The Atmosphere is a new open network of apps and services that all work together. Think of it like truly owning your Google Account. Instead of every app being its own walled garden, Atmosphere apps share a common foundation — so you only need one account to use them all, and they can easily share data.

Your Atmosphere Account is your passport to this entire ecosystem. One account unlocks every app — no more creating new logins, no more losing your stuff when you switch. Sign in once, and you’re home everywhere.

via atstore

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Some Apps

Apps I poked at include these:

• Acorn is a community platform, currently by invitation only. I haven’t tried that yet.

• atstore is an appstore for the atmosphere.

• diffdown is a multiplayer (minimal) markdown editor (Obsidian it is not, yet):

• skyboard is a multiplayer kanban board, and it looks pretty good.

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First Look at margin.at

margin.at is multiuser stream of web annotations. Here’s the stream including a few annotations I added.

The method of use is 1/ sign up, 2/ install the margin.at extension in your browser, then 3/ when visiting some webpage you can use keystrokes to annotate, bookmark, highlight the page.

Commands:

Annotate and highlight any webpage, with your notes saved to the decentralized AT Protocol.

Features:
• Bookmark - Save any page on the web and look back at it later
• Highlight - Mark important information you want to reference later
• Annotate - Add notes to anything on the web, like, reply, and view other users’ annotations

Keyboard Shortcuts: [Note: ‘alt’ is ‘option’ on Mac]
• Alt+M - Open sidebar
• Alt+A - Annotate selection
• Alt+H - Highlight selection
• Alt+B - Bookmark page
(Customize at chrome://extensions/shortcuts)

How to use: [note: ‘right click’ is ‘control’ on Mac]
• Sidebar: Right-click anywhere → Margin → Open Sidebar
• Popup: Click the Margin icon in your toolbar
• Annotate/Highlight: Select text → right-click → Margin → Annotate or Highlight

I have some shortcut collisions that I have not sorted out with the Chrome extension yet. For example, I can’t bookmark a page, yet.

Here’s a web page, annotated:

When I mouse over, I see this:

I can easily share the annotation to Bluesky, where is show like this, which is not so great.

As I comment in the Bluesky reply. ‘PS margin.at links do not resolve on bsky to a thumbnail of the margin annotation, but to a splash page for margin.at, which is bad.’ I deleted the thumbnail but what I’d like is a better rendering, including the original annotation’ like a can get with, say, a substack link.

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Takeaway

I’ll keep fooling with margin.at and other AT tools, and I expect to see a great deal of progress. As an Obsidian user, I am uncertain how the AT world will play into my workflows. One thought is I am already publishing parts of my Obsidian vault to forestry, so perhaps an AT-based variant of the forestry functionality.

Likewise, AT is built around multiplayer sharing publicly on the web, so I could imagine an Obsidian collaboration layer based on AT, but I don’t know enough to do more than scratch my head about that right now. But the model in Diffdown is promising.

Writing it down is the beginning of every reliable system.

| Steven Thompson, 2026-01-20 Make it Physical (GTD)

My most recent posts here were Folio 2026.1, and Addendum to Folio 2026.1: Filtering Complexity, which summarized the system I use to manage my workings in Obsidian. I use the term ‘workings’ very intentionally. I am, at least in the recent months and year, avoiding ‘second brain’ and other lofty terminology regarding notetaking. The most I am willing to veer away from quotidian ‘notetaking’ is bicycles for the mind:

I am sidestepping various terms like ‘second brain’ or ‘tools for thought’ — they seem a bit grandiose — but I am influenced by the finding that human-powered bicycles are the most efficient machine ever created. Converting human calories into the gas equivalent, a human-powered bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. A bicycle’s motive force — its motor — is the human on the seat, pedaling. The bicycle itself does nothing until the rider’s foot hits the pedal.

Still, although it’s ‘just’ notetaking, thinking about how to take notes and use the information in them, is still worth talking about.

…

This year, I have started numbering versions of the Folio system, and a new addition — the TaskForge application — more than justifies a new version.

Before you wonder if I have replaced Obsidian, I haven’t. TaskForge is a native Mac OS application that indexes and modifies Obsidian tasks, and in that regard, it is more-or-less a replacement for the Task List Kanban plugin that I was formerly using. (For more on TaskList Kanban, see Folio 2026.1, Addendum to Folio 2026.1: Filtering Complexity, and First Look: Task List Kanban). Most of the remainder of Folio 2026.1 remains largely as it was, aside from TaskForge-specific tweaks.

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TaskForge

TaskForge (TF) is, as I said, an independent application for Mac OS, iPad, iPhone, and Android. (I have, so far, only used the Mac OS app). It’s independent — meaning it’s not a product of Obsidian or just a plugin. However, it is tightly connected to Obsidian’s file vault, from which it pulls and manipulates Obsidian tasks.

Here’s a screenshot of a Kanban view in which I am filtering tasks from the [[•workfutures.io]] project (see here for a description of Folio task management).

I have defined various column headings in this Kanban: do next, do, do someday?, don’t, and done. Unlike Task List Kanban, however, I am not using tags on the tasks to define these states. Instead, among other alternatives, TF allows me to line up these columns with task states:

• - [!] for do next

• - [ ] for do

• - [?] for do someday

• - [-] for didn’t

• - [x] for done.

There are other task status available but I find these enough for my purposes, generally

When I click on a given task, I am taken to an individual task detail screen:

The task title is at the top, and various buttons immediately below allow me to

• change task state (from done to do someday?, for example, which can also be accomplished by dragging and dropping in the Kanban itself)

• assign a priority (which I am not using at present in Folio)

• assign an action to take on completion of the task (I opt in all cases — so far — in keeping the task, and not archiving or deleting it, the two other options).

