Transcription
Do you ever absent-mindedly reach for your phone? Do you ever swipe around until you find an app that'll give you just a splash of dopamine? Well, if you don't, good for you. But for the rest of us, how nice would it be to turn our impulsive phone habits into something good. In this new update of the Obsidian app, I believe we can. And I want to show you exactly how. How to set up clickable widgets on the lock screen, how to set up widgets across your device, and really how to use this new update to hijack your novelty bias. so that you're opening up Obsidian more than you are Instagram or in my case, YouTube.
If you're new here, I'm Nick Milo and I'm here to help you create your idea verse, a digital home for all your best thinking. You ready? Let's go to the phone. Now, in my eyes, this is Obsidian Mobile version 2.0. Officially, it's 1.11 as of the recording of this video, but if that changes over time, I will not be surprised because this update is that huge.
So, before I show you how to set up the widgets, what if I just tap on daily note? And immediately it opens up today's Daily Note. And you can see I'm right here working on Obsidian mobile video. Pretty soon I'll be able to cross that out. How cool is that?
Now, if I click on home base, and you must have a home base note. If you don't, watch this video. We'll link to it up here because it is so crucial that you have a home dashboard that gives you the confidence whenever you feel lost. You're like, "Hey, where should I go?" You go to the homebase note. In this case, it's now a widget and boom, it immediately opens up and I can now go anywhere across my idea verse with one click. I love this so much. I'll go ahead and click on calendar and you can see all these different meetings, reviews, daily notes all together for me to just look at together along with a dream u about a flying orange llama. So, take that for what you will.
Let's jump out of that one. And we can also just go ahead and create a new note. And let's give this the really creative title called new note. And then I can just start typing. Okay, this is an important point. Gone is the past. Obsidian mobile 1.0. It was great, but it was a little slow. There was too much friction. It took too long to just add a new idea. Guess what? The friction is gone with the widgets.
Now that you see how they work, let's set them up together. So, what I'm going to do is just press and hold. It goes into an edit mode and edit in the upper left. I'm going to go ahead and hit add widget. And then I get to type obsidian. And then we have new note, daily note, and then view note. And that's where you bookmark a note and then connect it. So if I just want to set up, let's say, daily note again. And then I hit add widget. Now we have it at the top here.
Now what you'll want to do is press and hold on it and then hit edit widget. And then it's going to ask you to choose your vault. Most of you will probably only have one vault because I do a lot of stuff with Obsidian. I have a lot of vaults. some team base, some otherwise, but I'm just going to go ahead and select my vault called idea verse. And now go ahead and hit daily note. And just like that, this new widget I created took me right back to my daily note. I think that is just phenomenal. So that's how you'd set up a widget.
And let's do one more together. Let's assume that you do have that home base note, that home note that you always go back to. So again, press and hold, hit edit, add widget, and then we're going to go into type in Obsidian, and then this time it's called View Note. This one's a little tricky, so I want to show you this one. So now I'm going to press and hold on it, edit widget, and in this situation, as of the recording of this video, it can only recognize notes that you've bookmarked. So in this case, I hit choose, and I have a few different vaults, but I have bookmarked the home base note. How did we do that? Go into Obsidian and if you go to whatever note you want to bookmark in the upper right there'll be the three dots and then you can find where it says bookmark or in this case edit bookmark because I've already bookmarked it. So since it is already bookmarked I can now choose the bookmark home base and it actually previews the note which is pretty cool. So now if I click on this one and immediately it opens up the home note and in the next part of this video I want to show you how you can do that from the lock screen so that when instantly you have an idea or you want to check in on your daily note or you want to go to your home base note you can do it just like that.
By the way, these updates are for iOS and Android. So no matter what your phone is running, you should be set. Check out the official change log for the differences in the updates so that you don't run into any surprises.
Now, for this one, I can't record my lock screen, so I just have to show you this way. And we'll try to do this together. It's going to be a little bit tricky. So, audio will be a little strange. I apologize for that one. But these are the widgets, and they'll take me wherever I want to go. So, hey, see that one? It's a calendar. If I tap on that, immediately we're back at the daily note. How cool is that?
So, let's go back to the lock screen. And what you'll do is you press and hold. Now, it'll say customize. So, then go ahead and tap the customize button. Click on the lock screen. Again, if I just tap on any of these, I could can delete them. So, in this case, I'll delete add a new note. And what I want to do is actually scroll all the way down to the O's for Obsidian. And then we can open Obsidian, just the app, which has that cool icon. Maybe you want to use that one. As cool as the icon is, I'm either going to add a new note, which you just saw. I can go to the daily note, which I've added. Search, which is above, and then open note also takes me to the homebase note that we looked at previously. So, let's just go ahead and add new notes. I think it's just drag and drop. And we just put it back. We'll hit done. And now if we tap on it, new note. So now from the lock screen, we're able to create any note we want to at any time. Like how cool is that?
