Note Taking Templates I Use in Obsidian  ## Metadata - Author: [[Nicole van der Hoeven]] - Full Title: Note Taking Templates I Use in Obsidian - Category: #articles - Document Note: # Title: Templates for Efficient Note-Taking in Obsidian - - - tags: #Obsidian #Templates #Efficiency Author: Courtney Robertson Source: Courtney's YouTube Video Reference: [Link to the YouTube Video] date created: {{date:2023-12-17}}T{{time:15:30}} - - - ## Table of Contents: - Index Creation - 📝 Summary - 📖 Main Content - 🗒️ Notes - 📖 References - 🗣️ Paraphrase - 🧪 Hypotheses - 📊 Methodology - 💡 Implications - 🔮 Future Research - ❓ Implications - ✅ Logical validity - Conclusion ## Index Creation: [No specific terms or concepts were highlighted for indexing in this source.] ## 📝 Summary: Courtney Robertson, a seasoned user of Obsidian, shares her experience and insights on using templates to streamline note-taking in the application. She discusses various types of templates she uses, such as those for meetings, people, periodic notes, gaming, and content creation. Templates serve as predefined structures that automate repetitive tasks and help organize notes efficiently. ## 📖 Main Content: Courtney describes how she employs templates in Obsidian to enhance her note-taking workflows. She categorizes her template usage into five main areas: meetings, people, periodic notes, gaming, and content creation. ### 🗒️ Notes - Courtney has over 100 templates in her Obsidian vault, which she uses to expedite various types of notes. - She primarily uses templates for meetings, including default meetings, specific agendas, and social meetings. - The templates for people contain metadata, including details about how she met them, their history, family, and more. - Courtney utilizes templates for periodic notes, such as yearly reviews, to structure her goal setting and review processes. - For gaming, she has templates for player and GM sessions, making it easier to document tabletop role-playing game sessions. - In content creation, Courtney has templates for video and writing, which include metadata and structures to guide her through the creative process. ## 📖 References: [No external references were cited in the source.] ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: Courtney mentions that when she began using Obsidian, she realized she was repeatedly creating the same types of notes, which she found tedious. As someone who values automation, she was pleased to discover Obsidian's core plugin called Templates. Over the years, she has accumulated over 100 templates that help reduce the monotony of note-taking. Courtney explains that templates are predefined patterns that can be applied to different notes to avoid retyping the same content. Obsidian offers two options for implementing templates: the core plugin Templates and the community plugin Templater, the latter being more powerful. She emphasizes that templates can be used for various purposes, including meetings, managing people, periodic notes, gaming sessions, and content creation. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. Future studies could explore the impact of using templates on productivity and note organization in knowledge management applications like Obsidian. 2. Investigate how different types of templates, such as those for meetings and goal setting, influence task efficiency and goal achievement. 3. Analyze the effectiveness of templates in improving the documentation and recall of tabletop role-playing game sessions. 4. Examine the role of templates in streamlining content creation processes for various types of media, such as videos and written articles. ### 📊 Methodology: To study the impact of templates, researchers could conduct surveys and interviews with users of knowledge management tools like Obsidian. They could also analyze user data and note-taking habits before and after implementing templates to measure changes in efficiency and organization. ### 💡 Implications: The use of templates in knowledge management tools can potentially enhance productivity and streamline workflows. It may also improve the quality and consistency of documentation, benefiting both individuals and teams. ### 🔮 Future Research: 1. Investigate the integration of artificial intelligence and natural language processing in automatically generating templates based on user needs. 2. Explore the customization of templates for specific industries or professions, such as academia, business, or healthcare. 3. Examine the impact of collaboration on template usage within teams and organizations. 4. Research the accessibility and usability of template features in various knowledge management applications. ### ❓ Implications: The future research outlined above has the potential to advance our understanding of how templates can revolutionize knowledge management and productivity in various domains. ### ✅ Logical validity: The source provides practical insights into using templates in Obsidian for efficient note-taking. Courtney's explanations are clear and logically coherent. There are no apparent logical fallacies in her presentation. The tone of the source is informative and instructional, guiding users on how to make the most of templates in Obsidian. ## Conclusion: Courtney Robertson's experience and guidance on using templates in Obsidian offer valuable insights for optimizing note-taking workflows. Templates can be a powerful tool for reducing repetitive tasks and improving organization in knowledge management applications. Courtney's categorization of templates into different use cases provides a practical framework for users to implement and customize templates according to their needs. Short Summary for [Note taking templates I use in Obsidian (Obsidian Tour 2023)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) "Obsidian Note Taking Templates: Automate