The description field provides a new affordance for Folio. The line following the task definition in the corresponding Obsidian .md file is kept in sync with this field. Here’s a screenshot of that task in the heading section of the Obsidian file:

As I have discussed in earlier Folio posts, I rely on the Obsidian Official Web clipper to incorporate articles this this one, by Derek Thompson, and I’ve tweaked the templates in that browser plugin to match up with TF conventions. For example, here’s the template for an article for [[•workfutures]] project inclusion:

Most importantly, I have the template assign the metadata field — [start:: 2026-04-15] — which I used to sort tasks in the TF Kanban. I will show the set-up for that later.

Changing the values of any of the fields in a TF task definition update the corresponding task elements.

I haven’t mentioned the organize section of the task definition because so far I have’t fooled with them.

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TaskForge set-up primer

As I explained, I haven’t explored all the features of TaskForge, so I can’t explain every option or tweak. I will move lightly over what I have done to make it usable for me, this far.

Task Types

I am relying solely on inline tasks — that means the default Obsidian markdown tasks. I am avoiding Task Files, which I haven’t used before, and would likely not line up with my style of task specification.

Lists

TaskForge is designed around lists of tasks. Notably, default lists for various categories of tasks — like Today, Inbox, Upcoming, and Completed — and a Kanban that aggregates all tasks with a column dedicated to each task status:

I found looking at all the task in my vault at once was maddening, and since I try to use project markers — like [[•workings.co]] as task metadata — I quickly have gravitated to using project-related filters to segregate tasks. In the example above, I have selected a filter for the [[•workings.co]] project.

Defining those filters was easy. I selected the three line slider at the upper right, and then selected Kanban and Quick Filters:

In general use, I select one of the filter ‘chips’ and deselect the others to minimize confusion and focus on one project at a time.

The Task Detail Panel

Clicking on a single task opens the Task Detail panel:

The various fields can be modified or initialized by selecting. Most notably, the description field can be edited to create a summary description, which leads to an indented bullet point, or, if it exists already, it is displayed. I’ve added on in the markdown side, and it is reflected back in TaskForge:

Conclusion

This has become quite long, so I will drop off here.

TaskForge is not a perfect system, but it is closer to my dream task managemeent system for Obsidian than anything I’ve tried before.

I plan to experiment with alternative approaches — instead of filters on one Kanban, why not multiple Kanbans? — so stay tuned. Folio 2026.3 is likely just around the corner.

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This post provides a high-level overview of Folio 2026.1 and outlines how I plan to report on future changes to the system. I am sure there will soon be a Folio 2026.2, so don’t get too settled on the particulars. However, I will try to make clear which elements of Folio are stable and unlikely to change much (such as the Folio knowledge base) and which are changeable (such as plugins).

This is an addendum to that post. I am not updating to 2026.2, but just filling in a set of details that might help anyone trying to understand or use Folio. In that recent post, I touched briefly on the Task List Kanban plugin. However, I did not get into some important features of that plugin, specifically with regards to filtering, which turns out to be essential to my workflow.

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Several of my on-going projects are massive. For example, there are currently 8060 tasks pulled into the workfutures.io msmd project by the plugin, across all the files in my vault. msmd stands for must, should, might, didnt1, a priorization scheme. At any given time, I want to scale down that list to a comprehensible size. For that reason, I am making use of several affordances of the Task List Kanban plugin.

The first — and essential — affordance is the association of task tags with kanban columns:

Whenever I create tasks, I assign a tag to the task from this set of priorities:

Note that this task is also tagged #AI and #feb26.

In the filters section of the workfutures.io msmd kanban, I can filter in various ways. First, I select from all tasks across the vault by filtering on the task marker, [[•workfutures.io]]. Then I can filter on tags, such as #AI. Those are shown in the filters section on the upper left.

So instead of drowning on 8060 tasks, I can filter down to 30 or tasks in the project, those tagged #AI. And because the tag filter capability allows for multiple tags, I could select #AI, #jan26, #feb26, and #mar26, looking for tasks created in the past three months on #AI.

I can also use the must, should, might, didnt tags in a different kanban, as filters. Here’s the workfutures.io tlk kanban, showing just tasks tagged #must:

And, I can open these complemntary kanbans in a split screen to look at the two different schems at the same time.

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Some Limitations

There are some limitations to Task List Kanban.

One, it’s not possible to filter for multiple content elements at once. For example, I can’t filter for [[•workfutures.io]] and burnout at the same time, unless I explicitly create a tag, #burnout. (Since I don’t use tags in Obsidian, generally, I don’t want to go down that path. In general, I would prefer to use other elements of the Folio knowledge base, such as [[+burnout]], and reserve the use of tags to the Task List Kanban plugin.)

Another limitation is that the Task List Kanban files are constructed in a non-standard way, and the elements are not addressable as are Obsidian markdown files. So, I cannot transclude all or part of a Task List Kanban into another markdown file. This means that I can’t, for example, bring together all of the tasks marked #AI and #must into a single markdown file, and annotate it.

…

At some point in the near future, Obsidian Bases will likely support kanban views and I may at that point make a transition away from the Task List Kanban plugin. And that might be Folio 2026.2.

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…

One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done.

| Marie Curie

…

Curie ‘was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields [Wikipedia], so, we should pay attention to what she says, generally.

However, she did her Nobel-winning work in the early 1900s, and had no access to computers.

One underlying principle of the Folio system of notetaking in Obsidian (which I verbified1 in this post’s subtitle: 'to Obsidian’, meaning ‘to take notes in Obsidian’), is that I really want to be able to ‘notice what has been done’ and not ‘see only what remains to be done’. I want the rich history of my work to be visible to me, bringing it into context as I roam in, across, and through my notes.

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About this Post

I’ve been making all sorts of changes to the notetaking system for Obsidian I call Folio. Folio is the outgrowth of notetaking models I’ve been using for years, starting with paper journals in my university days, and continuing for decades since I’ve shifted to digital notetaking. Along the way, I’ve tried dozens of tools, including Evernote, Dropbox Paper, Dynalist, Notion, Typora, and presently Obsidian.

