The 5 BEST Obsidian Plugins I Use (2021) // EP 2 Mastering Obsidian

make no mistake you can easily spend hours finding and tweaking new obsidian plugins for a very small if any increase in results or you could spend a relatively small amount of time and experience the bulk of the benefits that obsidian plugins have to offer i know because i've been there this is known as the pareto principle or the 80 20 rule which states that you get 80 percent of the results from 20 percent of the effort i found this to be true in many aspects of life and obsidian plugins are absolutely no different we're going to divide this video into five parts which are my five favorite obsidian plugins and the ones that i get close to 100 of the results from first we're going to go over a plug-in combination that has replaced my journaling app and therefore saved me a monthly subscription while allowing me for more customization next we're going over a better way to import your kindle highlights from your kindle into your episode involved after that we're going over the plugin that has made me not miss using the notion app and the last two are very small and lightweight plugins that make a significant difference in my workflow and they may make it in yours as well the first of these five that we're going to be going over today is the only one that requires a small amount of tweaking while the other ones are all plug and play alright so here we are back in our obsidian vault which is the same vault we opened in episode 1 of this series before we begin as i said in the previous video obsidian community plugins as the name suggests are not native to obsidian which means that we have to turn the safe mode off and you can find that here in the settings community plugins and we can turn this one off you'll then be prompted by this admittedly a little intimidating disclaimer by obsidian telling you that community plugins can access files in your computer connect to the internet and even install additional programs yes this can be a little intimidating but from my experience and the experience of the thousands of members in the obsidian community as long as you stick to the popular plugins you really have nothing to worry about so we can safely turn off the safe mode and once you do that you can then come here to community tab and browse for community plugins okay so we're gonna start with my personal favorite combination by far in obsidian for the past two or three years i've been paying a forty dollar yearly subscription to the very popular journaling app called day one and although overpriced it is indeed a great app however after implementing what i'm about to show you i've since canceled my subscription and i'm not going back all right now we have some ground work to do we need to activate three different plugins and the first one is the most famous community plugin which is the calendar plugin as you can see it's the one with the most download so we're going to click it hit install and then we have to click enable and if we exit out of this you can see we have successfully installed the calendar plugin and it lives right here for you to tweak the settings but before that let me show you how the calendar looks like so we're going to exit out of that and the calendar is currently sitting right here personally i prefer it on the bottom right corner so we can just drag and drop it like so and now we have a very nice calendar here on the bottom right so we can come back to the calendar settings and the only thing that i change here on the calendar settings is that i toggle on the show week number so we're going to toggle this one on and as you can see in the calendar we now have a week number displayed next to sunday and as you'll see in a minute this is going to tie in beautifully with the other two plugins we'll be activating all right the second plugin is actually native to obsidian so we don't have to go to the community tab we can simply come here to core plugins and it's named templates it's right here so we're going to toggle this one on and as the name suggests this allows us to build templates in obsidian and for organizational purposes we can create a templates folder to put in all our templates inside of so we can come here to our file explorer hit new folder and we're just going to name it templates so now we can come back to the settings of this templates plugin which is right here under plugin options and we can tell this plugin to use a designated folder to store all the templates that we create so we can come here to template folder location click on it and it shows right away so now all our future templates are going to be stored automatically inside this folder so now we can exit out of this and we come back to the community plugins tab and we're going to install our third and final community plugin and this one is called periodic nodes and it's made by the same developer that made the calendar plugin so you can come here install and then we're going to enable it and now what this plugin does is that it lets you take weekly monthly quarterly and even yearly notes and it lets you assign a designated template for each all right now we have just a few more steps to go to complete the groundwork first we're going to create a template for our daily note by coming here to our templates folder and create a new note let's title it daily note template and then let's give it some prompt something simple such as what did i do today what could i have done better and what am i grateful for obviously these are just examples and you can put whatever you want in here and now let's create a folder here on the side and call it journal and now we'll just create a weekly notes