Your Note Taking Workflows with Core and Community Plugins" [00:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=2) Obsidian's templates plugin automates note creation to simplify workflows. [02:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=138) Using templates with metadata for ad hoc meetings [04:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=273) Note-taking templates for different types of meetings and individuals [06:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=416) Use of note-taking templates in Obsidian for periodic notes and yearly reviews. [09:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=552) Templates provide traceability and chaining of periodic notes. [11:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=695) Using the Lazy DMS template for game pacing [14:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=841) Using templates for writing provides structure and motivation [16:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=975) Choosing the right format for note-taking [18:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=1100) Using find and replace and Quick Ad for note taking efficiency [20:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=1218) Using templates in Obsidian for consistency and automation --------------------------------- Detailed Summary for [Note taking templates I use in Obsidian (Obsidian Tour 2023)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) "Obsidian Note Taking Templates: Automate Your Note Taking Workflows with Core and Community Plugins" [00:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=2) Obsidian's templates plugin automates note creation to simplify workflows. - Obsidian's core plugin, templates, automates note creation by applying predefined patterns to different notes, reducing repetitive tasks. - For more advanced use cases, the community plugin, Templator, offers even more powerful features, including inserting text, creating complex macros, and running JavaScript within the Obsidian Vault. [02:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=138) Using templates with metadata for ad hoc meetings - Templates with metadata help in organizing meeting notes. - The use of templater strings to automate the insertion of meeting details. [04:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM&t=273) Note-taking templates for different types of meetings and individuals - I use different templates for agendas before, log - Summary: In this video, the speaker discusses the use of note-taking templates in Obsidian, a note-taking app. They explain that templates can be used to automate the creation of repetitive notes and provide examples of different types of templates they use, such as meeting templates, people templates, periodic notes templates, gaming templates, and creating templates. The speaker also provides tips for using templates effectively, including not creating too many templates, organizing templates in a separate folder, updating templates when necessary, and using the Quick Add feature to speed up template creation. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzRlhKFCYM - When I first started to use Obsidian, it didn't take me long to notice that I was typing out the same things and creating the same kinds of notes over and over again. And I really hate this repetitive low value type of work. In fact, automation is part of my day job. Luckily, Obsidian does have a solution for this in the form of the core plugin called Templates. Templates is built to automate this part of node creation. Fast forward three years later, and now apparently I have over a 100 Templates that I use in Obsidian. And in this video, I'm gonna take you through some of them and talk in general about how I use Templates in Obsidian to take a little bit of the tedium out of my note-taking workflows. In general, a template is a type of pattern that you can create beforehand and then apply to different notes so that you don't have to retype the same thing all over again. Now in Obsidian, there are two ways to implement this. You can either use the core plugin Templates, which I mentioned, or you can use a community plugin Templater. I think Templates is sufficient for most use cases, but if you're finding yourself wanting more, then Templater is like Templates on steroids. It can do anything from inserting just a bit of text to creating complex macros or even running JavaScript within your Obsidian vault. I have a whole video on that here, so check that out for more details because I go more into the installation and configuration and options for that there. And in this video, I'm gonna focus more on the Templates themselves. While I was looking over my Templates, I realized that I really use Templates for one of five major categories, meetings, people, periodic notes, gaming, and creating. So let's take a look at that now. This is my main vault and I have all of my Templates within this system folder, and then the Templates folder underneath that. And as you can see, I do have 110 notes. This is novel word count, by the way, the plugin that I'm using that shows the word and note count. So let's look at some of the meeting Templates that I use. The main one is a default meeting one. This is for something that is maybe an ad hoc type of meeting or a meeting where it's not clear that I'm going to have recurring ones of the same nature. So I do have metadata here. You can see that I'm using a template or string here that just replaces this entire thing with today's date, and then it has the type of meeting and a bunch of other metadata here, including the company, my company that I work for. And that just helps me search for it later on. So this is the H1 or primary heading of this note. And this is actually a link so that not only will this be replaced with the name of the note when I