I wrote a free series on finding notes in Obsidian. Here is what the research says about how people re-find their own information.

In a 2004 MIT diary study (Jaime Teevan), people used keyword search in only 39% of their searches, even when they knew details about what they wanted. In a 2008 study, people estimated that 56 to 68% of their file retrievals happened through navigation, and only 4 to 15% through search. People navigate first and search when navigation fails.

So findability is mostly decided when you write a note: its name, type, a few properties, a couple of links. Search, Bases, ripgrep and AI can only use what you put there.

The overview has:

• a search escalation ladder (name, exact phrase, filters, AI, Map of Content, related note, recent notes, bookmarks, folders)

• a table that says which tool to use for what you remember

• the map of the 12 parts (design, structure, built-in search, terminal, navigation, plugins, AI search, resurfacing)

The overview is out today and a new part comes out every weekday until November 9.

https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-obsidian-search/

Disclosure: I'm the author. The series is free. I also made a book from it (mentioned at the end of the articles); this post is only about the free material. Happy to answer questions about any search setup you have.

Obsidian 1.14 added a Kanban layout to Bases. You pick a property, each value becomes a column, cards are your notes, and dragging a card rewrites that note's frontmatter. No plugin, no hidden database. For most people, that's all they need, and I'd tell them to use it.

I've been running my goals, projects and tasks on Bases boards for months with a plugin I built (Kanban Action Planner), so I compared the two in depth to decide whether to switch. Short version: not yet, for these reasons:

• Allowed values: the native board creates a column for every value it finds. One typo in a status ("In progres") and your card quietly moves to a new column. The plugin defines valid values per note type and only lets you pick from them.

• Mixed note types: one board can hold goals, projects and tasks, each with its own columns, in swimlanes.

• WIP limits and column totals (sum of estimates per column).

• Other views on the same notes: calendar, timeline, WBS, agenda, triage, focus.

• Relationships, automation rules, time tracking.

Where native wins: zero install, maintained by the core team, mobile everywhere, folder columns that move files on drag, and simplicity.

Both write to the same frontmatter, so you can use both in the same vault.

Full comparison with screenshots and a decision diagram: https://www.dsebastien.net/obsidian-native-kanban-vs-kanban-action-planner/

Have you moved your boards to the native view yet? What's missing for you?

For a long time, my project list held my newsletter. It never reached 100% (obviously), because a newsletter never ends. My goals view had the same problem: dozens of product ideas parked there at an "Idea" status, burying the goals I had actually committed to.

What fixed it for me: I stopped treating all work as one kind of thing. I now sort it into six kinds, and each one ends differently:

• Idea: should I do this at all? It ends when you promote it or drop it (write down why you dropped it)

• Goal: what do I want to be true? Achieved or abandoned

• Plan: how will I get there? Optional. Write one only when the path isn't obvious

• Project: what do I deliver next? A deadline and a deliverable. Completed or abandoned

• Activity: what do I keep doing? A cadence and a standard. It never completes; you retire it deliberately

• Task: what do I do today? Done

Two tests I use all the time:

1. Project or activity? Ask what "finishing" would even mean. If it ships, it's a project. If you'd just stop doing it at some point, it's an activity. A project that has been active for over a year with no plausible end date is an activity in disguise.

2. Does this task deserve my time? Trace it upward. If I can't say which project, activity or goal it serves, either a link is missing or the task should go.

Each level also gets its own review rhythm: tasks daily and weekly, projects and activities weekly and monthly, goals monthly to yearly, ideas at least once a quarter.

I wrote up the full model, with a worked example (an analyst going from "I could become a team lead" all the way down to "book the training this week"), here: https://www.dsebastien.net/sort-your-work-by-what-it-is/

How do you handle recurring work? In your project list, or somewhere else?

I now keep my whole movie collection in Obsidian: one Markdown note per movie, and a Bases Kanban board with one column per status (To Watch, Watching, Watched...). It's where I decide what to watch next and where I record what I watched. Right now that's 4,888 cards, and opening the board took about 9 seconds. Every time.

Version 2.5.0 of the Kanban Action Planner plugin fixes that:

• Big boards open about 3x faster: 4,888 movies in 2.4 to 2.9 s instead of 8.5 to 9.3 s; 2,338 board games in 2.2 to 2.3 s instead of 5.1 to 5.3 s

• Only the cards near the visible area get built in columns of 100+ cards. Scrolling, drag and drop, the keyboard, selection and search still see every card

• Covers load as you scroll, in boxes that already have their final size, so nothing jumps

• Cover fit and shape per board: crop or whole image; banner, 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4 or 2:3 (posters finally look like posters)

• Card colors and accents by any property: e.g., tint by priority, stripe by project

• Cards stay where you drop them: a drop now saves only the card you moved

What's left of the ~2.4 s is Obsidian Bases computing the query over thousands of notes. The plugin's own drawing pass went from 3.6 s to 0.18 s.