I originally derived Folio from an approach I’d used in Typora, a markdown-based text editor that doesn't support all the more advanced features of Obsidian. At that time, I referred to my system as Taskora since it relied on Typora (see The Taskora Convention (2021)). I first reported on the ideas behind Folio in 2024, after I moved to Obsidian. Here’s an early reference — Folio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge — but please don’t click away! Folio 2026.1 is dramatically different from what might be considered, in retrospect, Folio 2024.1.

This post provides a high-level overview of Folio 2026.1 and outlines how I plan to report on future changes to the system. I am sure there will soon be a Folio 2026.2, so don’t get too settled on the particulars. However, I will try to make clear which elements of Folio are stable and unlikely to change much (such as the Folio knowledge base) and which are changeable (such as plugins).

Also, in early 2025 I changed the name of Folio to Portfolio (for reasons that no longer make sense), and I am returning to the earlier Folio2 as its name.

The five sections of this post are these:

• Folio Fundamentals — core elements of Folio, like file naming, folder conventions, journaling, and annotation.

• Knowledge Management — How I organize information in Folio to support a ‘knowledge base’, and the plugins I rely on for that

• Task Management — How I use Obsidian tasks and some plugins to get things done.

• And a few conclusions and thoughts about the future of Folio.

…

Folio Fundamentals

Folio is a system for notetaking and the core fundamentals are based on Obsidian’s version of markdown, and related capabilities, such as wikilinks, the platform’s plugin architecture, and conventions like daily notes.

File Naming

I timestamp nearly all files in my Obsidian vault. Daily notes are just the date — 2026-03-14 — for example, while an imported article takes the form {{date}} {{title}} - {{author}}, like 2026-03-06 The A.I. Labor Crisis Is Coming. This Is the Solution. - Gina Raimondo. Other file types have their own naming conventions, but they mostly use a date as a prefix.

Folder Conventions

My folder convention relies on a small list of folders:

• 00 Forestry.md is a folder with information for my digital garden, where I publish some of the files in by vault to the open web at stoweboyd.forestry.md.

• 00 journal in the folder for the current year’s daily and weekly notes.

• 00 journals contains journals from previous years, like 2025 journa1.

• 00 knowledge contains the elements of my knowledge base, described in detail, in knowledge management, below

• 00 writing archive holds materials I’ve written, like articles, essays, and presentations. I also have archived others’ poetry and recipes there.

• 01 other projects is a graveyard for projects I’ve abandoned, or completed.

• 02 templates holds current and out-of-date templates for Obsidian, such as ‘daily note template`. Note these are NOT timestamped3.

Journaling

I base my notetaking practice on interstitial journaling, where I add entries to the day’s daily note throughout the day, many of which link to other notes, such as imported materials from the web, usually via the Obsidian Web Clipper, and an occasional PDF.

In recent months, my journaling has relied on an experimental plugin called moments, which I described in a recent post. Basically, moments looks at a daily note as a series of moments, each introduced by an h3 header with date and time stamps4.

Here’s a section of the daily note from February 7 with three moments shown:

I will leave the explanation of the contents of these moments — like the tasks and the •quotes and •short takes projects to later sections.

The moments sidebar lists the moments in the currently active note, including so-called ‘implicit’ moments, like creating or updating files, which is one of the most powerful reasons for using the plugin. I am focusing on the implicit moments, here, showing files updated or created March 13, at the bottom of the sidebar:

That list of created and updated files was the result of rereading The Game Theory of Democracy, and What We Are Living Through in Trump 2.0, and adding or updating a number of file references while annotating the files.

Annotations

My approach to annotation is primarily focused on imported articles. When I import an article from the web, I highlight important sections, create footnotes commenting on the article's arguments and conclusions, very commonly convert references to people, works (like books, and other articles), and organizations into links to taxonomic elements of my Folio knowledge base.

Here is a section of such an article, showing those annotations:

Note the first annotations, one each for Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen, which link them to their respective entries in the Folio ‘people’ folder (note the use of @). The link to their referenced article is marked as a work in the Folio ‘works’ folder. I will detail these ideas in the next section.

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Knowledge Management

I have defined the Folio knowledge base as a collection of folders, each of which contains certain files that are marked with a special character in the file name, usually the first letter:

Folio can be thought of as a knowledge base, and in my case, I have structured my Obsidian instance explicitly as a system for knowledge management. I use various conventions to distinguish between references to different types of knowledge:

• people (like @Albert Einstein, @Brian Eno, and @Joy Harjo),

• concepts (like +workslop, +economics, and +time is a flat circle),

• organizations (like ºWorld Economic Forum, ºTrader Joes, and ºSocial Security Administration),

• places (like ~France, ~Washington DC, and ~Rust Belt), and

• projects (like •workfutures.io, how to use time, •decision making, and stoweboyd.io).

I use the Auto Note Mover plugin to automate placing files of each sort in their respective folders

The files in the knowledge base can refer to each other, as with this example, the @Tom Ginsburg:

Note the Moments sidebar at the upper right, and the Obsidian graph at the lower right, which shows the relationships between the files. These can be traversed by clicking on a file name. Likewise, the backlinks and outlinks at the bottom left are provided by the Rich Foot plugin.

Task Management

Much of what is going on in Folio is task management. For example, the templates I use in Obsidian Web Clipper to import web materials generally include a task that defines what project — or projects — the import is for. An example:

The task includes a project marker ([[•workfutures.io]]) and a tag (#history) used by the Task List Kanban plugin (which I wrote about here) to determine which column the task should be in:

The [[•workfutures.io]] project is the largest and broadest of my projects, with many columns. Here you see the Corrine Murray article, at the head of the history column. Note I don’t use tags in Obsidian except for the project marker, which is required by the Task List Kanban plugin.