create the note, but because it's a link, it'll also update this heading. So I would then also fill out the attendees here. And I have a few sections that I would like to fill out. I have an agenda in case I want to create some talking points here before the meeting happens, a log for during the meeting. And then my next actions for after the meeting. So let's say I want to create a new meeting and I'm going to call this new meeting here. I would then either use a command pane to insert a template. So you can see that there's some Templates that are already here with hot keys, or I can use this insert template modal. What that means is I can just use the hot key for inserting a template and that'll bring up this modal of all of the Templates that I can choose from. So in this case, I want to the default meeting one. So I'm going to enter that and you'll see that there are Templater strings here. Now this one is just going to be replaced with a date, and this is going to be replaced with the title. So because I've applied this template manually, I can then go ahead and open up the command pane and execute the command for replacing the Templates in the active file, which you'll see I've hot keyed here. So I'm just going to use the hot key like I typically would. And that fills in those things already. The date and this heading, which is actually a link to this file, so it's kind of linking to itself. And the reason for that is so that if I change this, then the heading will update as well without my needing to do it. Then I would go ahead and fill in the attendees here, like maybe I'll put my friend and colleague Marie Cruz there. Here are some sections that I would fill out. The agenda is more for before the meeting, so I make sure I cover the things that I wanna cover. The log is for the things that we actually talked about in the meeting. And the next action section is for after the meeting, and that's when I write down things that I need to action that we talked about in the meeting. I just showed you the default template, but I also have a few other meetings that I use here. So you can see this K6 Company Sync, OSS sync, Tech Talk. Those are meetings that I have specific agendas for. Sometimes I like to bring in agendas from other places and embed them within the note. Here's another one that's just a social meeting, and here are a bunch of sayings. I'll show you the one with David because I know I can. So this is what that template looks like. This is my manager, and right now I am embedding this part of his note. So I have agenda sections within people's notes and I pull them into the meetings that I have with them. In this case, I have as an agenda item for David to talk about my fourth quarter OKRs. So let's talk about the template that I use for people. So I will click on this person template here, and this is just the standard one that I use. Now I have a bunch of metadata here. I don't always fill them out, but I do sometimes find them useful. I recently added this one called Hugs because some people aren't comfortable with hugs, so it's a true or false kind of thing. I also have this bit of template or code here that just moves this file over to the private gente folder, gente is people in Spanish. And that's just because I wanted to be able to make sure that all of the people are in a certain folder. So if I go here, I have a private one here, and then I have gente right there. That's just so I can make sure that I can exclude that from things like Obsidian Publish. So I never publish my notes on people. And then I have a few things here, like the agenda that I mentioned for David, how we met, history, the family, and I don't fill all of this up. If you're wondering what the section here about the personality and knives are, I made a video on people. So check out that video if you wanna know more about why and how I take so many notes on people. Another big use case I have for Templates is my periodic notes. Periodic notes is a community plugin. I have talked about it before in this goal setting video. So if you wanna see how everything connects, then I suggest you watch that. But we'll go over the Templates here. So this is my yearly review template and it has a bunch of things for me to fill out. Every year I have OKRs or objectives and key results. They're kind of like goals, but just a little bit smarter. And I would fill this out. And this template just helps me think clearly about what exactly I need to do. In this situation, for example, it prompts me with a question to ask, and it makes me think about last year. And this is actually also an embed. So in my yearly note, this is going to pull in the yearly review from last year, and it'll pull in the OKRs that I said that I would do. This yearly review is then also linked to in the quarterly one. So here is my template for quarterly note. And by the way, all the Templates that I'm mentioning in this video, like the meetings, the people, all of the periodic stuff and even the ones for gaming and creating are available on my Patreon. So this is my Patreon vault. It has a few workflows here, and you know you can click on them, so it'll tell you how to use the Templates and stuff. And it also comes with macros, like automatically adding things to the agenda. And it has a bunch of Templates that I'm gonna be talking about in this video. If you'd like to join my Patreon, then you can click on that link. It's not necessary, but it's a great way to support me and encourage me, and it's also where I am able to talk to people on the Discord channel for Patreons. Thanks. I won't go too much into the detail for the periodic notes because I made a video all about that. But I did just want to point out that this is one of my main use cases for Templates. Another thing that I wanted to point out is that my use of Templates also provides