Automation: Obsidian's missing feature solved

Dear Reader,

Most people who start managing information digitally with Obsidian run into the same problem: Their notes resemble a collection of summaries, rather than a functioning network of knowledge.

Think of your notes like a house: A collection of planks and boards is not yet a house. It is the way these elements are connected that creates a house. How quickly you can build a house and how stable it is depends on the quality and uniformity of the building blocks.

This needs two things: A system, or the architecture of a house, and a set of uniform building blocks (the planks and boards).

I covered the first part, the architecture of your notes, in previous tutorials (here and here). In this week's tutorial, I want to show you how to quickly create uniform building blocks for your note-taking system and automate note creation, templating, and information capture, using a set of plugins and features that work together.

The system consists of six elements that any note-taking system in Obsidian needs in order to scale - set them up once, and using Obsidian will be smoother, faster, and easier.

Summary: The article proposes six elements to automate Obsidian. (1) Templates, which ensure that all notes have a shared set of properties, which makes organising them much easier. (2) QuickAdd, a plugin that bundles note creation, templates, and copying the notes to correct folders, making organisation even cleaner. (3) The Commander plugin, which makes access to templates and QuickAdd easier by adding (missing) buttons to the Obsidian UI. (4,5) WebClipper and ZotLit, which are tools to capture content from the browser or your Zotero collection, into predefined templates, which adhere to your note-taking system. (6) Bases which display notes with a shared set of properties across your vault. Collectively, these six elements enable you to maintain a system of digital notes much more easily. Lastly, it introduces Multi Properties, a plugin that lets you add properties to multiple notes, making it much easier to correct old organisational mistakes.

Information Management Course

The Information Management course was released this week, and over 120 of you already enrolled - many first-timers to the EA community. Thank you for your support and welcome!

This week's tutorial introduced you to my Obsidian automation setup. However, it will take time to set it all up. If you don't want to spend this time, join the Information Management Course, which includes a starter vault with everything already set up and which can save you days of tinkering. (I literally spent ~20 hours on creating it, so you don't have to.)

If you bought the note-taking course, you can get a 95$ discount on the new course. Reach out to me if you haven't received the automated email.

What's next for Effortless Academic?

Replacing the old note-taking course with the new information management course was a huge step and months of work. So what's the next topic you'd want to learn about?

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​