The Future of Folio

At some point, the core Bases plugin is likely to support Kanban views, and I will attempt to transition to that as a replacement for the Task List Kanban plugin. The newest addition to Folio is a digital garden capability (see stoweboyd.forestry.md) allowing me to publish parts of my Obsidian vault to the web. This is a work in progress, and I will write about that soon.

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Writing it down is the beginning of every reliable system.

| Steven Johnson

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I’ve read a few pieces recently about notetaking1 that could be characterized as counter reactions to the often explicit recommendations for notetaking ‘efficiency’. For example, the zettelkasten theory that we should put what we read and care about into our own words, rather than copying others’ materials.

These arguments fail to acknowledge that we don’t necessarily know exactly what we think about some idea at the time we encounter it or when it mysteriously pops into mind. In my case, it can take years of noodling — and cross connection — before I have a clear idea of what I think about even a fairly well-defined concept or issue.

It may well be that those who seek to create ‘output’ — in the form of publishing articles, writing books, etc. — are satisfying their own need for certainty. But others, like me, are more sedimentary in our thinking, adding layers of insight and divergent perspectives over time, rather than a quick-drying watercolor of the topic.

I appreciated the commentary about ‘the scalable zettelkasten’ from the folks at Deepread.com (who are, yes, trying to promote a product) that prodded me to write this post [emphasis mine]:

The Scalable Zettelkasten: A Practical System That Works

The Minimal Viable Zettelkasten

A truly scalable Zettelkasten starts with the minimum viable system: simple highlights and brief notes, natural language for connections, and gradual building without pressure. This approach recognizes that consistency trumps perfection, and that small, regular additions create more value than elaborate but abandoned systems.

Your minimal system might be as simple as highlighting key passages while reading and occasionally adding brief comments or questions. These highlights become the raw material for later processing, but they don’t require immediate transformation into perfect permanent notes.

The “Simmer and Refine” Approach

Instead of demanding immediate processing, the scalable approach lets ideas marinate before formalizing them. This “simmer and refine” method acknowledges that insights often emerge over time, not in the moment of first encounter. You review and connect when inspiration strikes, not according to a rigid schedule.

This approach mirrors how actual thinking works. Ideas need time to develop, and connections often become apparent only after you’ve encountered related concepts. By allowing this natural timing, you reduce the artificial pressure that kills most knowledge systems.

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These ideas jibe with something else I read recently, Steven Thompson’s Emerson’s Recursive Thinking Method. The Emerson in question is the writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The emphasis is Thompsons’:

Reading “Emerson: The Mind on Fire” by Robert D. Richardson has been a revelation. Emerson’s process, at first glance, seems simple enough:

1. Capture raw fragments — quotes, observations, fleeting insights.
2. Return to them over time, annotating, reframing, and connecting.
3. Use reading as a catalyst for generating new questions.
4. Sort notes thematically, even when the categories are unclear.
5. Revisit notes years later with new lenses, allowing questions to evolve.

I recognized myself in the first step. My journals and reference notes are full of fragments — lines from books, thoughts from journals and hikes, clipped articles, and even memes. But I rarely return to them unless I’m citing something or building a Zettel notation. What I’ve been missing is the recursive annotation — the slow layering of thought over time.

Emerson didn’t just collect quotes. He returned to them, added commentary, reframed them, and connected them to other ideas. This recursive process often generated new questions. For example, a line about beauty might prompt: “Is beauty moral when it uplifts, or only when it aligns with truth?” These weren’t rhetorical flourishes — they were invitations to think further.

Reading, for Emerson, wasn’t about mastery. It was about provocation. He copied passages from Plato, Montaigne, Hindu scripture, and Carlyle into thematic notebooks — not to summarize them, but to test them against his own ideas. Feynman had a similar practice. He kept a dozen “favorite problems” in mind and tested every new idea against them.² Emerson’s version was more fluid, but the principle was the same: read to generate friction, not just understanding.

Even Emerson’s sorting process was a form of inquiry. He didn’t always know where a note belonged (Niklas Lunmann didn’t always know either). Sometimes he wrote in a general notebook and later moved it to a thematic one. The act of sorting forced him to ask: “Is this about beginnings or endings? Is this a moral insight or a metaphysical one?”

Most importantly, Emerson’s questions weren’t front-loaded. They evolved. A note written in 1832 might be revisited in 1845 with a new lens. His notebooks weren’t linear — they were recursive. The themes weren’t conclusions — they were containers for inquiry.

That’s the shift I’ve been missing. I’ve spent decades trying to reach conclusions, never realizing that the real purpose of note-taking might be to keep the questions alive.

I don’t think ‘recursive’ is the right term for what Emerson was up to. Maybe what’s involved is the embrace of uncertainty in notetaking. Instead of determining exactly the purpose a quote, article, or idea serves, exactly at the moment of its appearance on our radar, we might accept the indeterminacy of the note, and in anticipation of evolving into something larger, or part of other threads of thought.

This reminds me of the difference between abductive reasoning, on one hand, and deductive and inductive reasoning, on the other. Deduction and induction share the characteristic of simply organizing what is known in a well-understood way. The classic induction example:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

And an example of induction, which deals with the probability that a statement is true:

Each time I do A under the same conditions, B occurs.

The next time I do A under these conditions, B will probably occur.

Neither of these generates new information. But abduction is the ‘logic of what might be’, as Roger Martin styled it. An example from Charles Sanders Peirce, the philosopher who brought the concept of abduction into modern logic:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;

But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,

Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Abduction, unlike deduction or induction, leads to new insights. Like induction, those insights may be wrong, but they open the door to further inquiry.

