkastened" once it: conforms to the Zettelkasten format and you wouldn't mind putting in a letter and sealing up in an envelope (atomic).

Finally highlight the text that you just created and cut/copy it to clipboard. Once in the clipboard hit ctrl-n to make a new note, and templater it will automatically create a Zettelkasten note. Make sure to go back to the note you created and link the newly processed note!

Project Management Like a Pro (Projects)

Projects are goals that have a particular end state, whether that is a deadline or some sort of "project completion" state.

A project you are currently working on will go under the _PARA/Projects folder. You can use the ribbon commands to interface directly with active projects with the help of macros and user scripts.

When a project is finished, the folder is moved to the _PARA/Archive folder. For future projects if there was a particularly helpful resource, you can "summon" it by looking in the Resources of your Archived project.

Publishing the WIP resources is a great way to show your work, without having to stress about making a brand new format!

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing—you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work. (Location 211)

Show Your Work! - Austin Kleon

Daily Note Domination

Last but not least, the Daily Note Workflow allows for capture of events, thoughts, and to-dos in the real world. In the Daily Note Template, you can easily move up to the weekly note and the quarterly note that a daily note belongs to. In addition, the ribbon command Capture Thought allows for quick capture to the current daily note.

Folder Structure

The following is the folder structure used by BHOV-2023, along with short descriptions as to why each exists.

Elements of Markdown Important to BHOV-2023

Footers

Footers serve two very important roles: citation and non destructive updates. Citation is used in the Zettelkasten, to help link a note to its source material.

Footers also make for great non destructive updates to notes. This means you can revisit an old note, and instead of altering it directly, you can append a footnote to the end of a thought, without changing the structural meaning of the original file. Think of it as sedimentary rock, or a really lightweight VCS.

Footnote Shortcut combined with Natural Language Dates allows for super easy non destructive updates that serve as asides, knowledge from a wiser and smarter future you.[^1]

YAML

YAML, or frontmatter, serves as a way to get computed values or track over time. For example, if you are looking to establish a daily reading habit, you may desire to put that habit in a YAML and then track it.

// /Daily/2023-01-01

---
read: 0
---

// /Computed/Trackers.md

\`\`\`tracker
searchType: frontmatter
searchTarget: read
fixedScale: 1.0
fitPanelWidth: true
folder: Daily
datasetName: Read 20 mins or more
month:
\`\`\`

Tags

Tags are great for searching and grouping. Try and choose memorable tags that will stick out, and to group similar tags together using a plugin like Tag Wrangler.

Tests

The test folder allows you to check if the plug-ins are performing as normal. Since obsidian can't run test like you might in code you have to be a little bit more cheeky about running tests and really talk them out step-by-step as you might in writing unit tests for a programming language.

CRM

Another private but universal trait of humans is our relationships to others. Knowing this BHOV-2023 includes a private CRM (Private/CRM) that can help keep track of the important people in your life, as well as a smart computed view in Computed/CRM.

I use my CRM to keep track of important days like birthdays as well as items discussed (adult relationships can go months without speaking).

Ribbon Commands

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-18-40.png - Add a quick thought to Project_Name/Scratchpad. Good for project specific thoughts.

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-18-53.png - Create a new task in a project kanban. Good for an open specific project task.

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-18-44.png - create a new project with an optional Kanban Board, Resources page, and Scratchpad.

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-18-58.png - Lint a file. Can also by triggered with cmd + s

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-03.png - capture a thought to your daily note (if it exists)

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-10.png - Insert a link to another Zettel using the Luhmann plugin

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-15.png - open daily note

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-19.png - move a zettelkasten note from the root to the Private folder

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-24.png - Open a map view of all your notes using the Map View plugin. Looks for location: [lat,long] in frontmatter

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-28.png - open a new Excalidraw drawing using the Excalidraw plugin

Screenshot 2022-12-17 17-19-36.png - Open active file (and vault) in VSCode

Tips and Tricks

Someday/Maybe Tasks (GTD)

Since BHOV-2023 is catered towards immediate processes, you may be wondering where to put open goals you have for yourself that aren't immediately trackable; like "learn Italian" or "run a 5k". I personally create a Kanban within my Quarterly note, and in addition to the regular columns (To Do, In Progress, Complete, Waiting On) I have a fourth column called "Someday/Maybe". The reason I put it in my quarterly note is that quarterly review happens infrequently enough (once every three months) that I get to decide if I really want to take on a Someday/Maybe task. In addition, Quarterly planning is a great time to do long term goal planning and come up with concrete steps!

How To Search Effectively

Search is a critical component to a well functioning vault. Putting these notes in matters little if you can't find them later. Search can be split into two steps (broadly): the index step, and the query step.

The index step is where you have the most control. Make sure to populate your notes (especially the Zettels) with tags that you'll remember later. Choose a reasonable and helpful title, and add an alias or two, and split content into helpful headers!