traceability. So for example, this is the quarterly review note, and yet I am embedding the yearly review from this year. This is just a good way to chain these periodic nodes together so that the quarterly refers to the yearly and maybe the monthly refers to quarterly, weekly to monthly, daily to weekly. And that way you're always thinking about the higher level, so you're not focused just on the now and here. Now I also have a bunch of Templates that I use for gaming in particular, probably one of the most commonly used ones is the session one. So this is a player session for when I'm not the one that's the GM and it has a bunch of metadata here. This FC stuff, that turns it into something that can be usable for Fantasy Calendar, or calendarium, if that's what you're using. And it also has a few other things that helps me find sessions. I'm gonna open up a particular session from last week so that you can see what that looks like. So this is what it is when it's all filled in with all of those details. I actually have to figure out what the date is. So this is an in-game date. And then going back to the template here, it also has the session summary and the summary would go there. So I haven't filled out the summary here yet. This is using a call out, but I would type out the summary here. And another cool thing is in the recap section, this is pulling in the recap from the previous session so that I know where we picked up from. This is what that looks like in the template. So I've got that embedded here. And this user get last game title is a script that I wrote that always looks for the previous session and takes the file name of that and replaces this whole string with it. Again, this is all in the Patreon vault, so you wouldn't have to set this up. And then I would put the log in here now. The log has a bunch of different things, sometimes picture, sometimes embeds of combat and such. The GM session kind of looks the same way, but it is more structured because as a GM, you're the one that is responsible for the pacing of the game. So this is using the Lazy DM's template, Mike Shea. Mike Shea is a fellow YouTuber whose work I enjoy very much. I also wanted to show this frontmatter one because after every session I go through and I create notes for maybe people or items or locations, and I can select what type that is. So I can say it is a deity or you know, maybe it's a family or an NPC or an item. So there are a bunch of choices there. I'm not playing the One Ring anymore, but I did find it useful for long journeys to have this template. There's a specific sequence of events that happens for this particular game system, and I like being able to just insert the template rather than trying to remember what the rules were. By the way, as part of my Patreon, I do also have a separate, separate TTRPG vault just filled with a bunch of things that were too niche for the other vault. So it has a bunch of things like workflows and rules and system information for some open systems, all of the Templates, monsters and also some table of contents type stuff for PDFs. And my last big use case for Templates is creating, because I create for my day job, I create for this YouTube channel, I create for fun. Now, creation means one of several things. Usually these days it's video. So I do have a template for a video. So this is my NVDH video template. And you'll notice it also has some very similar looking metadata and it does use the Fantasy Calendar syntax, although I'm switching between that and calendarium these days, but that's just so I can also search for it later. Now for video creation in particular, it's not just about having the format. I mean, the metadata and stuff is obviously important, but I actually really find it useful to have a structure for how my videos typically go. And I have a post-production checklist. Now, I am going to create a video on this I think next week about my entire content creation process and how that works in Obsidian. So I'm not gonna go into the details right now, but this is already available in Patreon if you'd like to see it. Another thing that I use Templates for in the realm of creation is writing. Sometimes I don't just create video, I also write. And when it's writing and you start with a blank page like this, it's just very difficult to really get up the motivation to write anything because just looking at that blinking cursor sometimes it's just... It's a recipe for a writer's block. Instead of that, I like to have Templates. So I have a bunch of writing Templates here that I've taken from a few sources, most notably the course Ship30 for 30, which I did a few years ago now. And what they are are just kind of prompts or structures for different types of writing. So let's look at the mistakes and lessons one. So I click on that. This is a template, but it's a different one from the other ones that I've shown you because it's not meant to be used as is. Instead, what this is supposed to do is it creates a structure. So it says like this first subhead is one line of advice you want to give readers. So when you're actually using this, you'd replace this part with the actual advice that you want to give. There's advice for how to structure it, such as in the opening sentence, explaining what happens if they don't do what you're saying in this heading here. And then it also has smaller headings that prompt you for actionable advice. What this template does is it gives you a rough structure so you can kind of see what your blog post or whatever you're writing is going to look like even before you've written anything. And it also challenges the idea that you have to start from the beginning because maybe you don't know exactly the type of advice, overarching advice you want to give, but you have the actionable advice already. So why not just start here and you can