Obsidian Advanced Techniques | Templates, Tagging, Folding, Embedding, and more

hello and welcome back to another video in this video we will be doing a deep dive into obsidian if you're not familiar with obsidian it is a desktop application for creating your second brain primarily uses markdown files and those files are stored on your computer we'll be looking at some of the advanced techniques for this uh how you can link your notes together how you can embed content how you can link to certain blocks of your notes we'll be covering some of the outlining techniques that are really powerful so if you want to get your ideas down into into your notes and you want to reorganize those uh those will be really really uh useful we'll be looking at templating so if you want to build some kind of uh consistency around how you structure your notes and we'll look at the zettelkasten way of using that in the templates we'll be looking at the tagging system at how you can maximize your organization with tagging which is away from the folder structure to rethink about how you how you interpret how you process your notes we'll be looking at some workflow using the tagging system and then finally if you are a software developer learning and you want to record your notes there's a great tip here of how you can embed running examples of what you're learning inside your notes so that when you're reviewing those when you're writing some software and you want to recall that information you've got that right at your fingertips so without further ado we're going to dive straight into obsidian and see how this works so here is the outline of what we're going to cover uh basically um we'll jump into obsidian and we'll take from here so first of all we're going to cover embedding the contents of another note in obsidian so this is quite interesting so here's obsidian and i've got an example note called the zettel casted method and i've linked three notes into here i know over on the side i've got a preview of what that looks like so if i just were to command click into this i would be able to view the contents of this it's just a very quick overview i like the permanent node settle casting way where where the information is really lightweight i can now link to this if i want to talk about zettlecast in a project i can link to this note and get an understanding of what it means very quickly so the way to preview that here in obsidian is you take your your link and you just put an exclamation mark in front and you'll see on the right hand side i have now embedded it in here i can do that for all three of these now which is pretty cool so now if you if you want to build like study cards or compose things together you can just compose this all together view it in that mode and now you get a nice preview the exclamation mark i believe comes from when you're embedding images in markdown so it's more of a markdown notation so the exclamation mark uh i believe like signifies that it's a visual um impact rather than just being a like a metadata or a link or something like that so uh i believe the way to images is you put an exclamation mark in front of a markdown link and then that will embed the image in your markdown so they've followed a similar concept here um for that so that is how you preview the contents of some notes in other notes so let's move on it so you can link to individual blocks within a note so again you can preview them beforehand uh but now we've got this notation of a uh it's a carrot symbol which allows you to essentially put blocks together so let's say i have information on permanent notes and i want to let's say if i go into here and i now have a section called examples of permanent notes and then to do put some examples in here now if i wanted to link to this section i can put a carrot here and put just like an id if i don't put the id that there are ways to automatically generate that when you link to it so if i want to put okay preview and then now this is a link actually i won't preview that this is just a link to that section where if i go permanent notes and now i use that carrot symbol i now get the option to select things so that's examples link there actually it's not done what i what i thought it would do it's actually picked up the content below let's just move that there and see what well actually let's see what i'm not sure why it's done that actually that was not expected but if so if i click that that doesn't go anywhere but if i put i just type it i believe now when i click there it links to this here so you'll notice that this is what's highlighted and i guess your mental model around this is you're putting a little up arrow to say this thing here pointing up to it is what i want to call examples and for example if i put examples of liter richer notes if i don't uh like uh here there's an example so if i just didn't put that id in and then i wanted to do the same under literature notes i would do double square brackets literature notes this time put the carrot now if i wanted to put link to that block there see it puts the id in automatically and it appends it in there so i think the reason why it picked up the wrong thing and the other example is because i didn't put some spacing around it or something like that now you might be thinking well that's kind of cool could i put in my my document here could i put a preview of that so that's the link there if i put an exclamation mark what it does is it pulls in the title but hold on i wanted to preview the contents of that as well so it it doesn't