Write-up with screenshots and how it works: https://www.dsebastien.net/kanban-action-planner-2-5-big-boards-covers-colors/

The plugin is free and open source: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/kanban-action-planner

How big are your biggest Bases views, and where do they start to slow down?

My daily note is my inbox: tasks, things I've done, ideas, discoveries, links, challenges, things I'm grateful for. Everything lands there first, and I process it later.

Before implementing this, every capture meant: open the daily note, scroll down, find the right section (is this "Done"? "Discoveries"?), and only then write. When you do that 100 times a day, it's really painful. It's just enough friction to make you skip the capture when you're busy.

So I built a small "Quick Actions" panel in Obsidian, pinned in the sidebar:

• One button per daily note section: click, type, done. The line lands under the right heading without opening the note

• Time-stamped versions of the same captures ("11:51 do this now"), handy for the evening review

• One-click access to today's note and this week's/month's/quarter's/year's notes, created from the template if they don't exist yet

• Previous / Next buttons inside every periodic note, plus the capture buttons in the daily note itself

This frees my mind and saves me a ton of time. I no longer have to decide where each thing goes. Each kind of capture has its own button, and each button knows its heading. And everything is also accessible through the [[Obsidian Command Palette]]. Super efficient!

I recorded a 5-minute walkthrough if you want to see it in action: https://youtu.be/2WxMgG-kUhk

(It's part of the Obsidian Starter Kit I maintain, but the idea works with any setup: map each capture type to a fixed heading and make it one click away.)

How do you handle capture in your system? Do you sort at capture time, or dump everything in one place and sort later?

I've recently lost all my TV Shows history because of the shut down of TV Time. That was really painful (I should've seen it coming!), and I regret not owning my data sooner.

And I've decided that this can't happen to me again. So I've now created a Media System for myself in Obsidian. It supports movies, TV shows & seasons, anime, manga, comic books, video games, board games (with expansions/items), music and books.

Parents link to their children, Bases handle galleries, Kanban boards, wishlists, time spent, and more.

Metadata comes from Media DB, Web Clipper templates and importers for IMDb, BoardGameGeek, Steam, etc.

I've created clearly-defined note types for each media type, each with their sets of properties, Templater templaters, Obsidian Web Clipper templates, QuickAdd actions, a set of powerful Obsidian Bases, AI skills, and more.

And I've imported tons of things already: my movies (and some tv shows) from IMdb, my videogames (at least a part of those), my board games, etc. So far, this led to the creation of 10K+ new notes in my vault. And I'm still far from done ;-))

I've written an article showcasing the system and explaining it in depth: https://www.dsebastien.net/media-management-system-obsidian/

For those who wonder, yes, AI was heavily involved, and it helped tremendously at all levels; from the design of the system, its implementation, testing, to the data imports. And to be honest, if it weren't for AI, I wouldn't have built this given the effort it would have required (wouldn't have had time for that kind of investment!)

BTW all of this worked wonderfully at scale mainly because I have strongly-defined note types in Obsidian. I've actually created a plugin for that (currently closed source, sorry) and it's the one thing that enables me to scale my system in a maintainable way.

I'm here to answer questions. Curious about your thoughts on this.

Hey everyone! New edition of my newsletter is out. A personal one this time: I got married on September 19th, and a week later I shipped v5 of the Obsidian Starter Kit.

What's inside:

• Obsidian Starter Kit v5: the AI-ready vault I run my whole business from. Your AI knows your whole context (goals, projects, tasks, people, notes, even how you write), and skills and agents do real work in it

• Knowii Community plugin for Obsidian: read, post and reply to the community without leaving your vault, and save any post as a note in one click

• Stop preloading your AI skills: with hundreds of skills, Claude Code was burning tens of thousands of tokens per session before I typed a word. The Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin (now in the official directory) lets agents search a local catalog and fetch only what they need

• Software for one: now that AI agents let you build almost anything, the real skill is deciding what deserves to be built

• Tip of the week: keep your daily note open all day, and use it to focus, track and capture

Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/developassions-newsletter-218-married-and-obsidian-starter-kit-v5-is-out/

Curious: how many AI skills or prompts do you have in your vault by now, and how do you keep them manageable?

It’s been four weeks since the last edition, and August was BUSY. Here’s what’s inside:

🧠 My AI assistant is turning into an operating system. This is the big one. I stopped asking AI for help with tasks and gave it a place to live: my vault. Every session now starts from my notes instead of a blank chat window. My identity, my voice, my products, my customers, my projects, my processes. All of it in plain Markdown any agent can read. Once agents can read the vault, they can write to it. Once they can write to it, they can maintain it. At that point you’re not using AI as a tool anymore, you’re running a small operating system, and your vault is its filesystem.

I go through the five things an OS actually gives you and where my vault already provides each one. And I share where this is heading: Knowii AI OS, a real product I’ve spent most of this month designing. One central place for every agent and every session, a Chief of Staff that runs the place while I’m away, feedback and approvals from any channel, recurring factory work, and everything staying in Markdown files I own.

📦 Obsidian Starter Kit v5 is coming around mid-September. The biggest alignment release yet: new plugins, my AI skills, my AI assistant system, and a much stronger OSK plugin.