So, we should approach notetaking as a process of abductive sensemaking, and consider it as a way to pose questions that live over time, rather than seeking to answer then immediately. Another way to think about this distinction that notetaking is mostly about beginnings — the starting points of inquiry — rather than endings. For every note, I may add a question or two when entering it into my notebook. A day, week, or month later, I may return to that note — perhaps because I tripped over that question again, or discovered some new information about it, or awakened from a daydream about some related idea. I add a link, raise new questions, or, once in a while, I may find a synthesis of the original note’s ideas with something else I’ve written down.

It’s iterative abduction, or as I said at the outset, sedimentary. Layers of notes, layers of questions, layers of connections, layers of ideas. I never know how long it will take, which is why I have notes in my notebook (currently, an Obsidian vault with 15,289 files) that date back to 2008, and which I return to time and time again for inspiration and new insights, everyday

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I am generally willing to try out Obsidian plugins that provide a simpler way to do something I already do with kludges.

For example, I employ Daily and Weekly notes — a part of the Periodic Notes system — as the backbone of my approach to interstitial journaling. In a nutshell, I have been creating sections in Daily notes for various things I do during each day: I add headings (marked with a project name and a time stamp), tasks, discussions, and links to other notes. Below is a screenshot of part of a Daily note with several journal entries. Many of these are •short takes tasks (for my Short Takes series on workfutures.io) generated by the Obsidian official web clipper, and one is a manually created list of links to quotes I created that day.

The manually created list of links is a good starting point for why I decided to take a first look at a new plugin, Obsidian Moments (now in beta). Here’s how the developer behind it — Matt McManus — describes it [emphasis mine]:

Why Moments?

Daily and periodic notes are a great starting point for date-based organization, but they’re not always enough. Meeting notes about a project belong in the project file. Events deserve their own documents. Research updates live with the research. In practice, dated content ends up spread across your vault — and no single note captures the full picture of what happened on a given day.

Moments evolves the idea. Instead of putting everything in one place, keep notes where they naturally belong and let Moments weave them into a unified timeline.

This motivation — to create and manage notes (and notes’ sections) ‘where they naturally belong’ — is how I have been managing projects already: I create tasks associated with projects in Daily notes and other notes, and rely on other plugins to aggregate those tasks from wherever they are to a single place. (In recent months, I have heavily relied on the Task List Kanban plugin (see First Look: The Task List Kanban) which is designed around a similar ‘where they naturally belong’ principle. Note: this is a departure from the no-longer-maintained Kanban plugin (which I wrote about in Card-Based Writing in Obsidian Using Kanban), which relies on creating notes in specific folders.)

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How Moments Works

After installing and enabling the plugin (as a beta plugin, you must use Brat or some other mechanism to install betas), there are options. Here’s my configuration in two parts. Top part:

I stuck with the default date format because I was using it already across a wide range of purposes. Likewise, the date link style.

I selected ## Notes as the target section, again, because I already had that section in my Daily Note template. I want to follow my existing journaling style, and append new material at the end (as I set up for the official Obsidian Web Clipper). New ‘moments’ will be H3 headings, with {{date}} {{title}} heading content.

Second part:

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The Moments Timeline

One of the best reasons to adopt moments is the timeline, which is a sidebar view of either a/ all the moments associated with the open note (the default), or b/ all the moments ordered by date.

Here’s a section of the timeline for 2026-02-15:

The top entries in boxes are explicit moment I created in the associated Daily Note, about which I will describe next. The bottom entries, like wicked problems updated, are creations and updatings on 2026-02-15 of other files in my vault.

The heading of the timeline includes an X which toggles to showing the entire timeline for my vault, starting with the present date, and stretching back to my oldest files.

Creating Moments

I have configured moments to append new entries to the end of the associated Daily Note. Running the command looks like this:

When selected the Insert inline moment in current file option, I get this:

Which leads to a new moment in the associated Daily Note:

I only wish the inline moment command would a/ not create so much whitespace above, and b/ would include a text field for any comments.

Note that the date field is editable, but if modified, the entry stilll appears in the current file.

This also shows up in the timeline, as well.

Other capabilities

I haven’t explored the other command options yet, except to test Create new standalone moment which creates a new note and inserts a moment in it.

I believe my principle use case will be an augmentation of managing the flow of entries into my Daily Notes, and using the timeline as a way to see what I’ve been working on over time. I am already eager to see if the plugin developer will add a search feature to the timeline, so that I can more easily jump to a/ file updates, b/ specific days, and c/ all entries with specific keywords.

Bottom Line

I believe moments will be an enormous benefit to my interstitial journaling.

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Dealing with Simple, Task-based Projects

Starting a few months ago, my approach to project management in Obsidian shifted, as earlier approaches — based on the Kanban, Dataview, and Query Control plugins — did not work well for my major work activities, such as managing my workfutures.io editorial project. I adopted the Projects plugin as the basis of these complex projects (see write-up), and it has worked out well for that use case. (Aside: the Projects plugin is no longer actively maintained, and I expect I will be transitioning to the new Bases core plugin for complex, document-based projects as soon as Bases supports a board view.)

However, even though the Projects model works well for complex projects, it is somewhat overkill for other projects. For example, I use basic task-based project management in my weekly notes, and those tasks cut across many ongoing activities. (That’s quite unlike the model for complex projects, which often lack tasks and rely on the properties managed by the Projects plugin, instead, for state information.)

Here’s a mocked-up weekly note for next week, featuring two sections from the weekly template: ‘looking back’ is a retrospective on the previous week, and ‘looking ahead’ outlines plans and actions for the coming week. I generally create the weekly note on Monday.

Note that the file is automatically created in the 2025 weeks folder, which I will expand on. I have included only the ‘looking back’ tasks for the example, but on Sunday or Monday, I will fill out my plans for the week coming.