do that all this is is a is a reference to that line so you don't um get all the content in that block but there is a way to do it if you've got headings uh i don't know where that hash came in sorry that shouldn't have been there but if i put a hash and now i can link to that section and it pulls out the content of it as well so again i can go in here and i could say an example of a literal permanent note note can include like references concrete conclusions whatever those whatever whatever example would be so now you can see that i can i can embed that block in here so if you do find yourself where you've got quite long form notes and you want to just pull out a section and reference that what you do is you can use the hash and then link to the title of that section if you just want to create a link to a specific line then use the carrot which is the up arrow and give it a name or use the auto-generated name and that's fine okay that is how you link to individual blocks now we move on to folding what is folding so this is where it allows you to collapse content so for example you may create larger maps of content like a table of contents or something with what we call progressive disclosure which means it's all collapsed and you just progressively disclose open up what you want to view you could possibly use it for like a q a style notes where you don't want to reveal the answer so if you're creating study notes and you want to test yourself you could collapse down the answer and then expand it now you don't get this by default you have to enable it in the settings so let's jump over and jump into settings under the editor we have to apologize uh we do have a set of options um called folding so fold heading and fold indent so you can create lists and then fold the contents of this so let's create an example let's say i want to create a book outline and let's pick a topic that's what uh let's say we want to talk about entrepreneurship and let's say here's my outline uh or let's do some uh we'll do a bullet point this so introduction we might then might have uh choosing your business idea and then you can indent that you say market research interviews then you might have say building a minimum minimum uh fireball products [Music] i i can't tell if i've spelt that correctly then you say choosing a tech stack you might say getting early feedback uh lean startup home page something along these lines so you might be creating an outline for something and now you can collapse these down using these little arrows that allows you to just hide some of that content you can clap sound entire blocks and uh again the the ellipsis at the end here is just a short way of showing there's more content expand it out uh let's do a test let's see what happens if i close that file and reopen the file it keeps them collapsed and therefore you can create some study notes collapse them when you're not using it and then reopen it up if you want to test yourself so that is what folding is and you can do that in both the preview mode and the uh edit mode okay let's move on to multiple cursors um uh actually this is jumping out of order i didn't mean to put in this order let's say i wanted to indent all these things or out dent them um i can hold the alt or option key and it turns to a plus and now i can so let's say i wanted to put some text in here chapter like i could do that and i can edit multiple things at once a good tip is you can highlight using i'm using command and shift uh to select uh individual or up to the end of line and it's really good if there's say a block of text that you want to edit in one big go and it's quite repetitive uh great if you're into programming and you're trying to format uh say comments or data or things like that it's really powerful way to just do lots of things in one go without having to keep swapping between the keyboard and mouse keyboard mouse okay that is multiple cursors now indenting and out denting i've sort of alluded to this let's say i want to tab that in indent and shift and tab out then and this is a good way again if you're creating an outline of ideas you might say ideas and then note taking ideas and then you might say um uh methods of note taking and then i'm pressing shift tab to out dent and if you highlight text you can indent an out dent block so i can take that block shift and tab tab again if you're into programming this is a very standard way of editing uh blocks of code but it's great you can use that in your note-taking way and again like if you were documenting code for example so you put something like three back tips ticks let's say i'm doing some type script and i want to do a like an interface um uh book and you put like a title string author string this is where it's really handy to be able to out then indent those kind of things and the cool thing is when you say what language you're using you get the code highlighting so that's a little bonus bonus tip in there if you're into that side of things okay that's how indenting and out denting works swapping lines quickly in obsidian this one's really interesting so we can enable it and then we can add a hotkey for this so well actually it's just a hotkey so let's say i wanted to reorganize a priority list let's create a new note task list and i might say like daily tasks and then let's create uh well i could just use a markdown notation here say let's say morning routine uh meditation let's say i want to uh 10 minutes of reading go for a walk um let's uh and then journaling j-o-u-r chair spell general j-o-u-r-n-a-l