A Minimal Obsidian Setup That I Actually Use

Every Obsidian tutorial will eventually tell you to build a Zettelkasten. I tried it for a year. I had atomic notes, evergreen notes, literature notes, index notes, Maps of Content, a PARA folder structure, and eleven community plugins. My vault looked impressive. I never used it.

The problem with elaborate note-taking systems is that maintaining the system becomes the work. Filing a note into the right folder, deciding whether something is a “permanent note” or a “fleeting note”, keeping your Maps of Content up to date — these are tasks that have nothing to do with thinking or learning. They’re just overhead.

Here’s what I use now.

Vault Structure

Four folders. That’s it.

vault/
├── _inbox/
├── _daily/
├── _notes/
└── _templates/

_inbox is where everything lands first. No categorization at the point of capture — that friction kills the habit. Things sit in inbox until they’re either processed into _notes, turned into a daily note entry, or deleted.

_daily holds daily notes. One file per day, named YYYY-MM-DD. They’re dated so they sort correctly and can be found without searching.

_notes is flat. No subfolders. A note called go-context-propagation.md is easier to find than hunting through programming/languages/go/concurrency/context-propagation.md. The search is fast enough that folder hierarchies are mostly organizational theatre.

_templates holds templates. Not worth thinking about.

The underscore prefix keeps these four folders at the top of the file explorer and visually distinct from any loose files.

Daily Notes

The daily note is the spine of the system. Everything else is optional.

I use a template that takes about thirty seconds to fill in and covers what I actually care about:

# {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} — {{date:dddd}}

## Focus
What's the one thing that would make today a success?

-

## Log

## Notes

---
#daily

The “Focus” section is a single line. One thing. Not a to-do list — that lives elsewhere. Just the one outcome that matters today. Writing it first thing forces a decision about priority before the day starts deciding for you.

“Log” is a running capture during the day. Links to things I read, quick thoughts, things I want to remember, anything. Unstructured on purpose.

“Notes” is for anything longer — a summary of a conversation, a decision and its reasoning, something I learned that’s worth more than a bullet point.

The #daily tag at the bottom is how I filter these out when I don’t want them surfacing in search results.

Weekly Reviews

This is the highest-value part of the whole system. A weekly review forces you to look back before planning forward, which sounds obvious but is easy to skip.

# Week {{date:YYYY-[W]WW}}

## Shipped
What actually got done this week?

-

## Learned
What do I know now that I didn't know Monday?

-

## Friction
What slowed me down, caused stress, or didn't go as expected?

-

## Next week
What matters most in the next seven days?

-

---
#weekly

I do this on Friday afternoon, takes about fifteen minutes. The “Friction” section is the most useful one — it surfaces recurring problems that would otherwise stay invisible. If the same thing appears there three weeks in a row, it needs to be fixed, not just noted.

Plugins

Core plugins only, with two enabled beyond Obsidian’s defaults:

Daily Notes (core) — creates today’s note from the template when you open it. Set the template path and the folder and it just works.

Templates (core) — inserts template content at the cursor. Used for weekly reviews and any ad-hoc note structure.

That’s it. I’ve tried Dataview, Calendar, Tasks, Kanban, Excalidraw, and a few others. They’re genuinely good software. They’re also things I have to configure, maintain, and relearn after six weeks away. The question isn’t whether a plugin is useful — it’s whether the utility outweighs the maintenance cost.

Dataview is the one I’d reach for first if the core system stopped being enough. It lets you query your vault like a database:

TABLE file.mtime AS "Last Modified"
FROM #project
WHERE !contains(file.name, "archive")
SORT file.mtime DESC

That’s useful. I just don’t need it yet.

What I Don’t Do

Zettelkasten. The atomic note / permanent note / literature note distinction is a real methodology with real benefits for academic research and synthesising large bodies of literature. For a software engineer writing notes about tools and projects, it’s unnecessary complexity. The friction of deciding what “kind” of note something is reliably stops me from writing the note.

Backlinks as a thinking tool. The graph view looks like a brain. It isn’t one. I check it occasionally out of curiosity. It’s never caused an insight.

Daily note to-do lists. Tasks live in a dedicated task manager, not scattered across dated files. Trying to track tasks in daily notes means either copying them forward every day (tedious) or losing track of them.

Tagging everything. I use #daily and #weekly to filter those notes out of search. Everything else is searchable by content. A taxonomy of tags is another thing to maintain.

Three Months In

The vault has about 200 notes. I open it every day. The weekly review happens every week. That’s the metric that matters — not how sophisticated the system is, but whether I’m using it.

The best note-taking system is the one with the least resistance between a thought and a written record of it. Fewer decisions at capture time means more things actually get captured.

Start with daily notes. Add the weekly review. See if you need anything else before adding it.