One key point: I got through some extra formatting to maintain extra lines separating the tasks so that they can be independent blocks and independently referenced, like this —

[[2025 week 36#^dedzk3]]

— which I may do in daily notes or other files. Otherwise, the entire block of tasks has only one reference handle. (This is a flaw in Obsidian’s addressing: there should be a means to reference any block, line, or fragment within Obsidian.)

Using Task List Kanban

The Task List Kanban operates in the context of a single folder or across the entire Obsidian vault. I have only used it in the former use case, such as in the 2025 weeks folder.

After installing and enabling the plugin, I created a Task List Kanban for the folder by right-clicking on folder, and selecting New Kanban. (In this instance, I had already created the Kanban, so it shows up in the daily note shown in the image, and again, in the Hover Editor window.)

Settings

Once created, each Task List Kanban can be tweaked by its settings:

I like to use the columns doing, do, do later, and done for Task List Kanban boards. For one reason, the plugin imposes a done column, so I put aside the column headings that I use with Projects boards: working, work, waiting, and worked, but they are basically synonymous.

Columns: I don’t need to add the done column: the plugin does it. And, unless I add my own column headings, Task List Kanban creates its own list, which I don’t like: there are too many and not to my taste.

Folder Scope: As I mentioned, I only have tried the plugin in the folder mode.

Show Filepath: Helpful info, but clicking on it (which it invites) does not do anything.

Uncategorized column visibility: What isn’t immediately apparent is the relationship between tasks and the columns is managed by Task List Kanban with tags placed on the tasks. I will elaborate in the next section. Tasks that have not been tagged with one of the column names are uncategorized (as you see in the upper left of the above image).

Consolidate tags: I haven’t tested.

Done status markers: I have kept to the default ‘xX’, which means that tasks that are completed with - [x] or - [X] will appear in the Done column.

In Use

The tasks collected from the folder’s files are shown in the corresponding columns.

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This last week, I wound up in Obsidian hell. I wanted to figure out why the Lineage plugin wasn't working, so I installed the divide and conquer plugin, which is designed to make searching for plugin conflicts easier. Instead, I somehow enabled all the installed plugins in my vault, and after that, Obsidian wouldn't successfully load.

The final solution was to rename the invisible plugins JSON file (community-plugins.json) to some other name, forcing Obsidian to create a new JSON file with all the plugins disabled. Which — for unknown reasons — Obsidian doesn’t offer as a command.

But the exploit worked, thank all the little gods. I then enabled the handful I actually use.

Took hours. I have never isolated the cause of Lineage not working.

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To all subscribers: thank you for your attention. To paid subscribers: thank you for your support.

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Memochron Plugin: Bottom Line First

I came across a mention of Memochron in Obsidian Plugins Showcase by Nuno Campos, who wrote:

MemoChron bridges the gap between personal knowledge management and time-based planning by integrating calendar events with Obsidian, transforming routine scheduling into a comprehensive documentation workflow that captures the full context of your activities.

A bit grandiose, I thought. But I took a look and installed the plugin. After a few days of use, I can say that this is the best Obsidian integration of Google Calendar I’ve seen.

In a nutshell, I’ve used the ‘secret link’ to various Google Calendar calendars, added them to Memochron’s settings, and the calendar events appear in a Memochron sidebar, like this:

As you see, I have two Google Calendar events defined for the fourth of July.

Memochron has one major limitation: the plugin doesn’t provide a way to make changes to the Google events from within Obsidian. However, considering the complexity of what can be done with Google Calendars, I am fine with making necessary changes to the core information in Google events using the Google app. What I really have wanted for a long time is something like Memochron: an easy-to-use presentation of Google events within Obsidian.

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Configuration

Here’s the top half of the plugin’s settings:

1. I have added two Google calendars.

2. Monday is the first day of my week.

3. I want both the calendar and agenda views.

4. 30 minute refresh is fine for me. Also, there is a ‘force refresh’ command available.

5. I don’t need the daily notes file linked in the agenda view, personally. I tested that, and it works. (I don’t think that daily notes should be conflated with calendar events.)

The second half is more interesting, because Memochron supports the creation and editing of Obsidian notes generated from Google calendar events, by clicking on the event in the agenda:

1. I designated a folder for Memochron notes: ‘00 knowledge/events’. (Actually, I had created that earlier for various experiments in creating and managing events; all failures.)

2. I did not test the ‘date-based’ folders implementation. It may be helpful if you are generating a lot of event notes.

3. I chose to have event notes titled with a leading ‘{{date}}’ timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD format (which I use generally) and the event name.

4. I accepted the default YAML.

5. I tried to hack the default template for notes by embedding the ‘{{event title}}’ and ‘{{date}}’ into a task, and setting a reminder (in Reminders plugin format) so that I will be reminded of the meeting in Obsidian as well as in Google Calendar. But Memochron doesn’t support 24 hour times in the template language, which Reminders defaults to. There may be a fix for this, either in Memochron providing a template option, or in Reminders. In the meantime, it doesn’t integrate.

6. I don’t use tags in Obsidian, so I deleted the default tags.

Here’s an example of a Memochron note. I volunteered to help my neighbor, Stephanie, create burgers from a mountain of ground beef for her 4th of July party. I also linked to the party note, as well.

The Notes section of the event note would be a good place to record observations, minutes, or tasks arising from calls or meetings. Note, however, that if you make changes to a Google Calendar event — like changing date, start or end times — a Memochron note created prior to those changes will not be updated automatically. As a result, I am adding pre-event description info into the Google event, and generally only adding material to the Memochron notes during or after the event.

I found one important glitch with creating Memochron notes: multi-day events aren’t really supported in the notes’ creation department. While multi-day events are imported correctly, and display sensibly in the agenda, creating Memochron notes for them doesn’t work. The template variable for event notes don’t support ‘{{start_date}}` and ‘{{end_date}}’. I have added an issue to the Github for the plugin, and it seems like the developer, Michalis Efstratiadis, has been adding features and dealing with issues quite quickly. I bet he’ll fix that glitch quickly.

