Order in the Chaos - Obsidian and writing
Posted on January 4, 2024 • 8 min read • 1,578 words
I’m quite a chaotic person. Yep, I do have self-awareness, at least in that respect. I love many things and doing many things. I start a lot of projects, but I don’t finish all of them. Or rather: They are in various stages of ‘complete’.
That sometimes gives you the feeling that you’re not getting things done, or that they don’t matter. Especially since I write these things for myself. But a few weeks ago, I decided that things have to change. Not only because conversations with my coach made some issues clear, or because things are a bit messy at my daily job. Of course not 😃
I write because I enjoy it. It helps me get things off my chest. On the other hand, I want others to be able to read my experiences and hopefully do something useful with them for themselves.
With that thought in mind, I have started jotting down all my ideas in Obsidian and am now slowly developing them.
What is Obsidian?
If you boil it down, Obsidian is nothing more and nothing less than a program for making notes or editing texts, a text editor. But it’s an incredibly good, smart, and extendable text editor.
At its core, Obsidian allows you to save text in files. You can link these files to each other. This lets you jump quickly through all your files. You can enhance this text with Markdown. If you’ve read my article about Hugo, Markdown should look familiar. It allows you to focus on writing your texts without being too distracted by formatting.
Some features of Obsidian:
- Uses Markdown
- Is fast
- There’s no need to click ‘save’
- Has a built-in ‘canvas’/mindmapping board
- Is extendable
- Is offline
You might see the last point as a disadvantage, but I’ll explain why I think it’s an advantage.
When you’re writing texts, you don’t want to be distracted by just about anything. So not even by your editor having to download something from the internet or having to save. Ultimately, it’s about writing your text. The more text you can produce, the better it ultimately is. Of course, in the case of a blog, the texts still need to get on the internet, but we have other tools for that. You could use Wordpress for this, with or without a Markdown plugin. Or you could use a static page generator like Hugo, which I have written about before.
My order in chaos
To keep everything a bit manageable, I’ve created a dashboard. This dashboard is a canvas, on which I’ve placed several cards. These cards refer to a specific heading within a file. That file, in turn, contains a number of queries:
- idea
- research
- draft
- review
- plan
- published
- update
By changing the status tag in a note from idea to research, for example, the note is automatically moved to the next card. This also applies to all other statuses. A ‘special’ status is the update status. I add this status to articles that also have the published status. This way, I also see which articles I have already published, but still want to update. Or if I want to write a follow-up. I can then add a new idea or update the original one.
Because I use this as a dashboard in Obsidian, it tells me at a glance where I am in my writing: which articles I’m working on (draft), or what research I’m doing (research). So when I have time, I can choose what to do with the time I have at the moment.
What does my “writing idea” look like in Obsidian
As mentioned, a note in Obsidian is a file. You can add characteristics to the beginning of the file, the so-called front matter. I use the following template for creating ideas in Obsidian.
---
tags:
- self-development
- Obsidian
idea: How do I create order in chaos with writing
type:
- idea
idea: How do I create order in chaos with writing
status:
- draft
---
Canvas: [[creating order in chaos.canvas]]
## Order in chaos: Obsidian and writing
# Related ideas & other content
\```dataview
TABLE title, idea
FROM "ideas" AND !"Templates" OR "Content"
WHERE any(contains(file.tags,this.file.tags))
AND
file.name != this.file.name
SORT file.name DESC
\```NB: Ignore the backslashes near dataview and backticks. They are only there so that the website’s formatting isn’t messed up. I still need to figure out how to use backticks within codeblocks.
In this case, I’ve given a number of properties:
- The title so I can easily create an overview of all titles
- The type which indicates if it’s going to be a blog, a video, an audio article, or for example a photo or other graphic.
- The original idea
- In what status the idea currently is. Is it still just an idea, am I researching, or am I writing
- And finally, the tags. Based on tags, you can easily retrieve articles. These are also the tags I use on my site.
What plugins do I use
For writing articles, I currently use these plugins:
- Dataview
- Metadata Menu
- Commander
- QuickAdd
There are more plugins that are useful for writing, like the longform plugin, but I haven’t used those (yet).
Below I shortly explain what they do and how I use them.
Dataview
With the Dataview plugin, you turn your Obsidian Vault into one big database, with all the possibilities that come with it. You can perform simple searches, or queries, across all your files. Do you want all the files with the status Idea? No problem. Do you also want to filter out certain directories? Also no problem. The query I use to find all my blog ideas is this one:
TABLE WITHOUT ID link(idea) as Idea, dateformat(file.ctime, "yyyy-MM-dd") as Date, tags
FROM -"Templates" AND -"Classes" or #idea
WHERE contains(lower(status), "idea")
SORT dateformat(file.ctime, "yyyy-MM-dd") DESCThis query returns a table where the status equals ‘idea’. It looks across all directories, except for the Templates and Classes directories. If a file has the idea tag, it’s also included. The table is then sorted based on the file’s date in descending order.
Another list that I use, which you see in the template above
TABLE title, idea
FROM "ideas" AND !"Templates" OR "Content"
WHERE any(contains(file.tags,this.file.tags))
AND
file.name != this.file.name
SORT file.name DESCThis ensures that in every idea a table is automatically filled with other articles or ideas that have one or more tags in common with this idea. This way, I have a head start when writing and can refer to relevant articles.
Obsidian itself also has possibilities for this: backlinks.
When you create a link to another file, you can find it in the backlink panel. You can also enable it so that backlinks are automatically displayed under every file. Creating a link to another file, whether it exists or not, is done by putting the name between brackets: [[another file]]
Metadata Menu
You can of course fill in all your properties by hand. You can also use Metadata Menu. You then create a ’template’ for your files, allowing you to fill in or select from a list a certain set of properties. You can automatically give every note a fileClass, and based on that, do all kinds of smart things. If you’re still thinking “What does that metadata menu actually do?”, I can’t explain it better right now. That might be because I don’t understand it myself that well yet. It helps me in keeping the properties per file in sync, at least.
QuickAdd
QuickAdd lets you quickly create new files or notes. You can use templates (which also come as standard functionality in Obsidian) to pre-prepare new notes. I’ve created a QuickAdd action called ‘idea’, which then creates a new note based on the template you see above. This note thus contains the standard formatting and most important properties. The note is placed in the correct directory (idea in this case) and given the name of the idea. Then the idea opens, and I can start typing right away.
Commander
You can use the hotkey cmd-P (on macOS) or ctrl-P (on Windows) to open the command palette and search for your newly created QuickAdd action. But if you want to add something quickly, maybe that’s not quite frictionless enough.
Daily Stats
Since you want to know how much you’ve actually written, you naturally need to see it. Daily Stats, as the name suggests, provides daily statistics on your writing. You can easily see how many words you’ve typed that day, across all your notes in Obsidian. If you want to type a certain number of words per day, you can see if you can stop writing or if you need to keep going. In addition, Daily Stats has a panel that you can display on the side so you can see how much you’ve written over a longer period.
The future
Things change so quickly in Obsidian. The Metadata Menu has several updates that I’m definitely looking at. On the other hand, I try to avoid tweaking too much instead of actually writing. We’ll see what the future holds.
Source
Of course, I didn’t come up with all this myself, I’m too chaotic for that, as I’ve said. I’ve watched a lot of videos from Danny Hatcher and Jon Stewart . What a wealth of information those guys provide. It can be high-level sometimes, but it’s definitely worth following.