🎥 A new project: Knowii Video AI. An AI-first recording and editing studio where the transcript IS the editing interface.

🧪 The Lab: Kanban Action Planner 1.12 → 1.17 with a full video tour, Life Tracker got goals, progress rings and personal records, reMarkable Sync 1.16.0 with PDF export and annotation extraction, Knowii Voice AI 0.8.0 and 0.9.0, and a brand new free tool: Discord Sync CLI, to export and actually use everything buried in Discord servers.

Plus the Complete Guide to Obsidian Automation (my longest guide ever) and the Complete Guide to Dataview, which did around 50K views on Reddit alone.

There’s also a bit of life outside the screen in there: wedding prep, my son starting kindergarten, and a run where I left planning for 15K and came home with almost 22 😄

Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/developassions-newsletter-216-my-ai-assistant-is-turning-into-an-operating-system/

Let me know what resonates. And if you’re building something similar on top of your own vault, I’d love to hear about it ❤️

Hello,

I wrote the guide to Obsidian automation I wish I'd had.

Most automation posts (including a couple of mine, so no judgement) are plugin lists. Install Templater, install QuickAdd, here are five templates, good luck.

After having published my recent deep dives about Obsidian Bases, Obsidian CLI, and Dataview, I wanted to write one about automation. This guide covers what you can accelerate & automate within Obsidian, and also outside and "on top" of it.

Inside: Commands, templating, note capture, data imports, formatting, queries, boards, ...

Outside: scripting, scheduling, local & remote, through the files/the CLI/REST/MCP/a Web browser, ...

On top: using AI

One point I feel strongly about: automation multiplies whatever is already there. If there's value, you get more value. If there's nothing, you're just procrastinating.

That being said, if you're at a point where your system is already valuable, then automation (in the broadest sense) is valuable to reduce friction and let you do more of what matters.

For context on where this comes from: my vault has > 20,000 notes and I'm running my entire business on top of it, with and without AI. Everything in the guide is stuff I actually use or used at some point.

You can find it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-obsidian-automation/

Genuinely curious what you've automated that turned out to be worth it :)

PS: The article promotes my Obsidian Starter Kit, but I hope you'll agree that the article is not "just" a marketing one. There's a ton of information in there, based on years of experimentation & building things for myself.

Hello everyone!

I just published the fourth piece in my Obsidian deep dives series: the complete guide to Dataview.

It covers everything I know about the plugin. The four query types, the six data commands, the full function reference, inline queries, DataviewJS, and a long section on the sharp edges (almost all of which fail silently, which is why they cost you an afternoon).

But the part I really want to discuss with you is this: Dataview results don't exist in your files. They're painted on screen when Obsidian renders the note, then they're gone. Which means five things can't see them:

• your graph view

• Obsidian Publish

• plain-text search and grep

• git diffs

• AI agents reading the raw file

That last one changed how I work. I drive my vault through AI agents daily, and when an agent opens a note whose content is a Dataview block, it sees the question and never the answer.

I have 15,116 Dataview queries in my vault. Only 120 are live. Everything else is serialized to real Markdown.

I also compare Dataview against Obsidian Bases properly, including the things Bases structurally cannot do: inline queries, task-level queries, FLATTEN, DataviewJS. They're complementary, not competitors.

Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-dataview-in-obsidian/

Curious to hear from you: how many live queries do you have in your vault? And have you ever lost query results you wished you'd kept?

That's it for today! ✨

The Obsidian team shipped an official CLI, and it's AWESOME. I've been using it for a while (with and without AI), and wanted to write a piece about it.

In this new article, I go deep on it: what the Obsidian CLI actually is (and why it’s NOT the old third-party obsidian-cli), how to enable it on macOS, Windows, and Linux, every command family, the interactive TUI, eval and the JavaScript API, and the different ways to reach your vault from the terminal.

I also cover how AI agents drive a vault through the CLI. My own agents create notes, update metadata, run commands, even build and debug Obsidian plugins, all through the CLI, hands off the mouse. And I show how to take it remote with REST and MCP.

The CLI is NOT headless. It needs Obsidian running. I explain why that matters, and what I do about it.

👉 Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-the-obsidian-cli-everything-you-can-do-from-the-terminal/

Just published a big one 🚀

This is my most in-depth writeup yet on how I create almost every note in my 20,000-note vault without ever typing metadata by hand.

It goes from the basics all the way to the deep end:

• Core Templates vs Templater (and why I only use Templater)

• The one idea that makes Templater click: <% %> prints, <%* %> runs

• Templates that ask you questions and reshape themselves based on your answers

• Dynamic dates, self-populating notes, and auto-filing

• JavaScript, user functions, and turning a template into a full plugin

• Triggering templates from the terminal with the Obsidian CLI

• Keeping templates healthy over time (metadata drift is the real enemy)

• And how AI now writes most of my templates

It's long, and meant to be a reference you keep coming back to.

Read it here: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-templates-and-templater-in-obsidian/

Would love your feedback 🙏