Final Thoughts

Memochron is a promising tool for pulling in events from Google Calendar and managing notes about them within Obsidian. While it doesn’t support round-trip synching, I can live with that.

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Version 1.9.1 of Obsidian includes a footnotes viewer, which is a now core plugin, although you have to toggle it on.

This sidesteps an Obsidian headache, so you can see your footnotes without having to switch to read mode to see all footnotes.

(Note: I dragged the footnote viewer from the side panel into a tab beside the file I was editing, which going forward may be the norm for me.)

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I am a huge user of footnotes, mostly in the form of side notes (see Wonkish: Obsidian Footnotes As Sidenotes and Obsidian Tufte-style Sidenotes), so I really appreciate being able to see all footnotes in a side panel. Here's a large note with many footnotes:

But while fooling around with the viewer, I found a glaring omission: I should be able to click on a footnote in the viewer and have the edit window jump to the clicked footnote. That's coming, I bet; because, of course, it should. [Update 2025-07-03: Obsidian now supports this in the Viewer, although it hasn’t been added to Obsidian’s release notes, which is a curious omission.]

Note that you can edit the footnote text in the viewer window, which is helpful when the original is not visible.

But I uncovered an interesting fact. When I control-click on the footnote reference in the viewer, I can control-click to 'Copy link to block'. Odd, because a footnote isn't a block -- or at least it wasn't until this release. Note in this image how a block id shows up inside the footnote:

I can search for the block id in Obsidian search, and clicking the result centers the file on the embedded block id.

I can also control-click to 'Copy block embed' which leads to a properly formed embed, that however doesn't transclude the footnote reference. That's strange, since the viewer is basically a transclusion of a list of footnotes. Maybe below the hood, Obsidian is using this newly expanded model of block ids to build the viewer?

When I try to transclude I get this:

which looks like an error message. If I take off the leading exclamation mark, making the line just a block id reference, it also fails to find the block id.

It’s fascinating to imagine that Obsidian might support, in the future, addressable sub-blocks, where sections of blocks could be addressable. This may turn out to be just a wrinkle in the current beta, but it raises big questions.

Conclusions

Footnote viewer is a big help for those who rely on footnotes, like me.

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For business reasons, I’ve been taking a look at various efforts to support multiplayer Obsidian. The company only offers Obsidian Publish, which as the name suggests is really more oriented toward publishing than multiplayer editing, commenting, and sharing. Even when touting its collaborative features, it’s pitched as a way to collaborate on publishing. Other publishing options — like Blot — can publish, but don’t support collaborative editing.

Others I (re)looked at recently:

• Relay seems to have an active user base, and adding features quickly, and has implemented Universal File Sync — enables syncing images, videos, audio, pdfs, and more — but I’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan. I will write it up once I’ve upgraded. Requires your collaborators run their own Obsidian instances. Relay’s the alternative I am watching most closely.

• Screen Garden seems to be coming along too, but also lacks coherency. If I can include an image in the shared folder, how come I can't reference the image to see it embedded in another?

• Share Note is just a means to publish, but in high fidelity, using your own plugins. In my case, that includes all the the Tufte sidenotes css from TfTHacker. I use this frequently to share well-formatted but read-only docs with others.

Each of these could have their own review, but I am in a hurry, and none of them meet my needs, yet.

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A peek at stoweboyd.com.

At some juncture, I pointed the stoweboyd.com domain name away from Tumblr to Medium. In both cases, I wasn’t promoting the website very much at all, but in recent months, I had wanted to have a website where I linked out to articles and posts I’ve created on my active writing platforms, like workings.co, workfutures.io, and others. I thought I’d give Blot a try. Check out stoweboyd.com as it stands presently:

I picked a template called Magazine for a few reasons. I like the navigation elements on the left margin, for example.

Note that I am using the tags: metadata field for Memoirs that I will be posting. I’ll highlight that in a bit

Zooming in on the About Stowe Boyd page to demonstrate another feature of this template:

Blot and the template support something like Edward Tufte sidenotes, as with the ‘Stowe’s enormous head.’ wisecrack at the top right. This is not — alas — based on markdown footnotes, like the Tufte Notes CSS built into the Cornell Notes system on Obsidian. Instead, Blot (or at least some templates) supports text like this which is rendered in the right margin of the following block:

{|<} Stowe's enormous head. What could be going on in there?

This is just a quick peek before I get into the inner workings of Blot.

The basics of Blot.

Blot is based on a simple model. You create a folder in Obsidian, sync that with a folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, Git, or iCloud, and the files in that folder are published to your Blot site. I used Google Drive, since I am already backing up my Obsidian vault there.

This is that folder, called blot, in my Obsidian:

Blot treats some subfolders specially:

• _drafts - files in _drafts will not be published to the web. Any file or folder with a preceding underbar is skipped.

• Pages - files in Pages are automatically added to the navigation bar.

Other subfolders are basically ignored, Like Posts, although files in them are published if Blot knows how to render them.

I haven’t played with Icon files yet.

Main settings.

Once setting up a site — Blot allows multiple sites for a single account and fee — you’ll see this:

As you see at the top center, I have configured my stoweboyd.com domain to point to the site, which worked well, although it took a while to update. Otherwise, the website would be stoweboyd.blot.im.

Edit template and Navigation Links.

I haven’t yet attempted editing a template, but I have used the capabilities provided, especially fiddling with the navigation links. Files placed in the Posts folder automatically are treated as navigation links, like About Stowe Boyd:

You can drag around the links to order them as you’d like.

Publishing Options and Link Format.

I have simply used the defaults on Publishing Options and Link Format so far. I’ll explore only as needed.

Tags.

Perhaps because Blot has no notion of using folders as a website map (other than what was discussed earlier), the service supports aggregation of posts by tags.

