Transcription
This is my Obsidian Vault. This is where I keep all of my contacts, whether it's my daily notes, the metrics I want to keep track of, content research. It's also where I keep my AI agents and custom workflows, pretty much the whole thing.
But this doesn't just capture notes, this also is where I do all of my work. And that's the part I think a lot of people are missing, right? Because capture is one thing, but it's totally useless if you can't do anything with it. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about in this video. Data collection is only as good as what you do with that information, okay? So, it's not just about inputs, we're also going to talk about reporting, intelligence, and execution. So, let's dig into it.
So, first things first, I don't want to turn this into a vault tour. I just want to show you what you're missing out on if you're thinking more about the workflow and not systems, how things work together. What I really want to do is get you focused on how you can customize this platform to work for you, right? Like this is a custom view I built out so I could get a real feel for exactly what I need to see right now. Not just metrics and stuff, which is, you know, awesome, but really what my focus is for the day.
Part of my daily routine is kind of the to-do list, right? Making sure that I knock off the most important thing one at a time. So, for me, that's really important. I've got ADHD, don't know if you can tell. Um, but knowing exactly what I'm doing one, two, three is pivotally important, right? This is the current focus front and center. This is what you're doing right now end to end, right? I can log the time, I can knock it off. If I need a little more information, I click contacts and I can pull up some stuff from my notes that match this search criteria.
Also some shortcuts in terms of tracking, right? So, I've got a few things that if I do every single day, things tend to fall into place for me, right? So, I can knock those off by clicking these things on or off, you know, through the day. I can also quick capture some ideas and log it to an inbox, which is fantastic. It makes things really, really easy and it's just directly in front of me, right?
If I want to drill down on any of these bits of information, I've also got the full-on metrics view for it, right? I can go over here, check this out. I'm looking negative today cuz it's still in progress, but, you know, you can see the heat map here for what we've got going on through the week. Overall to the summary, see what's going on, look at trends. You You get the thing, right? Just optics. But I mean, I can also look at overlapping graphs and I can get real insights as to if my revenue goes up one week, for example, I can really drill down and see what actions I was taking during that time and then just do more of that. I'm not obviously not going to show you the business views because, you know, there's some private information there, but you get the idea how things all work together.
I'm going to get more into the mindset stuff in a second, but I'm just going to finish up how this all comes together. And it's pretty straightforward, actually. I run everything off of two commands that I start my day with and end my day with, and that's how we track different things. But not only that, every activity I do inside the vault is also logged as well. And that's going to come in later, okay?
But what we do, we've got this daily template with all of the metrics I want to track as properties. That's important. Then we've got the three main priorities that are populated based on my daily notes, some are carried over from the day before. Got the tasks, my activity log, which is running throughout the day, calendar, my schedules, right? And all the different things I want to talk about. It's really not hard to wrap your head around how we are tracking this thing. It's just setting it up and getting into the routine of actually using it.
Every day, I run my pie agent. I just go slash today. I'm hoping my face isn't covering this. Then it pulls in my calendar, my inbox, any carryovers from the day before, and we figure out what it is that I need to focus on that day. Same thing at the end of the day, I write close day and I just use my voice dictation to talk about the day. I'll go in and I'll fill in the other half of the metrics, for example, you know, time with my family or effort put in like out of 10, you know, the different things that are important to me, and it'll go and log those and we can see the the different trends, right?
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Okay, so here's where things are changing a little bit and why I wanted to do this video like this and not a big flashy tutorial, okay? Because there's a lot of that and people don't seem to connect the dots ever. Everybody is interested in putting one and one and one and one, but not two and two. They're thinking about workflows and not systems, and I think that is a a fundamental misstep.
I still, to this day, get the question why use Obsidian and not just Claude code with some fun folder structures. And you're missing the point entirely. It's not enough that your agent can just read and navigate a folder structure, that's not an operating system. I want to keep everything in one place. I want it to be the one place where I can do everything, right? Not have to alt-tab all the time or go in and separately make notes of my activity for the day. If I keep it all in the one spot, I am infinitely more focused.
There's a lot of folks out there putting out like operating systems and using Obsidian as a memory layer for it. And then they'll build out another interface for metrics and monitoring and all that other stuff, and it doesn't make sense to me to have to go from one app to another app to another app to do all these different things. I can go into Obsidian and keep my eyes on everything, but not only that, I can work in it as well. It's the entire system. It's not just the one workflow after another. It It's all working together.
Like I can check out Telegram, I can check out Slack, check my email, bounce over to my school community, see what's going on on YouTube, if people are like, you know, responding to comments and that kind of thing, right? I've got my terminal right here and then I can spin up the localhost and just run this wherever. I can move any of these windows wherever I want. It's really customizable and the system is all in the one spot. That is so important and I'm going to tie it back into the dashboard here in just a sec, okay?
But like a browser here, uh the agent here, a different folder there, your dashboard somewhere else, all of that causes friction and friction isn't harmless. Every time you change context or have to like switch views or whatever, you're losing momentum. You might not notice, but you absolutely are. It might sound dramatic, but it's just good system design. If you keep everything tight so you don't have to go like searching or reaching for anything and it's all in the same place, you're going to be more productive. It's a lot easier to work with your toolbox nicely organized than it is to like go looking for a different toolbox is maybe the best analogy I can come up with off the top of my head.
Anyway, back to the conversation at hand, agents and Obsidian are great friends because they complement each other's strengths. Agents help you input to the Obsidian structure, Obsidian fills in the memory gaps in your AI agent. It works great. Except it still leaves the problem a lot of people have with note-taking and personal knowledge-based apps where they just like collect information and it turns into a graveyard.
Where Obsidian is uniquely powerful over other PKMs is you don't just have to sit on all that information, you can turn it into an intelligence layer either through a custom plugin like this, which is great, you just build out a mini app essentially to pull from your daily notes. You can do it with your canvas, right? With different charts, views, and things like that. There's a lot of ways you can get there and Obsidian offers that. That is useful and beneficial on its own, but when you factor in that you can actually go in and do the work in this platform as well, that's where things start to really compound.
It doesn't make sense to think of these as like individual workflows anymore and that seems to be what is most popular on YouTube tutorials is like, "Oh, I can do this." And then you put it back on the shelf and then you go to another app for something else. No, man. Keep it all in the same place and you'll be exponentially more productive. And that's really what I'm trying to say here is stop thinking about things as like individual workflows and start building out systems where all these different things start working together for you.
So, well, I said the point isn't to you worry about this particular dashboard. I do have a free starter vault that I'll leave a link in the description to some of my free stuff, but I also have this exact layout with the dashboard and intelligence plugin available through my school community. I'm updating that very shortly, it'll be in the tools and agent section right here. The link to that will also be in the description. Make sure to subscribe if you want to see how this continues to grow out as I build it out in the future. Thanks for hanging out with me. I'll see you in the next one.