Top Obsidian Plugins For an Organised Vault

Dear Scholar,

Happy New Year! I hope you had a good rest and are ready to start the new year with clarity and confidence.

Over the holidays, I polished my academic and personal vaults in Obsidian. Interestingly, I found that they both can share the same system and configuration if set up correctly. Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to aspects of this newest update to my note-taking and knowledge management system. (If you haven't used Obsidian yet, start here to learn how it will change your career.)

Today's blog post is about the 18 plugins that can make Obsidian easier to use than Evernote and more powerful than Notion:

The key to using plugins is to combine them in ways that synergise. For example, I can use one plugin to add icons to notes of a certain type (e.g. a source note on a paper), another to display links to these notes in a specific colour, and a third one to create notes of that type with one click. Together, these three plugins make it much easier to keep the vault clean, avoid wasting time thinking about templates and folders, and have a better overview when reading my notes.

New Course: The Effortless Learning Accelerator

A digital system for rigorous learning and brilliant ideas.

❓What: The Effortless Learning Accelerator (ELA) is a cohort-based course that teaches you a digital system for learning any complex topic over many years.

👤 Who: It is designed for knowledge workers, students, academics, or journalists who want to research vast and complex topics and synthesise their own ideas.

🟡 Details - You'll learn how to:
- Never forget anything you've read
- Find any note, reference or idea even years later
- Use your notes to produce publishable writing, backed up by references
- Build a system to manage ideas and facts that you can use for years
- Customise Obsidian to your needs
- The note-taking system I developed over 4+ years of experimentation

🔧 Tools: You will get access to a pre-configured Obsidian vault with 20+ fine-tuned plugins and bases, which makes the learning curve as gentle as possible. This template can be used for professional and private knowledge management. Templates for third-party plugins to import websites, videos, academic papers, and digital books into your system with one click

📆 Start date & duration: Over ~4-6 weeks starting in February 2026

🎥 Format: A mix of videos and small-group live lectures. Weekly assignments/goals to ensure your progress. Private community for support and accountability.

👥 Community: ~15-20 committed people who want transformation & results, not just another online course. I hope to find a cohort of folks with similar backgrounds to learn from one another and hold each other accountable. The goal is that no questions are left unanswered and you feel confident using the knowledge management system in this course for many years to come.
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Since spaces will be limited, please fill out the form to be offered a space in the coming weeks.

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Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

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Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

This is the weekly Effortless Academic Newsletter. It consists of an in-depth tutorial and additional events, promotions, or relevant information for the AI-curious modern academic. I strive to consistently provide value with every email. If this is not relevant to you, you can always unsubscribe from everything and will never hear from me again. If you find the email somehow inappropriate, please reply to me and let me know what you didn't like.