- About a year ago, I made
a video on how to create and maintain a content
calendar in Obsidian, something that I had
sorely missed from Notion. That video is still valid, but I think I've found a better way. In this video, I'm gonna
talk about the new plugin, Obsidian Projects, and I'm
gonna show you how to use it while creating a new, hopefully better, content calendar with it. Between my day job and passion projects like this YouTube channel, I end up creating a lot of
different types of content, many of which are in
flight at the same time. So having one single source of truth, one content calendar that tells me what's ready to be published
when is really a lifesaver in terms of helping me get things done and plan for when I'm doing my work. It all starts with a single
note for every video, blog, article, or feature
that I'm working on. This is an example of one of those notes. It's got things like the
thumbnail, the title, the structure, and also at the end, I have a bunch of things
that are in a checklist so that I don't forget to do them. My old way of managing my
content involves two plugins, namely Fantasy Calendar and Kanban. I use both of them separately.
Let me show you that now. To be able to use a
Fantasy Calendar plugin, I have to put these parameters in the YAML front matter for every note. Of course, I don't do
it manually each time, it's part of the template,
but they are specific to Fantasy Calendar. They identify the calendar
that I want this event to be placed into and the date when I've
scheduled this to be released. There's also a category that helps color code it a little bit. This is what Fantasy Calendar looks like for the videos that I've released. As you can see, they are
color coded, so in this case, the purple ones are the ones
that I release for my day job and the pink ones are, well,
my videos for this channel. As you can see, I've been
using this for quite a while, but there are some
disadvantages to using it. For example, I run into this
sort of issue quite a bit, where there's like an
overlap between one note and the next one, especially if I have a lot of
things scheduled for that day. I also have some repetitions here. Sometimes the same note is
placed on the calendar twice. I'm not really sure why that happens. Here's an example of
another plugin that I use called Kanban and with
Kanban I can move things from one part of the board to the other. That way it's kind of
like an assembly line. One video or one piece of
work goes from one station, or one column in this case, to another, and that way I can kind of visualize how many things are blocked or waiting on something to be actioned. The thing about Kanban, though, is it's not actually in
any of the front matter. It doesn't look at really
any of these things. If you go to the Kanban board
and click Open as markdown you'll see what it actually looks like. It is a markdown file
that has links to notes, and it also has the images
that I've put in it. So basically every card is a task. Kanban not storing data
in the YAML front matter is a problem because that means it's not looking at the same
thing that Fantasy Calendar is. So I had to add a bunch of
things in the YAML front matter just for those plugins, and it's not really a seamless experience to tie the two together. Ideally, I would have both of them looking at exactly the same data being updated at exactly the same time just by changing the things in that note. That wasn't exactly how it works, but that is what Obsidian Projects does. Obsidian Projects is kind
of like another layer. Think of Obsidian Projects as adding a separation of concerns. It distinguishes between the input, which is the information,
like from the note, from the actual video, that Obsidian will need
to parse from the output, which is the view and how it's
going to be presented to us. The real appeal of Obsidian
Projects is the separation, because once they're separated, it adds this modularization
to it so that each view becomes like an atomic component, so you can really separate them out and choose the ones that you want and rearrange it according
to your own tastes. That's why I'm excited to try
out the Obsidian Projects way. So we're going to set this up right now. As of now, I'm still using the old way that I've just described, but I've already had a
look at Obsidian Projects and I think it's going to do what I want. Let's have a look at that. If you're a Patreon, you
can download this vault as well as everything I'm
going to be adding to it for this use case from the
link in the description. Otherwise, keep watching and
I'll show you how to do it. The first thing that we're going to do is to create a template for the new note. I'm going to say that it's a video because that's what I'm familiar with, but you can change this to a blog post or anything else that you'd like. This is a Templater string
that takes today's date and that's just going to
be something to start with, but then we're going to
have to change it manually when we actually apply it
so that this will become like the scheduled date. Published is going to be a Boolean, meaning it's true or false, and we're going to be able to select whether something has already
been published or not. The status is going to be what stage of the creation process
this particular video is in. So I'm going to do something different and create a Templater string that will prompt us to suggest one value from a series of values. Wait, system suggester. Just to keep things simpler here, I'm going to separate them into ideas to research, to film, to edit, to publish, and done. Then I'm going to copy this and paste it again. If you're wondering why
I had to repeat that, it has to do with a template or a syntax. One set is for what is
going to be displayed and the other set is the value that it's going to be mapped to. I'm going to leave the URL blank because we're not going to have a URL at the beginning, and I'll just leave the tag as YouTube, and I won't have a cover yet. So now we have a template for
a video that we might create. Now, let's create a folder
here called content. This is where everything's
going to be saved. Now let's go to settings and make sure that anything that's created within this content
folder is going to have that template applied. So I'm going to settings