something along those lines right let's say i've got a list of things here and then maybe i could just put an x in there let's see what that looks like if i preview it for that uh it doesn't look anything particular if i was using the bear app that would have converted to check boxes which is kind of cool so let's say we've got this but now i i just want to rejig the order of this um in my note-taking how would i do that so i go into the settings and under hotkeys are all these interesting things that you could optimize and uh the swap lines line down and swap line up and i quite like the idea of customizing that if i want to shift it down i press the alt or option key down and if i want to shift it up the alt or option key up as far as i can tell those hotkeys don't do anything in any other context so now i can press alt down and i can reorder my priority list so let's say i do my reading at the end of the day uh i'll do a journal in the morning a meditation and then go for a walk and then i might have other daily activities if you're outlining say a book for example my book outline i say actually we want to talk about that first or this needs to go in its own section so bring it up and shift and tab and now i brought it as a top level section so you can see how we can quickly uh just organize your ideas and move them around really quickly you know the goal here is that your your tools become an extension of of your your method so there's not a cognitive overhead to be blocked by having to figure out how to get it working in the tool and get into a state of flow so that is how you uh swap lines quickly in the city now we want to do templates so templates are really good if you want to streamline your workflow they're just a set of templates templated markdown files and it gives you can give you a standard work a standard framework to use um i would use this in the context to say if i want to create a study note permanent note maybe a journal entry uh if i'm doing some software development maybe a user story uh or even a thing called a story brand um which is kind of cool where you think of a project and you say well who's the hero what challenge are they overcoming so if you're writing a blog post you can do a story brand to make sure that you pay attention to the narrative and actually design your articles in the way that you want it to be told so how would we do this uh let's uh move back into obsidian so what we do here we create a folder and we're going to call this templates so that's now saved it'll be saved on our file system and we'll use this let's say we want to create a study note uh actually no i'll call it a yes study note so let's say i want to study something um i want it to have a title so there are three variables you can use and use the double curly brackets opening and closing this is kind of a standard way of representing dynamic data so if you're using other programming languages which have templating support some will use this notation um i could say when it was created so put a date and time so those are three variables that you can use and with a study note i might say see also and i might say references so where have i got this from and i could just template a little placeholder where i put a numbered list of what i want to put in here and that's a template there so now when i create one of these i can tell it to create a study note let's say um oh actually i want to i want to add something else i'm going to put a status and i'll put to do and we'll i'll cover using hashtags for status uh in a moment then let's say i want to create a ref uh like a yeah uh reference so again title but maybe i want to prefix this uh with reference then maybe i'll have a source and this could then be a link to somewhere where um i'll just put a number a numbered list i don't because i don't know what it would be but again we'll put a sorry created uh date and time uh and then source oh it's already what source uh what do i say like link could be a web link something uh that we put after that um okay and then finally we'll just create one more we'll call this um let's say doing some software development you want to create user story so again title i will say type uh story for yes type sorry feature so i'm thinking about software development we use some kind of tagging say what are my features uh status backlog generally if you're adding something for the first time it might be on your backlog and then you could say as a whoever i want to or i want so that so user story follows the notation as a customer i want to browse a product so that i can buy it or as a writer i want a note-taking app that has um internal links so that i can create connected thoughts something like that that's a sort of standard way of doing things and the cool thing is when you put these angle brackets here it sort of creates a block quote for that so it pulls it out and then we'll put a placeholder here description of the story right so we've created three templates now let's dive in and we'll enable in the editor settings there's an uh there's an option i'm going to lose my my place for this maybe this way it's a core plugging if i can search i can't search templates there we go so i enable the templates and what that does is it creates a plug-in option down here called templates and now i can say what folder it is and they'll give me some suggestions and i want to create my use my templates folder that i've created if i want to modify the date and time formatting i can do that and there's some references so rather than