The query step is more out of your hands but you can do things to improve your experience. Know if you are fuzzy searching or searching for exact keywords before you make you make a query. Leverage quotes (\"\") for exact searching, use Omnisearch for fuzzy searches. If you don't like the results you recieve from Omnisearch, try tweaking weights in the settings.

External Tools

Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 uses a lot of external tools and technologies. I firmly believe that each of these technologies plays a significant role in making Obsidian an ecosystem instead of a stand alone application. These tools serve as scouts, fetching information from different places and returning the goods to "home base". That being said, some/most/all have some form of financial component as well as their own learning curves, so I wouldn't be dissapointed if you don't want to use them. That said Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 works a lot better as a holistic system if you do.

Tools Used

Readwise

Readwise is a very powerful software that syncs with multiple form of inputs whether that be Twitter or books. The Readwise Official integration automatically syncs into Obsidian once you set it up with your account.

If you'd like to copy my settings you can go into tests/external/readwise to see the export settings that I've used.

Alfred

Mac only

Alfred is a global Mac search app that replaces Spotlight. Alfred's main claim to fame is this program ability allowing you to add multiple workflows that you can trigger with a hot key like "sc" or "run", etc.

Zotero

Zotero is an app that can help you with footnotes in citations in your Zettelkasten notes. There is a chrome extension that allows you to save the title of pretty much any book on Amazon, and then insert it directly into obsidian for a footnote and a citation.

GitHub

GitHub is a hosting service for code, in BHOV-2023 we use it to store snapshots of our vault, as well as make public changes that others can comment on.

Sync

Sync is an Obsidian official paid service that allows you to sync your obsidian vault between devices. Each vault has a 10 GB limit, so be careful with what you do with images, PDFs, movie files etc.

Publish

Publish is another official Obsidian paid service that allows you to share your vault on a public URL.

Shortcuts

IOS only

Shortcuts are small bits of code that run on your phone. These small workflows allow for macro style functionality.

In the near future I will publish the shortcuts that I use daily in a sister repo to BHOV-2023.

A Day in the Life - Real World Use

BHOV-2023 is only helpful if you can use it day in/day out as a tool to help you in life. Here's how I would use it in any random day (let's say Tuesday, perhaps):

Morning - refer to my weekly note to see what tasks I have open there -prepare the resources I need to do my best work, move tasks into my daily note and put commitments in my calendar
Afternoon - do deep work on my open projects as well as taken care of any commitments, Capture any to-dos that come up from my phone or my computer without context switching
Evening - review the notes in Computed/To Process. Process these notes into Zettelkasten notes.
Night - read new content in the reader app (blogs, youtube videos, podcasts) or my kindle and highlight the things that I like

Special Case: Saturday or Sunday

Reflection is a critical component to the value of this vault, and so one day a week must be carved out to do reflection. This shouldn't take more than thirty minutes or so, but it does need to happen once a week, so choose what works best for you.

Reflection is an extension on what happens on a normal evening where I spend more time processing notes and try to do deeper work in consolidating the thought processes that I've had over the week.

In BHOV-2023 it's easy to traverse through a whole week and just click between the notes to see what you thought during the different days, and use that as firepower to create new notes and ideas.

Mobile Integration (General)

In BHOV-2023, mobile is mainly used for "upstream" and "downstream" work. Upstream work is raw note insertion. On my phone, I have a "battalion" of shortcuts that manage putting notes into my Obsidian vault. From there, I do most of my processing work on the computer.

Downstream work is searching for existing notes or doing light progressive summarization. I try to keep the plugins on mobile light, here's what I use:

I'm hoping to refine BHOV-2023 for mobile over the course of 2023, and have something ready for BHOV-2024!

Installation

Great! Now that that's out of the way, we can finally get to running the vault, phew!

  1. Select Use this Template or git clone https://github.com/bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023.git. This will create a separate GitHub repo for you that will allow you to diverge and add your own flavor to BHOV-2023.
  2. Download into your local machine using git clone or download zip.
  3. Open the vault and rename it to whatever you want and open it in Obsidian
  4. Select "Trust Author ad enable plugins" to get the community plugins in BHOV-2023 (see picture below)
    1. trust author to get plugins.png
  5. Before you commit anything to GitHub, make sure you edit .gitignore to match what you want to publish. Doing this early will save you headaches down the road if you decide to publish (part) of your vault. To do this run the command: Obsidian Git: edit .gitignore. You'll already see some commented out options that you might choose to hide from uploading to get hub whether it's private or public.
  6. Depending on when you clone this repo, you may want to check plugins for updates. In the bottom right corner, the plugin Plugin Update Tracker will alert you if any plugins in BHOV-2023 need to be updated. If the little plug icon has a red X next to it see what plug-ins need to be updated, and update them.
  7. Open this file (README) and pin it with ctrl-.
  8. From there explore the vault a bit. I would first recommend visiting the starred notes in the bottom left corner.
  9. Then I recommend opening the PARA folder, looking at the projects in the files within.
    1. Try adding to the Test Project scratch pad by using the Quick add: add to project scratchpad command
    2. Do the same with the project kanban command
  10. Hit the open today button in the left and ribbon to create a new daily note

"Required" Plugins

Truly nothing in this vault is required, but if you want the full experience, these community plugins are quote-unquote mandatory:

The following is a list of these plugins as well as a one sentence blurb of how I use them in BHOV-2023 and why they create the fabric of the system.