So we looked at widgets. Now we just looked at the lock screen and I can search from here too. Do the face unlock and start to search for notes that have Bilbo in them. We immediately see the notes with Bilbo starting to populate. Pretty awesome, I think, as well. And again, to hijack the novelty bias, instead of going on Instagram, why not go to your your home note? So immediately, I'm back at my home note and I'm like, "Oh, wait. What is recent? What is my calendar saying? What efforts do I need to work on? I'm now reminded of them. I'm using the impulsivity that comes with having a phone in the modern digital age as an advantage finally because I'm hijacking my own novelty bias. My bias that says, "I want something new. Give me that dopamine hit." And instead of getting lost consuming more and more information, we're getting, if anything, lost consuming the information we've told ourselves we already care about, the stuff that we've made notes on in our idea verse. Very cool.
By the way, if you want to jump into Obsidian and make use of all its up-to-date features, including the Obsidian mobile sidebars areas that you've seen in this video, the capture note system I use every day, and a lot more, check out Ideaverse Pro, my Obsidian template and course. In just a few clicks, you can go from setting up your first Obsidian Vault to a full-fledged idea system. You can organize your thinking, capture your notes, manage your projects, and start with a complete system that you can then adjust to fit your exact needs and goals and seasons in your life. And as Obsidian updates, Idea Versse Pro and our companion course teaching you the ins and outs of everything will update, too, so you'll always be up to speed. Check it out by scanning here or going to the link in the description below.
Now, in the next section, I want to talk about the control center and how to set this up. All right, this is for anyone using an iPhone at the very least. I don't know how it works on Android, but if you swipe down from the upper right, you get what Apple calls the control center. If you click and hold somewhere, it opens up the opportunity to edit things. And in this case, you can see on the bottom, new note, daily note, search, and then open that home base note. They've all been set up. So, if you're wondering how to do this, let's go ahead and just delete the search vault. Now, we're going to hit the bottom add a control and I'm going to type as usual OB. That gets me obsidian. And then I see the search icon. So, let me go ahead and tap that. And immediately it goes to the the new spot. You can actually expand this to take up two different fields. Now, you get that nice text. It says search vault. I like open note to be on the right if I can and search fault on the left. Now, let's just tap search vault and oh, it doesn't work. This is by design. So, now if we press and hold to get into edit mode and now if I tap on search vault, I need to make sure it's the correct vault. So, in this case, ideaverse and we're good to go. Now, you might see it also has query. So, we can have preloaded searches. I don't have the need for that, but if you wanted to have a pre-loaded search just for Bilbo Baggins, then every time you hit this one icon, you will search all of your notes for Bilbo, go for it. In this case, it's fine for me to keep that search field empty. And so now, when we click on it, immediately we go to the search field.
Okay, we've covered how to set up these widgets, lock screen widgets, and control center controls. Now, how do we tie this all together? How do you actually customize your phone so it works well? So, as you see, as I'm swiping through these different pages, I have a bunch of different apps, that doesn't matter. But what matters is on every page, have a widget that allows you to jump back into Obsidian. What normally happens to me is I'm absent-mindedly checking my phone and I'll swipe over and I'll try to go to YouTube or Substack. But now I have a new option. I can just click on the daily note. So, I'm giving myself a choice. do this consuming behavior or in your same sort of mindless scrolling on the phone, do this nourishing behavior and all I need to do now I don't have to change I don't have to go into the mountains I don't have to give up my device instead I found a better way to manage my desire for dopamine instead of getting distracted online I can easily go to one of these apps so the way to do this is in this case we can go ahead and remove this daily note widget so remember all these widgets we created together. I'll just click and hold on one of them and I'll start to move it around and place it exactly where I want it, which is right there. And you can see I've done that for the next screen over, the next screen over, and even this other screen. Whenever I'm looking at any screen on my phone, I want to have an escape hatch back to Obsidian. That's how we hijack our novelty bias and spend more time with the thoughts that matter more to us. Our thoughts, not their thoughts.
What's resonating the most? Let me know in the comments. I really want to know in this one. For me, this was the game changer. Now, wherever I am, I can just jump back into my daily note. And I have to tell you, the daily note is back, baby. I've never been someone who uses the daily note religiously every single day. I'm more hit or miss with my days. However, with this Obsidian mobile, what I'll call 2.0 update, I'm using the Daily Note almost every day. And it's because of the new environment. Now, it's just so easy to jump into the Daily Note and say, "Hey, what am I working on?" And guess what? This video is basically done. So, boom. I get to do that. And if you want to get my exact setup with everything that you've seen here on mobile, check out Ideaverse Pro. It's easy to download, to install, and to customize to make it your own. And if these mobile updates have convinced you to try Obsidian for the first time or get back into it after a long break, I know there are many of you, check out this video next where I'll teach you just the 80% of obsidian you really need to know in only 15 minutes.