having you here mtdd there'll be a way to insert maybe march 12th for example okay now let's see it in action let's say i've got a well i create a new uh a new thing i will call this um uh what do we have we've uh we've got reference study notes let's say i to studying study uh zettel uh but let's say i'm studying a book um how to take smart smart notes a great book that covers a deep dive into the zettelcaster method now what this has given me is uh just an empty note but now on the left-hand side that plug-in has enabled this little copy symbol which is essentially your template hit insert and because i've got more than one i get to choose what type of template i can say this is a study note and now what it does is it creates how to take smart notes taken from the title up here this is when i created it here's my stasi to do and i might then have the amazon reference i might have other references and then i could make my notes in here i could create a new note so let's say i wanted to create use a story if i'm doing a bit of software development templating feature so let's say i'm working on a templating feature create a user story as a writer i want a template so that i can create notes quickly and with a standard set of content something along those i put a description in there and again i can preview that and that now comes out in a nice block quote there so that's how you can use templating uh use your imagination go creative create a workflow if you're using other techniques like the story brand if you look that up it has a whole kind of workflow around that which is really good if you're planning out projects and you want to you want to pull out the prompt for for completing things in here okay that's templating tagging in obsidian so we've kind of alluded to this um and i the way i think of tagging is you can create things like feature note types you can also create status and if i just open up the sidebar here we can now use this to expose the tagging so again we'll go into the settings of the editor um i'm just now wondering if this is a plugin rather than i think it's a plugin not a setting uh if i go here we have a tag pane let's enable that so now i get a little hash up here in the tag pane if i click that i can see backlog feature to do so everything that i've tagged has an entry here but one thing that's really useful is i could create a grouping of those so type feature status backlog i'm just now going to click through and clean up the ones where i haven't done that from and you notice it'll give a suggestion as you start typing status status backlog and now i can collapse those this to do here let's just put that as status and status council status let's just fix that so it looks clean s a t okay so now i have a nice little system where i can look at all my features and they come up here that's the search string that it generates and i can look at things like my backlog and my to-do's um very quickly so if you want to build some workflow maybe you've got some notes which you've partially worked on you just want to create a little bit of status around that you can use the tagging use the slash notation so that you get the groups here another thing you can use for that is to create themes around your content so one of the things with obsidian is that ultimately these files are on your file system and you might be tempted to organize things in very rigid folder structures which is fine if that works for you i tend not to like that because how do you know what file what folder a particular note goes in let's say i'm talking about um knowledge management and as a folder and note taking as a folder and then suddenly you realize it's settle cast and set knowledge management is it no taking so i like to keep things quite shallow just stick them in but what i can do is i can use the tagging here to create some themes and i could say like a theme oh hashtag note taking create multiple ones theme settle casting so now i can create a top level view of these these things that i want to index into so what what have i got on note taking what have i got on zettel casten um and it's quite free form i don't have to tie that now into my folder structure i can have that very free form uh and build up a map of how to and create entry points into my note-taking system so so ultimately that's uh tagging uh you need to enable the plug-in for that pane to appear and then you can use it for status you can break it into folders um and yeah you have to enable it and then finally uh how to embed codepen into obsidian so not really just coping but let's say you're learning how to program and you want your uh your notes to be rich and have examples of what to do so let's say you're you're looking at um you're looking on the web and you find this link here it's a code pen so it's a working example so what you can do is you can if i click this link here so if i open that so here's here's an example it's just a simple react kind of clock react framework but there's an embed option and lots of websites have an embed option so twitter you can embed i believe things maybe even youtube you can embed youtubes and you can do the iframe option so i'm just going to select all of this in this text box i'm going to bring that into the clipboard and we'll move over into obsidian and let's say coding example how to create a clock in react for example or timer and let's just paste in and create a title example and it doesn't look like it's doing much here but when you put that in preview mode it will load that and now i can