continue that way just filling in the things that you feel most natural about writing at that point. And then go back and say, "okay, well all of these points are actually about this topic. So now I know what the major piece of advice is." And I really like that type of writing. And I also really like that I can look through this list and kind of choose which format fits it best. So maybe I thought that I wanted to write about mistakes and lessons, but maybe a straight how to guide would actually be a bit better, or maybe a personal story would be more convincing in this scenario. So I'm kind of using this as a way to break myself out of creative ruts so that it prompts me to consider different types of formats. And then within that format, it helps me not start from nothing and not necessarily start from the beginning. So here's some tips that I would give you when you're using Templates in Obsidian. The first is don't go overboard with Templates. Wait until you actually already need them. When you find yourself typing something over and over again or creating the same kind of note, then create the template. Because I went through this phase where I just created more Templates than I really ever needed and it just got too complicated. And you can see that of the 100 plus Templates, really, I maybe use half of them regularly. And you know what? That's okay because some of the Templates are not meant to be used on a regular basis. Some of them are just meant to spark my creativity. The second tip is to create a separate Folder for your Templates. You don't want to accidentally think that one of the Templates is a real note. For example, with one of these writing prompts, at a quick glance, I might think that this is something that I've written, but actually having it here in the Templates folder means that I know where to look when I'm looking for a different format for my writing. Another tip is to update Templates when something changes. The template is going to be the pattern for everything else going forward. So it's really important that you change the template so that everything else is going to be consistent. Now, what about the notes that you made with a previous template? Well, Obsidian doesn't have a great native way to do this. I know there's some find and replace community plugins that you might like to check out. Personally, I just use an IDE like visual code or something, if you already have that. But I think Notepad++ might do it as well. What I do is I do a find and replace for the old string or text that you want to replace, and then in the replace section, you can put the new thing that you want to replace it with. That's how I maintain consistency across my notes even after I've made a change to the template. Another tip would be to use Quick Add to speed up the creation of Templates. Now, I do have a video on Quick Add, so check that out. But I'm going to show you a quick one here. Earlier I showed you how I manually applied a meeting template, but that's not actually how I usually do it. Usually I create meetings from within a daily note. So let's just pretend that this is a daily note. It's not the right format, but let's just pretend that it is. Within this daily note, I'm going to trigger a Quick Add macro. So I'm going to do that with a special hotkey that I use. And let's say I would do a default meeting. It automatically prompts me for the name of the meeting, and then I'll hit okay. So that one macro did a bunch of different things. It prompted me for the file name of the meeting, and then it added a link to it here in the note that I was in. Then it created that note, moved it over to the meeting folder, applied the meeting template to that note, and then also opened that note within a vertical split. So in this way, you can use Quick Add to do a bunch of things very quickly. And when you start working with Templates, this is just hard to give up. I really love this workflow for creating meetings. I use it almost every day. And as a final tip, when you create a note using a template, think about how you're going to connect that note, that instance of that template to the series that it belongs to. For example, if you create an instance of a recurring meeting, maybe you should have a note for the recurring meeting that then lists all of the specific meetings of that type. So here's an example of a recurring meeting that I have, and here is a Dataview query that brings together all of the meeting notes, the specific instances for this recurring meeting. And that's what this looks like. And you can have the link to the note here, and then a summary here. If you have a summary within the metadata. Here's another type of database that I have. This is my video database, and this is what that looks like. And what it does is it brings together all of the notes that I've said is type video, and then it shows the name of the file, when it was published, summary, the plugins, and so on. It's a great little index for notes that you've created using a template. Not everything can or should be automated, but using Templates in Obsidian helps me ensure consistency in metadata and format. Sometimes it gives me a checklist so that I don't forget to do certain steps in a process. It establishes traceability by embedding higher level objectives, for example, within lower level ones. It also helps me shake out of a creative rut by letting me apply mental models that I've already identified. And also it just saves me a lot of time. Using a template in Obsidian isn't the only way that I try to automate part of my writing. Check out this video to see how I use text expansion to create custom shortcuts that work with any app, not just Obsidian. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music), Note Taking Templates I Use in Obsidian, Nicole van der Hoeven, 01hhqp60tgcgpnzjtvhvw60kp3.