- So one of the things that I missed when I moved from Notion
to Obsidian was being able to have a content calendar. And for that, I liked being able to have a Table view and then a Board view, and then also a Calendar view. So a little something like, this is my Notion content calendar, which I don't really use anymore. And it's pretty easy to
turn it into a Board view and back into a Calendar view. But I've quickly found
out that on Obsidian, it isn't quite as easy to replicate this because it doesn't natively
have this functionality. Turns out that there
are just a few plugins that I can use to recreate
this entire setup, so that it looks something like this. So let's get into how I
plan everything I create as a developer advocate on a
Content calendar in Obsidian. So it all starts with the Kanban plugin. If we go over to this is a content board that I've created using the Kanban plugin. So if you don't yet know
how to install a plugin, you just go to Settings in Obsidian and then Community plugins And then if you haven't
turned Safe Mode off already, go ahead and do that. And then you'll be able to go and browse through the different community
plugins that are available. There are so many of them
and it's really changed the way I look at Obsidian. Honestly, if Obsidian could
not be extended with plugins, I probably wouldn't be using it as much because I got a lot of
value out of being able to customize my experience of Obsidian. So you just go over here and
type in the Kanban plugin, and then I've already got it installed, but you'll see a button here to install it and then enable it. Once you've got that done, that you open up the Command Pane. So I'm on a Mac, so
that's a Command P for me, and you type in Kanban and
then you create a new board. So I won't do that for you here because I've already got one, but I'll take you through what
I've done with that board. The way that I do it is each
of these lists is like a stage. So I like to be able to see at a glance, what types of content are in what stage because I create blog, I write
blog posts, I create videos. I also do a lot of presentations or maybe I'll make a pull
request in a repository. And sometimes these things
are going on simultaneously. So I need to make sure
I know what's where, and what's ready to publish. So I have ideas researching,
filming, writing, or coding, things that need editing,
things that need scheduling, and then things that need some
post-publishing activities before I actually move them over to done. And moving things between one status to another is pretty easy. This is the Obsidian as
a content calendar thing that I'm doing right now. And to move that over, I can
just put that over there. So to create a note
from one of these cards, you just click here and then
click Create Note From Card. Now I've already created a note from this, so I'm just gonna click that, and this is what it looks like. So I really liked this
because it lets me kind of put more into what I
want to do in that bit of content or what still needs to be done. This is where I'll put
like a progress report, but it's also where I put
things like Checklists. So I have a whole bunch of pre-production and post-production checklists that I wanna make sure that I do, so that I'm also keeping consistent with the type of content
that I'm creating. And one of the ways that I'm doing that is by using the Templating plugin. So that actually is a core plugin. So if you go to Settings
here and Core Plugins, you'll find Templates
there already installed with Obsidian, but not
activated by default. So you just take that
on and you don't really have to do this, but I just find it really useful because now when I have
a new content idea, let's say, this is a video. I already have a command
for inserting a template, or you can do that in
the command pane, too. Yeah. So you can insert a template. You can see I've got mine
mapped to command semi-colon, so we'll do that. And then let's say, I wanna create a video and this is going to be on my channel. And that already pre-populates
a bunch of things that I wanna make sure I get done. So I'll put the thumbnail
there and the title, and you know, just things that I need to be thinking about when I'm creating that particular bit of content. So for blog posts, this
might be different. I might have a different structure. I also work at k6.io and I create content for them as well. So I wanna make sure that
there's a difference in tone. You know, it's more professional
when it's put on that side. So I really like using
the Templates plugin to be able to quickly
switch between the two, but let's head back to, oops, let's head back to my content
board or my Kanban board. One thing that I've started
to do is when I have, when I wanna put down ideas, I actually flip back to the Markdown view. This is the closest that
I think Obsidian gets to being able to display it in Table view. So let's quickly show that on Notion, you can go to a Table view and see it in this sort of format. So I haven't quite been
able to replicate that, but this is not bad
for my use case for it. You can use tags as well, but I haven't really been doing that. So I like this because
it's just a really good way to quickly add ideas if
I'm in the mood to just, you know, bash out a lot of things that I wanna get off of my head. So going back to the Kanban board it's as easy as clicking
on Open as Kanban board. And we're back here. One thing that I've started
to do is use emojis. So if I like, edit one of these, these are emojis that I'm using with the Emoji Toolbar Plugin. So I just did a shortcut there, so that I can quickly
insert one of those emojis. I am not really a fan of using
emojis as like, file names. For instance, some people do put it in the file name of the note. I just include it here, so that it's like a good visual indicator of whether that's for my personal channel or K6 and whether it's
a blog post or a video, that kind of thing. So I also have started
including thumbnails in the card just to make
it easy to see what's what. So here are some of the