and then Templater and then where it says
Enable Folder Templates, you will see I have a few here already, but I'm going to add a new one. And that's going to go in content. I'll select video. Now, let's exit out of that, and then I'm going to
right-click on content and click New note. You'll see that as part of the template I'm being asked to select the status. Right now this is an idea, let's say. So let's put it under ideas. This is a new video, so I'm going to type My first video here. It's automatically taken today's date, and I'm going to leave
everything else the same. Now, let's exit out of this
and install Obsidian Projects. So we'll go into Settings here
and then Community plugins. We'll get this one by Marcus Olsson, install it, and enable it right away. Now exit out of that. And now it's time to look at the project. I'm going to type command p or control p on Windows
and Linux and then Project. This is the command palette and I'm going to select
this command from it. You'll see that there's
this kind of splash screen, but I'm going to exit out of that because I'm running you through
the process of creating it. We don't have any projects here and one thing to keep in
mind is unlike plugins like Database Folder, this project view is across all projects that you have within this vault. So this isn't specific
to any folder right now. This is just all of the projects. We don't have any projects yet though, so let's create one now. I'll click new project and this one will be a content
calendar and for the path I'm going to select content, and make sure that the template that we're using is going
to be selected as well. And that's templates video. Let me create the project, and that first video that we
got is already being shown. This is the typical table view, and we can go and look at the
fields that are here as well. So, let's say we don't
really care about the path 'cause we know that it's going
to all be in that folder, so let's just hide that, and
that column has disappeared. We can also change some
of the values here. Like maybe if we don't
want this to be today, but we want it to be be tomorrow, then I'm going to select
it on the calendar here, and that's been changed. Now if we go to that video note, we'll see that the metadata
has also been changed. So that value is now saying November 8th when it was November 7th before, and this way you can change things in this view that are also changed in the YAML front matter,
which is pretty handy. But this isn't a calendar yet. This is a list which is useful, but now let's add a calendar view. To do that, we'll go back to New, but this time I'm going
to select New view. And in the view I'm
going to select Calendar, and I'm going to call it Schedule. We only have one project, so
we don't have to change that. And I'll hit add view. Now we see a calendar and this is automatically
taking the date parameter. This is handy because we
don't have to select it. Now, Check is another parameter that we can choose that'll add a checkbox according to the value of the parameter. In our case, I'm going
to select published, which was set to false. And you'll see that that note now shows up with a little checkbox
there that is not checked. In this dropdown, we can also select whether it's by a week, a
month, two weeks, three days or a day. I'm going to say month just to be able to get the full picture. And with this checkbox
I can check it as well and it'll remain checked. And if we go back to my first video, you'll see that the
published value is now true. And if I un-tick that because
it's not published yet 'cause it's still in the future, then we're gonna see that the published has been changed to the value of false. So that's Calendar. Let's add another view. And this time let's do Board, and I'm gonna call it Kanban, add view, and it's showing up there. So when you get into this view, you might be wondering why My
first video is under No status and that's because we haven't
told Obsidian Projects yet which parameter we need
to use for the status. And we do that by going here to Status and selecting the field,
which in our case was status. And now we see that Ideas is now coming up and if we had other videos, then it would be in
different stages as well. There's another video left,
but before we go to that, there's something that I need to do. So in this My first video note, I'm going to add a thumbnail. Let's say I have finder here and I'm just going to drag
and drop one into there. Great. Now we have a thumbnail. I'm also going to copy
the name of this image, and up here where it says cover, I'm going to paste that and
this is the name of the image. So then let's go back to Projects and I'm going to go to New again, but the time I'll select a different view and it's the last one, which is Gallery. And I'm going to type
Thumbnail and then add view. Now we still haven't
selected what the cover image is going to be out of those parameters, and if we look here, it's actually using the parameter Cover. So let's go here and instead of none, we'll select cover. And look at that. It now has the thumbnail
as the cover of this view. Now I have these four
views for the same data, so I can also reorder them like this if I want the thumbnails
to be first, for example. This would look really cool. Can you imagine all of the videos here? And you can click on each one. And you can go to Table and
see it according to the table. You can also sort according
to any of these fields. Change some of the fields that are there. And you can flip to calendar view to see what's going to be scheduled for the next week or month. Obsidian Projects is way more than it might seem at first glance. While it does come out of the
box with four working views, the real benefit of Projects is that it provides the framework for basically any plugin to
be added to it as a view. So imagine having a
view that is Excalibrain or Excalidraw Draw or Space
Repetition or Encounter Builder. I mean the possibilities are endless. If you'd like to hear more
about this awesome plugin, check out this interview that I did with the
developer Marcus Olsson, who has plans for this plugin that make me really
excited about its future. Thanks for watching.
(Swedish) Have a good weekend!
