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can some Obsidian power users please tell me about their setup, it seems super nice and flexible but as far as using it for organizing projects I'm a little at a loss and learning other people's workflows sometimes helps

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@ingrid I am not a "power user", and to associate my use of Obsidian (or anything else) with the term "workflow" would be to insult the term. BUT, I would suggest that the "other people's set-ups" approach to Obsidian can distract you from doing what's probably the most useful thing when it comes to working out whether it's for you, and if so how... and that most useful thing is: just start typing stuff up and putting it in there.

@ingrid Like, for real. Just write stuff in there. Start a lot of new notes. Link to ones you've already written, or not written yet. Eventually you'll hit a point where you're like "oh, I wonder if there's some way to do... ? ", and then you go looking for a way to do that thing. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you just have a messy vault of notes. But even that is searchable, structurable, mess-around-with-able. Just use it. "Fettle", as we Brits sometimes say.

@ingrid I've been going for about nine months now? Still not sure if I'm "using" it yet. Lotta notes piling up in there, though! Is it helping? Could I be doing it better? I don't know! But I'm typing up a lot of stuff I would otherwise probably have not typed up at all, so, yay?

@ingrid I use it to organize my creative projects (songwriting and large scale music projects), to store my journal entries in plain text, and to document life things that I will never remember, eg how such and such server is set up and what commands I have to use regularly.

I could easily do this without plugins, but I do use a database plugin to make a few bits of that easier.

The key for me is not to try to use it for things like task management, but simply as a documentation tool.

@ingrid i use their discord server as my go to wiki. Lot of discussions around various ways to approach onsidian.

My structure: I made three basic anchor folders: people, companies & projects and use daily & quick notes for entries linking it to respective anchors (screenshot). Hope this helps.

@ingrid I use it in a very simple way, because I needed something a bit like a wiki but lightweight and local only. It stores and links 200 - 300 word long files that have a few set formats (basically just section headings), which I copy in from templates whenever I make a new one

@ingrid mostly I focus work around daily notes. today's note is my workbook for tasks today. tasks get checkboxes. at start of day, I move unfinished tasks to current day or to a backlog page.

larger projects get their own page, which has open task checkboxes at top, followed by journal sections with date headers, in reverse chronological order. done tasks get moved into today's journal section. some projects have a separate important-notes and backlog pages

@ingrid Also don't qualify myself as a power user, but I've moved all my journals (I have quite a few) into Obsidian in the last year, and I love it. I started out with everything in iCloud, which I do love because there are a couple of files I edit multiple times per day, and having them as easily accessible from my phone and desktop is crucial to my workflow.

I recently moved a bunch of gamedev files out of there and put them in git instead. (I've had some bad experiences with iCloud & git.)

@ingrid I found this really useful. Too much to ingest in one go, but lots of good stuff https://publish.obsidian.md/history-notes/01+Notetaking+for+Historians

(it's "for historians" but I found it really useful even as a statistician)

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This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.