actually see that running i can interact with it i can see the html i can see that the code that's running and i can build up real world examples if i'm looking at how to learn how to code if if it's got an embed option generally you can then stick it into your notes here which is really powerful um we could try a youtube example so if i if i come up here let's go to i'll just find a video here one second i've not tested this so i'm not actually sure if this will work but we'll we'll give it a go um so so so essentially i've got this video here uh sorry let's stop that and then i can go to uh share embed let's see what happens copy the embed let's paste that in play and now you can create embedded youtube videos in here which is is quite good if you want to now take study notes of this video you just want to be completely within here what you would do is you would split the view horizon vertically run that in preview mode let's collapse that down now i can take my notes on this video uh and have that all tied together which is kind of cool so yeah with the iframe embed just copy the code stick it in you can do some pretty pretty funky things with your notes to reference other content and obviously if that video went away it's that that what that's pointing to goes away you lose that out of your notes and it's a reference that you don't really persist for very long but great for study notes where you just want to quickly capture things in but probably not ideal to rely on it for long longevity essentially so yeah that uh pretty much concludes uh the working working example of how to take sorry uh how to use obsidian um and uh some of the advanced features of obsidian so that was a deep dive into obsidian i hope those techniques will find you well in your note-taking journey and that they're things that can help you elevate yourself to that next level now i just want to take a moment to talk about uh what i'm working on with this channel and uh with the app that i'm building so there's no shame in this i'm building my own note-taking app i've used lots of different apps to try and organize my second brain to take that knowledge that i'm getting from reading books articles youtube videos so much knowledge but i felt like i was sort of slipping through my fingers i couldn't recall it when i needed it i discovered the zettelkaster method uh last year uh there's a great book called how to take smart notes uh by i think it's seonkay aaron's once you get into that mindset of how you can take that knowledge go through the process and distilling it down into something that's highly discoverable highly reusable you can create blog posts from it you can create youtube videos from it you can teach others from it most importantly you can deploy that knowledge in your own life but i very quickly discovered that i lack consistency in doing anything i can have the best app i could have obsidian i could have notion i could have run research i can have them there but unless i chip away 10 minutes a day and keep hyper focused on building value in my note-taking it's not going to happen so i decided that actually there's no app that's going to help me do this so i started the journey to create my own called the idea is that you get into a state of flow sends the flow of flotellic and you have a autotelic experience which means the act of learning the act of writing the act of discovering is the joy in itself so this app is built mostly around the zettlecaster method but it won't be restricted to that so that i can record my notes build a habit so that i can produce better blog posts and better youtube videos and really see that um transcend in the output and my thinking and being able to help other people along the way and this app i'm building obviously not just for myself it is for others who are like me who are an auto deduct someone who just loves to self-learn who will pick up a book who'll read an article and and recognizes that the information in a book is only as useful as how you build on that knowledge and how you organize your thoughts and the zetralcaston method really helps you with that helps you do your thinking through your note-taking it embodies the act of writing being able to teach others get feedback evaluate your understanding and recognize that your understanding changes over time so i wanted to build an app that really embodies that most other software that i've found either doesn't have the discipline around it or sort of encourages long form notes which are really hard to get the information back out of so if that is of interest to you then make sure you like this video make sure you hit the subscribe button and most importantly there's a link in the description where you can go to join.flowtalic.com just drop your email address in join the mailing list join the journey once you put your email in you'll get instant access to the app while we're in private beta it's completely free local storage you don't need to worry about um any accounts or anything like that play with it and check out the other videos on the channel where you can see how to get the most out of the app in its early stages and yeah leave a comment see and share your thoughts and what you'd like to see next so i'm martin and thank you very much

Channel: Martin Adams

Views: 109,508

Keywords: obsidian, note-taking, folding in obsidian, templates in obsidian, advanced obsidian, second brain, zettelkasten, roam research, markdown editor

Id: c6qfrRVUOO8

Length: 34min 40sec (2080 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021