Category Archive: Video

James Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits, and we talk about making lasting habits with meaning. »

How to stop the “just checks” and keep your bias toward action. »

One additional aspect of task management, which we have yet to talk about in Obsidian, is the ability to trigger system-wide notifications on your Mac, which can take you straight to the task that you need to complete. This works exactly like any other notification that you might get from a dedicated task management app like OmniFocus or Things. But it's pretty cool that you can set this up inside of Obsidian and combine it with the Obsidian Tasks plugin to create these notifications and even mark things as complete from Notification Center on your Mac. »

Another essential component of a lot of dedicated task management apps is some sort of review functionality that can help you facilitate a Getting Things Done (or GTD) style weekly review. And this is just where you look at a project like this Obsidian task management project where I have all of these different tasks associated with the different videos in this series, and make sure that everything is up to date and correct. »

In this video, we're going to expound on the foundation of task management basics and show you how to create queries that allow you to look through your entire Obsidian vault and return only the tasks that meet certain criteria. »

Obsidian ships with some basic support for task management, making it a great option for creating a digital bullet journal. But in this video, we're going to show you how to take those task management capabilities to the next level with a couple of additional plugins. »

Obsidian is a great place to take and keep your notes, but by adding a Home note that acts as a dashboard, you can really transform it into a productivity hub. And in this video, that's what I'm going to show you how to do. »

This post is a video lesson from the Workflows module of our Mastering Mindmaps course. In this video, Mike Schmitz shows you how how he takes notes from books that he reads in MindNode. »

This is a free video lesson from our Simple Habits course In this video, we’re going to take a look at the mechanics of habits and explain how they work, then show you a way to use this in order to replace negative habits with positive ones. All habits follow the same four-step pattern: Trigger […] »

Obsidian version 13 introduced a new editor engine that allows WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editing called Live Preview. It's a pretty big update, and in this video, we walk you through how to set it up and how it works. »

Matter is a Read-It-Later service that integrates really well into Obsidian. So if you like to collect your newsletters, RSS feeds, and even Twitter threads into Matter, you can sync your digital highlights and notes into Obsidian using the official Matter Obsidian plugin. »

Last week, I presented a paid workshop here on The Sweet Setup called Your Creative Flywheel. In the workshop, I walked through the process that I use for creating (I call it The Creativity Flywheel). Here's a quick recap. »

One of my favorite uses for my new iPad mini is taking sketchnotes with my Apple Pencil. There are several options available, but GoodNotes is my preferred app for this. »

Obsidian has some basic support for tasks built in. But if you rely on notifications for when to do what, then you're going to need a dedicated task manager. Fortunately, there's a Todoist plugin for Obsidian that allows you to have the best of both worlds — you can capture tasks into Todoist directly and get notified on your devices when it's time to do a task, but you can also embed those tasks into an Obsidian document so you can associate them with a particular project. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the Todoist Sync community plugin to embed tasks using Todoist's filters in Obsidian. »

Obsidian is great at a lot of things, but quick-capturing text is not one of them. I prefer to quick-capture my text in Drafts and then send it to Obsidian using Drafts Actions. »

Obsidian is a great place to do your digital journaling, thanks to the Daily Notes core plugin. But with the addition of the QuickAdd Community plugin, you can quickly capture journal entries into specific categories using the Command Palette. In this video, I walk you through how to set everything up and use it for daily journaling. »

This post is a video lesson from the Time Tracking module of our Simplified Time Management course. In this video, Rosemary Orchard shows you how to set up lists of options in Shortcuts to start and stop specific timers in Timery. »

Obsidian is a great place to practice time blocking because you can link your time-blocked schedule to your daily note. In this video, we're going to walk you through how to set up time blocking in Obsidian using the Daily Notes Core plugin, and the Day Planner Community plugin. »

Obsidian is a great place to keep meeting notes. But there are a couple of best practices, which can make your meeting notes more effective. In this video, we walk you through setting up a meeting notes template and how to use it in Obsidian If you prefer the written version, read on. Setting Up […] »

I've been using Obsidian as my writing app for the past several months, and I absolutely love it. In addition to giving me a great Markdown writing environment, the community plugins allow me to craft my ideal system for tracking my writing tasks well. In this article, I walk through my system and the plugins I use to manage writing projects in Obsidian. »

One of the most powerful features of an app like Obsidian is the ability to make connections between the notes that are in your library. »

One of the key things you need to understand about Obsidian if you really want to make the most of it is the concept of atomic note-taking. The basic idea is to break down your notes into the smallest possible pieces, which allow them to be linked together and makes them visible inside the Local […] »

Obsidian is great for Mac nerds like me who like to do everything from their keyboard. In this video, we’ll show you how to access commands from the Command Palette and set custom hotkeys for triggering commands using keyboard shortcuts. And if you prefer the step-by-step written version, read on. The Command Palette There are […] »

Dataview is an incredibly powerful plugin that allows you to filter data in your Obsidian vault in a lot of really cool ways. In this post, I’m going to show you how I use it to create a table of book ratings from YAML metadata. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Here’s […] »

Templates in Obsidian are a great way to jumpstart creating a new note. In this post, we’re going to show you how to set up and use a couple of different types of templates in Obsidian. If you’d like to see it in action, here’s a short video from our upcoming PKM course: If you […] »

The appearance of the interface is controllable by CSS code, but fortunately you don’t need to be a web developer in order to customize the look and feel of Obsidian using Community Themes. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to install and use a new theme in Obsidian. And if you prefer to […] »

Readwise is a (subscription-based) web service that lets you save highlighted text from digital books, web articles, and even Read-It-Later services like Instapaper and Pocket. You can review your notes and highlights inside of the Readwise service, but you can also connect your Readwise account to PKM apps like Roam and Obsidian. »

The promise of apps like Obsidian and Roam Research is to give you a tool for connected note-taking. With this approach, you can see the commonalities between your thoughts as your notes bump up against one another, allowing you to see connections and discover new insights. These connections are usually represented in some sort of Graph View, which can look like a complex spiderweb of notes and ideas. »

Drafts has long been the place that text starts on my iOS device. But lately I've been doing a lot more in Obsidian, and was looking for a way to get that text into Obsidian easily when I was done. While this is pretty straightforward using a cloud service like Dropbox to sync your vault, I then began wondering if I could do something more than just dump my text files into a synced folder. »

I'm a big fan of the mindfulness I gain from journaling, but have been searching for years for the perfect set of prompts that could completely eliminate the friction from my daily journaling workflow. I've tried many different prompts (and many different apps) over the years, but have settled on a practice called Daily Questions which has just clicked for me. In this post, I'm going to share how I implement my Daily Questions inside of Obsidian. »

TickTick is a great app for creating a great all-in-one timeblocking system. »

Ulysses is one of the best writing and notes apps out there. And it keeps getting better and better. Watch the replay of our mini-masterclass webinar. »

The last thing you want when it comes to your email is what we call “Dual Focus”. Dual Focus is a waste of your time. Dual Focus is frustrating and annoying. For example: Dual Focus is when you are trying to have a Zoom meeting and your toddler busts into the room. Dual Focus is […] »

This is part two from our Focused Writer webinar we hosted for The Sweet Setup community a while back. If you missed part one you'll want to go back and watch that first as the principles in this video build upon those laid out in the first part. »