Optional Plugins

These plugins aren't needed, as some are QoL and others have a steep price tag attached (some even have both!). But these apps are no less critical to my workflow than the "Required" apps above, so I need to include them.

The following is a list of these plugins as well as a one sentence blurb of how I use them in BHOV-2023 and why you may be interested.

Migration Guide for Current Obsidian Users

In the creation of BHOV-2023, the author was in the middle of his own migration from his vault of 1.5 years to BHOV. So this is all quite relevant!

First, the the questions you should ask yourself is: what about your current vault is necessary, what you'd like to change, and where you ideally want to be after migrating. Keep in mind, many of the tricks and strategies used in BHOV-2023 can be inserted into existing vaults, so you might not even need to make a full move! If you're interested in a particular philosophy you can look at the plug-in section under it and just try and integrate those plug-ins into your vault.

After following the traditional installation section, the first thing you're probably going to want to do is start migrating a few notes you already have in your old vault into the correct buckets. Once you get a feel for that manually, try to move your outside vault workflows (Alfred, Readwise, etc) to point to BHOV-2023. This will help facilitate the transition without a drastic switch over as new notes will be placed into BHOV-2023 and your existing workflows will be maintained in your old vault.

Settings

BHOV-2023 has set up numerous settings, but the important ones are as follows:

After You're Up and Running

After getting your sea legs for a few days (perhaps a week!) and you feel comfortable with Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault 2023 system, it will sadly be time for us to part and for you to forge onwards. You'll be able to safely delete the following files:

Troubleshooting

Obsidian is a software with many winding roads. Due to the complexity of community plugins being largely driven by independent developers that work for free, some plugins don't always function as they should. Here's a few things to look out for:

Sometimes Commander (plugin) moves things on the ribbon by themselves or items disappear

Try `View > Force Reload

Sync is acting weird

Make sure that you are syncing to this vault and not another one in your sync settings

Templater isn't completing templates correctly

This one's tricky, but try and find out the error from View > Toggle Developer Tools. If that doesn't work try to delete the offending line or the template all together.

Dataview isn't querying correctly

Make sure the query is syntactically correct. Look into the tag or path that it is pulling from, do they exist?

A script isn't working and I don't know which one

Check the _scripts folder. You can't see/edit JS in Obsidian, so you'll need to edit it in another software like VSCode

Should I fork or "Use this Template" for BHOV-2023?

This Stack Overflow answer should help

BHOV-2023 Template was updated and I want the updates!

This is a bit tricky since any template children off of BHOV-2023 have entirely separate histories. But it it is technically possible.

Videos

Over the year of 2023, I'll be deep diving into different components of BHOV-2023 as some aspects are better communicated visually.

Final Word

BHOV-2023 would not be possible without the amazing team and community that make Obsidian what it is. This vault works because the technology is built by an amazing team and an amazing community, and all thanks goes to all of the fantastic developers that keep the lights on.

I really do love this software -- it's had such a major impact on my life, it's hard to accurately quantify. It truly is a life-changing piece of technology. I jokingly tell my friends that I've had two pivotal moments in my life where I've noticed a stepwise improvement in my intelligence. The first was when I started reading as an adult as a past-time instead of as a chore. The second is when I first manually linked two discrete ideas in Obsidian and saw them connected real space. The edge between the notes felt like a formalization of a new thought -- something new that I could grasp tangibly.

If you liked what you read here, please go ahead and give this repo a star. Better yet if you feel so inclined hit the donate button ;). As I come across new and better paradigms I'm planning on keeping BHOV-2023 updated, perhaps even doing a yearly release with major updates. In the interim I will be updating this README as I go along the year, as well as participating in any discussions above in the discussions tab.

Note: If you use BHOV-2023 on Android or Windows, please let me know what replacements you use for the iOS/Mac apps. I'd really appreciate it!

There is an a lot of knowledge that got lost during the set up of this vault but I tried to be as explicit as possible with every step. As time goes on I will try and update this vault to match the parity of starting from scratch and getting new users going as fast as possible.

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

Bram Adams (@bramses) is a writer and programmer based out of NYC.

Bram publishes a Zettelkasten with a weekly newsletter, is a community developer ambassador for OpenAI, and does freeleance contracts (for hire!) related to AI/web dev/AR+VR.

Bram is the creator of Stenography, an API and VSC Extension that automatically documents code on save, which went #1 on Product Hunt. He also is the author of Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault, an extremely detailed philosophy + vault template used by hundreds of Obsidian users (new and old!), and ChatGPT MD, a (nearly) seemless integration of Chat GPT into Obsidian which has been downloaded by thousands of Obsidian users.

You can learn more about him and his work on his website.

The best way to support his work is to sign up for his newsletter here.

[^1]: hello from the future!

[^2]: calendar example