Obsidian is an ideal tool for Journaling.
- Local First: Your journal never goes to the cloud unless you explicitly want it to.
- A lightweight application: Obsidian, by itself, is resource-friendly. Of course, as you add Plugins that could change. More on that in a second.
- Ultimately flexible.
- There’s a rich ecosphere of Plugins to grow your Journal or Second Brain.
Getting started
Download and install the application and go. It’s that easy.
As discussed in the On Journaling article getting started is the important part.
Start with a Journal file. Create date headers if you are so inclined. Start writing.
You might want to get more organized: a file per day. Create a file at the beginning or end of the day and write.
Themes
Themes provide the look and feel for Obsidian. The default theme will be fine for most folk. But if you are not most folk, you will want to go to “Appearance” settings and “Manage” your way to a new theme. You can browse a subset of themes on the Obsidian Hub Themes page. Incidentally, the Obsidian hub is built with Obsidian publish, should you want to explore making your journaling public.
Plugins
The Obsidian Plugin ecosphere is vast. There are any number of Plugins that can enhance your Journaling experience.
A caveat, however, the temptation to have plugins for every aspect of your Journaling journey is going to be strong. Be cautious, plugins do add overhead to processing. There’s also the danger of going down the rabbit-hole of over-customization and losing focus on the original purpose of the Journal.
Core Plugins are built into the application. Community Plugins are contributed by the Obsidian community.
Core Plugins
Daily Notes
The Daily Notes plugin allows you to automatically create daily notes with templates. it works in conjunction with the Templates core plugin.
Templates
A simple templating plugin.
With these two plugins you can set up a simple template for daily entries for your journal and assign the creation of the daily note to a shortcut.
Community Plugins
Daily Notes
There are a number of plugins designed to enhance daily notetaking. They offer various degrees of automation and specialization.
Before exploring all the Community Plugins, it is best to start with the Core Plugins to determine what your daily routine is going to be and what data you will want to gather.
Keep in mind that “Form Follows Function.”
Templates
There are also a number of templating plugins to enhance your notetaking.
Templater is by far the most complete and popular plugin. There are many example templates in the Templater Showcase
A Word of Caution
It is easy to get caught up in customizing Obsidian to the extent that more time is spent on Obsidian configuration than actual Journaling.
Strongly recommend defining a workflow first, then working on an organizational structure, then determining your real Theme and plugin needs.