template command n we can call it the same weekly note templates and let's give it some prompts as well okay now we can place this in the templates folder all right now as a final step we need to come back to our periodic node settings and we're going to be toggling on daily notes and weekly notes personally i'll leave the format as it is and we're going to assign a daily note template and we created one and it was titled day we know templates so we just type it in and it's right here and we're going to add it to the journal folder and i will do the same for the weekly notes so weekly note template we created one titled weekly notes and we're going to assign it the same folder bear in mind that if you want to keep these two separated which is something a lot of people like all you need to do is create a new folder and title it something like weekly journal and the same goes for all of these different notes so the groundwork is complete and we're going to exit out of this so now we can finally see what we put together in action so we can come here to our calendar over here on the bottom right and we're going to press a date for instance october 3rd it's going to prompt us to create a new daily note we're going to hit create and as you can see it pulled our template from the designated folder and applied it to this date so now let's click on the weekly number so we can click on the week that just passed week 41 create as you can see the plugin pulled the weekly template that we gave it and if you come back here to the left you can see on the journal that you have both of these now personally i like to keep my weekly entries on a separate journal so we're going to come here new folder weekly journal we can drag this one into here we can now go back to our periodic notes and under weekly notes on the note folder we can change it to weekly journal all right we can now exit out of this giving it a try week 42 create now we can come back here to the weekly journal and here we have week 42. so now you have notes attached to dates and that can be really powerful and if you're wondering what this here is these little dots next to the dates each dot represents 250 words by default and you can change that by coming here to the calendar settings and where you see here words per dot 250 you can change this to whatever you like but at 250 if you have 250 words you have one dot 500 two dots and so on and so forth and this is something that i actually like quite a lot because sometimes on my personal vault i'm scrolling through the calendar and i see oh wow hey i typed a lot on this date maybe i should go back and see what happened and days where i had a lot to say tend to be important days that i like to remember so it's a really nice way to go back in time and see which days matter the most this is so much better than my previous journaling app subscription it's much more customizable i'm in full charge of the privacy and security of my notes because if you remember all our notes are here inside a folder in our file system and they're all in markdown format so if you want to export all your journal entries you can just come here to journal and copy paste all of this wherever you'd like it to be or just to make backups which is something that i'll be going over in a future video in this series so hopefully you can see how powerful these three plugins together can be all right now our next plugin is the kindle highlights plugin now this is much simpler than the previous one i briefly spoke about this one in the previous video but basically what it does is that it pulls your kindle highlights out of your kindle and into your obsidian vault and keeps them nicely synced into an organizational structure of your choice although this might appear simple there are services out there that charge a monthly subscription for this one and here you have it completely free of charge and it works just as nicely if not better so to activate this plugin we once again come to our community plugins tab we hit browse and we type in kindle should be enough and there we have it kindle highlights we're going to install it and then we're going to click enable so as you can see here in this little video you have to sign in with your amazon account and once you do that the plugin will automatically pull the kindle highlights into your obsidian vault and once it's done syncing it's going to give you a note for every book and inside that note you'll find a bunch of metadata and the best part about it is that you can have clickable links inside each highlight as you see here and if you have the kindle app installed it's going to take you straight to where that passage is on the book which is a feature that's really handy when you need some more context on the passage that you highlighted once you activate the kindle highlights plugin you can find it here on the left side of your screen and once you click it all you need to do is connect your amazon account and the plugin does the rest for you all right this next plugin is the kanban board plugin and this was one of notions nicest features and we now have it right here on obsidian and it works just as well if not better so once again we're going to come here to the community tab press browse and you can find kanban right here it's also extremely popular we're going to click install and then enable once you apply it you can simply make a new note by using command palette and remember command p is how we tell obsidian what we want it to do by typing it so we can type in kanban and one of the prompts is to create a new board so we're going to click ok and it created the new board for us and what this type of data visualization does is that it lets you