I felt the urge to finetune my Obsidian workflow a little bit to start off 2025, and I'm quite happy with where it is at the moment. Before, I wrote [[Kind of a Guide on Obsidian]], and while I'm happy with it, it doesn't really represent where I am with it right now. So consider this a revamp of sorts as I've gotten more comfortable with the app, about a year later. ## The Daily Note When I boot up Obsidian, the daily note page opens up immediately. It basically serves as a scratch pad where I generate links to other notes, as well as work projects and meetings. The highlight of it, if I may say so myself, is the following dataview that exists in my daily note template. ``` TABLE dateformat(file.mtime, "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm a") AS "Last Updated" WHERE (date(file.cday) = date(this.file.name) OR date(file.mday) = date(this.file.name)) AND file.name != this.file.name AND file.name != "Kanban" SORT file.mtime DESC ``` The output of this is a table that shows every page I've either created or updated on this particular day. This is *super* helpful for me, because it lets me keep track of stuff by day, and look back on what I've written so I can collect it for [[The Taniyn Newsletter]]. ![[My Obsidian Workflow-20241225142004491.png]] ## The New Writing Workflow For my [[2024 Cafe Posts]], I basically had a list of stuff that I would slot in when I came up with an idea. Looking back, this isn't *that* much different from a blog, which I've been [[Digital Garden|trying to avoid]]. For [[2025 Cafe Posts|2025]] I wanted to get a little bit more "loose" with how I wrote. I found that I don't really take notes as I do things, which is also something I'm trying to get better about. I made the [[Blogroll]] to try and offset this, but it just felt like maintaining a second page, so I'm effectively decommissioning it for now. I have a new system that I'm trying out! Basically how it now works is that instead of focusing the entirety of my garden around "effort posts" like I did in 2024, I'm instead going to focus it around the notes I want to take, and publish those instead. We'll look at how I approach media writing first, as this served as the test run for this new flow. I have a new Media heading that separates into three new sections, all tagged by year to make this format future-proof should I continue to use it. - [[2025 Books]] - [[2025 Games]] - [[2025 Movies]] Each section has the media I'm interested in to some degree, and will eventually be filled out with sections as I organize further. [[2025 Games]] is the most filled out, so we'll look at that. Rather than one long Media tag with all sorts of posts scattered about, it now looks more like Media/Games/FF Games I want to Finish/[[Final Fantasy XII]]. If you click on [[Final Fantasy XII|FFXII]], you'll now find what basically serves as a log of notes. These are super low-effort, and pretty much represent how I journal. Each log is attached to a date - what's cool is that in the back-end (i.e. in obsidian itself, not my website), I can actually click the date heading and go back to my daily note for that date. This creates a linked connection that shows me every day I've played a game (or, extrapolating out from the games section - every day I've watched a movie or worked on a project). As I played **FFXII**, I realized I had a lot to say about Gambits and the like. This is where the "Longposts[^1]" section comes in. This is where my usual more effort, "blog-type" posting returns, and is the kind of thing I'd push straight to my BlueSky or on my forum Auldnoir. What I like about this is that it leads to the best of both worlds - I get to scribble in my scratch pad about stuff as much as I want now, but still push out long-form content when I feel like I have a good idea. I don't feel as chained to the idea that I should only write when I have a good idea, because I love writing and want to do more of it. ## The Back-End That's everything a user will see if the hit up my site, which is all well and good - but how do I keep track of all these entries? How do I get all the longposts I've made in one spot, for my own benefit? To do that I use a series of templates, which all have a category assigned to them, which then lead to a Map of Content for that category. That's a lot of words, so let's return to the **FFXII** example! **FFXII** is of course, a game, so I use the Obsidian Templater plugin to generate my "Game Template". Every game has the following properties. ![[My Obsidian Workflow-20241225144148107.png]] These are all self-explanatory I'd say, but now let's click that "Games" category at the top. This page has a dataview table that includes most of the properties above, with the following code: ``` table without id file.link as Game, maker as Maker, genre as Genre, year as Year, rating as Rating where contains(category,this.file.link) and !contains(file.name, "Template") sort last desc ``` That leads to this output: ![[My Obsidian Workflow-20241225144417712.png]] With this, no matter where I write about a game - whether it's in my [[2025 Cafe Posts]], my 2026 posts, my Daily Notes, or a random page I just created - I'll always be able to keep track of the games I play in this table. That also applies for longposts like this one! I have a "Posts" template that puts these all in a table too. ![[My Obsidian Workflow-20241225144629397.png]] Everything - games, movies, music, meetings, posts, shows, people, places, clippings, books, etc. - gets attached to a category, so I always have a MoC for everything I care about. I was inspired by Steph Ango to build this whole system, but made a lot of my own adjustments to make it perfect for me. ## What About Old Stuff? If you like this workflow and plan to emulate it in any way, you might be tempted to retroactively go back and add this to your old stuff. I myself have tons and tons of existing pages for my library of games and movies and so on that is still around. In my humblest of opinions: ***Don't do this.*** It is a futile effort. If it bothers you, put all that old stuff in an archived vault if you want. But to try and go back and change stuff is silly, especially if you have lots of notes. As you change as a person, it makes sense for your note-taking and style or organization to change with it. I don't think the me of last year would be able to work off a system like this, so why would I change all of the notes of the me from a year ago? --- Anyways, that's pretty much my system right now! I might update it in the future, but I like where it is now that I've played around with it going into 2025. I hope this was helpful if you're looking for your own workflow. I also have a bunch of Obsidian resources you can check out in the [[Obsidian Knowledge Base]] I've collected. Thanks for reading! [^1]: Name pending - if you have a good idea let me know!