ones that I've created and it's just so that I can look at the thumbnails rather than having to read the titles if I want to. So I also, if you were looking closely, you might've noticed that
I've got this weird bunch of things here at the start of my note, and that's just metadata. So you don't really need
to have all of this, but you do need this part. If you want to create to have
this on a content calendar. See the problem is that when you're going and looking at the
content board from here, there is a way to add dates to the plugin. So you can have at here and
then, and then select then date. Let's say, I just wanna do it tomorrow. And it, it adds the date in there. And it does have Tomorrow
with a link to that note, but I just haven't found
this really that useful, because really, if I want
to look at a calendar, I would just go to the
calendar view to see what's happening tomorrow or the week after that, I rarely want to see it in card form where I can't really quickly sort by date or, you know, just filter by this week. I mean, maybe somebody will
make a plugin to do that, but for now, I'm just
sticking to removing this date and setting it in the metadata. So the reason that I do
that is because I'm using this cool thing called Fantasy Calendar. So Fantasy Calendar is a
plugin that I discovered because I did a talk
on how to use Obsidian for D&D with its creator. His name is Jeremy Valentine, and it was actually a
plugin that was created to track time as you progress
through a TTRPG campaign. So like my use case for it
was Dungeons and Dragons. I play D&D three times a week. And so, it's important
to also have a calendar to figure out when the
holidays are and whatnot. So that's what it was created for. But I used for that and for other things that are probably, well, I definitely know that that's
not what Jeremy intended, but it works just the same. So to do that, you go to
Settings and install it. It's also a Community plugin, just like the Kanban plugin was, but when you've got it installed, you go to Fantasy Calendar
and then you can add a new calendar and you can have several, you can see here that I have three of them that are for D&D, and one of them for real life
- shows where my head's at - and then you click Add calendar. And the first thing you
should do is apply a preset. So if you, because we
want it for real life, click on Gregorian calendar and then click Apply and I would change the calendar name to something
like, "My Content Calendar". And then this is already enabled for us, the Auto Increment Day,
otherwise you should tick that. And this is where you set to the date. It seems like it's automatically
taken today's date, which is great. Another thing that I would
do is set Event Categories. So there are a bunch of default ones, but really what I would do is keep one, I'll keep one for every
channel or every brand that you want to create content for. Oh, it looks like I can't delete. I can, I guess I, I have
to have two of them, but that that's good because
I can do Personal, let's say, and then maybe, Work. So I'm not actually going to save that because I don't wanna
create a new calendar, since I already have one. But once you click Save, you should then be able
to schedule cards onto it. So if we go back to Obsidian here, this is how we're going to
get this particular note showing up in the calendar. I'm going to have November there. Actually, I'm going to hold off on the day and show you what the
calendar looks like now. There are two ways that
you can look at a calendar. The Fantasy Calendar, anyway,
you can expand it here. And then you can see this by default, if you already have the
Fantasy Calendar enabled, but if you don't, you
can just switch calendars if you have more than one
and you can click on Today and it will let you go
through each of those days and have this little day view as well. So let's look at 25th, 'cause you can see I've got nothing there. So when I click on it, it's
asking me to create a New Event. So let's see what happens
when I put 25 here, that should see, that dot there, that pink dot that just appeared. So now we can double-click on it and you can see a link
on that day to this note. So imagine like there's a thumbnail there or a video that you've embedded. This is really cool to be
able to see it from this view, but sometimes that's a
little small, you know, so what I'm gonna do is collapse that, and I've got a hot key for
this, but if you don't, you can open up the Command
Pane and then type in Fantasy Calendar and hit
Open Big Fantasy Calendar, and then select that. And this is what it's going to look like. This is showing you the same view that we saw on the Day view, except that well, it's just bigger. So here is, this is this
month and this is the note that we just put on the 25th. And let me show you what it looks like when it's something that's published. If you look at that, I've
actually embedded the video onto this note and I can even play it from here if I want to. So I've got the thumbnail there
and a bunch of other things, or I can click on it
from here and it opens up in another pane in Obsidian. So this is just a really
good way of being able to do the things that we were trying to do with Notion, right? So I've got here, my
Content Calendar Table, I've got, well, the table becomes like the markdown view in Obsidian. I've got the Board view, which is replicated by the Kanban plugin. And I've also got the Calendar view. So, this combination
of plugins has made it, so that I've moved my
workflows entirely to Obsidian. I'm no longer using Evernote,
or Notion, or Roam research, except for a few things that
I haven't quite migrated. But for everything going forward, Obsidian is now my one-stop
shop for a second brain, a personal knowledge management system, my D&D campaign tracker,
and now a content calendar. So if you wanna know what
else I'm doing on Obsidian, check out this video on how I use D&D, oh, how I use Obsidian for work. And if you'd rather watch this video, this is one about how
I use Obsidian for D&D. Thank you for watching. Or as they say here in the Netherlands, (in Dutch) Thank you! Bye!