add boards and then you can name the boards whatever you like and add cards to it and then you can simply move the card from one board to the other you might be wondering what do you use it for which is a very valid question i use it for two main reasons the first one is to manage my youtube channel and i picked that one up from ali abdull i'll leave his channel in the description for you to check it out and the way i have it organized is that one board is named idea another one's named scripting next one is named ready to film ready to edit we can exit out of them this one will be named ready to publish and the last one i name it published so then the way i have it is for instance let's call this note obsidian episode 2 which is what you're watching and then i turn it into a note by simply putting square brackets around it and if you click it that's its own note so then inside this note is where i put the ideas for youtube video as well as the script and as it moves along in the production process i move it along here as well eventually it's going to reach the published board and i usually just leave the videos here i also use it to plan different things for instance i'm actually in the process of moving houses so i need to buy a bunch of stuff such as furniture appliances and all that so i have a kanban board for it as well and it looks something like this i only use about four so then i have one named research another four down to two and three and don't worry i'll explain in a second then decide it and lastly purchased so then i'll have a note such as microwave and inside the microwave note i usually just have a bunch of amazon links and once i'm down to just a couple links or at most three i move it along to the right once i've decided comes here and once i've purchased comes here i personally really enjoy this way of visualizing data it's not exactly for everyone but maybe it's for you as well all right now i'm going to show you the last two plugins and these are very small lightweight plugins that help me quite a lot now by default obsidian has a built-in word count which is right here hopefully you can see it on the screen so if you come here to a note and we start typing you can see here it tells us it's four words and 19 characters this is enough if your notes are really small but once you have a lot of text particularly if you do any kind of publishing work it's really helpful to find out how many words are in your highlighted text so when you highlight a text like so see right here it's two words but obscene doesn't tell us that it just tells us this four words 19 characters because it can only read the full note so then the obsidian community came up with a plugin called better word count so once again we're going to come over here to community plugins hit browse and we're going to search for better word count and here we have it we're going to click it press install and then enable so now if we come back into our note that we're just looking at you can now highlight just these two words and it'll tell you here on the bottom right two words 12 characters but now that we have this more advanced way of counting words we don't really need the default word count of obsidian and we can easily remove that one by coming into settings core plugin and scrolling all the way down until you see word count once you remove that one and we go back to our note now you can only see the better word count and this can come in very handy if you do any sort of publishing work especially for something like twitter where characters are limited okay so we reached the final plugin which is called recent files and if you use obsidian the way it was intended to which is without a folder file structure and you have hundreds maybe thousands of notes there might come a time when you were just working on a note and you followed links all the way to different notes and different notes and you forgot which one you were just in and now you can't easily find that note because maybe you don't remember the title and unlike a typical folder file structure you can't easily go back and trace your steps and for that the community also came up with a wonderful plugin that has saved me multiple times called recent files so for that we come to community plugins tab once more hit the browse for one last time type in recent files install and enable and once you do that it's going to be a little hidden it defaults to over here and personally i like to keep it opposite the calendar so right here on the bottom left and i don't need all that space so i drag it down a little so now let's see this in action let's say you're on your weekly note and then you moved on to obsidian episode two and then you were on the comment board you see that as you're clicking more and more notes it's gonna show up here on the left so you can easily backtrack where you were this one might seem a little useless when you're starting out and you only have a couple dozen notes but trust me as you build up your vault this one's going to come in very handy all right guys i hope you enjoyed episode 2 in this series if you missed episode 1 i'm going to link it somewhere up here as well as in the description thanks for watching and i'll see in the next one bye

Channel: FromSergio

Views: 5,768

Keywords: Obsidian, Obsidian plugins, Best obsidian Plugins, Obsidian app, Obsidian community plugins, how to use obsidian plugins, obsidian app plugins explained, obsidian templates, fromsergio obsidian, obsidian kindle highlights, obsidian better word count, how to use templates in obsidian, obsidian, obsidian free course, obsidian for beginners

Id: Byy-QNgtHIg

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021