Here’s what is shown when you click on Memoirs on the navigation bar:

So far, I only have a single tagged file, and a single tag. But if you go to the site and click around, you’ll get some sense of how rich this could be. I have another Blot-related project going on, and I intend to explore tags more extensively there. I’ll report back. Not only that, but I likely will be folding those two together.

Here’s what the file looks like on Obsidian:

Note that I haven’t spoken much about the content inside the workfutures.io, workings.co, and stoweboyd.io files. My goal is to create an index of posts, articles, and other published materials, and have that live on Blot. Here’s the current state of the workfutures.io index file on Blot:

I created an Obsidian Web Clipper template that captures links to posts on the workfutures.io newsletter on Substack, and through some plugin chicanery, each entry in that file is appended to the workfutures.io index file. It’s a contraption that involves other plugins, and I’d like something better. I will likely explore using Blot tags as a replacement for that system.

An alternative might be more like Wikipedia: imagine if references to topics, people, organizations, and works (books, art, movies, …) could be built up. The workfutures.io post in the image above — No Crisis — might be captured with a short summary, and multiple tags related to the content. That way, I could click on tag like Nick Bloom (the economist) and find all instances where he’s mentioned in any of my publications. A work in progress.

Digital gardening, or website publishing?

In principle, I could publish a large swath of Obsidian files using Blot. In practice, there are difficulties. In particular, I rely extensively on wikilinks to cross-reference files and (sections of files), and I am uncertain of how Blot would handle (or not handle) a reference from a published Blot page to an unpublished Obsidian note in my vault.

My sense is that Blot is better used as a website publishing system, which has different and more modest goals than creating a full-on digital garden.

Other considerations.

There’s a large selection of third-party services that can be included on a Blot site, but I haven’t ranged that far yet.

Conclusions

I’ve been quite happy and surprised with how straightforward the process with Blot has been. I will continue my experiments and report back soon.

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Simple Projects and Beyond

The simplest projects can be managed as a set of tasks. I say set, not list, because very frequently in my journaling in Obsidian, tasks in simple projects might be created independently across many notes, and not defined as a list of tasks in the same note. This crucially means that collating the tasks requires some unique taxon to be associated with every task in the set, like this, based on a project taxon:

The project taxon is •workings.co and a query to find all important/urgent tasks in the project might include this line (along with a lot of other directives):

Here’s the top part of output of a query to find all tasks in the workings.co project:

This query arrays the associated tasks based on the task states. Here, I’ve only shown the most active two task states, but the template I’ve created to generate such queries includes all task states, and a table of contents to be able to jump to any state.

In effect, that set of affordances — the tasks, taxa, and queries to aggregate them — is enough structure to represent a simple project in Portfolio. The implicit goal of the project is to amalgamate information sources — either notes in my vault or externally, through links to the outside world or excerpts clipped into notes — and eventually to write something on the topic, for me or for others.

But there are other projects that aren’t so simple, which I need to manage in different ways. In earlier writings, I’ve referred to these projects as complex, but complexity isn’t the right characterization, really.

I have found that I need to deal with two sorts of projects where the simple project approach won’t suffice.

These are what can be thought of as ‘tiered’ projects, composed of what are more-or-less subprojects, or areas of focus. I use the Projects plugin to implement these tiered projects. If you haven’t tried that plugin I suggest you read First Look: The Projects Plugin before continue, since it lays out the basics of the plugin’s capabilities.

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Tiered Projects

A good example of a tiered project is one that follows the form of a kanban, where the columns of the Projects plugin board represent stages of the parent project, with the cards on the board are subprojects, and each of those may have their own task list. Here’s an example:

I reside at 17 South Cedar Street, where we own a 1920’s vernacular four-bedroom home. There are a lot of pending projects which I have collated into the 17 South Cedar tiered project. These subprojects can be undertaken independently, although there are some dependencies that are not obvious at the top level.

Zooming in on fix stockade fence:

Here I am using language that shows the contingent nature of this project: if I am going to replace the entire fence after I build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) (a two-car garage with an apartment on the second level), then maybe I won’t make small repairs at all. (Note: it would be nice to have a plugin that allows more complex boolean logic like this.)

The task states indicate that the next thing to do is to assess the price of building a new fence, and perhaps to get that out of the way before undertaking the ADU project.

In principle, every subproject in the 17 South Cedar project might be this complicated. And, yes, the Projects plugin does support nesting one subproject into another, but honestly, the complexities of that are too much work for the payback.

There is a special class of tiered project where the approach used in 17 South Cedar doesn’t go far enough. These are what I call ‘missions’: tiered projects that require more views than just kanban-style states-based boards, and which run for a long and indeterminate length of time.

Missions

As I laid out in the previous section, I am involved in several ongoing tiered projects that are of indeterminate length and a great deal of complexity, such as the project information for my workfutures.io newsletter.

Until 2025, I had relied on simple queries-based projects or the board views of the Kanban plugin. I rapidly transitioned to the boards and other views of the Projects plugin once I learned of it.

I had relied principally on status-based boards in projects missions (that is to say, tiered projects being managed through the mechanisms provided by the projects plugin). This coninued the more or less standard Kanban model. The status-oriented approach is based on columns of the `projects` board view, named 0 working, 1 work, 2 waiting, and 0 worked.

I came to see this one-view approach as too limiting, since it's useful to view the same cards through different lenses, not just based on status.

In particular, since ‘workfutures.io’, ‘workings.co’, and ‘stoweboyd.io’ are writing projects, I want to be able to view the project cards organized by themes of the content being discussed and created.

Here’s a detailed example of Projects boards, this time for the ‘workfutures.io editorial project’.

In this case I have created several board views over the same cards, using different attributes to a/ define the columns, and b/ sort the cards within the columns. This is the by status view sorted by the theme attribute.

So, for example, the uppermost card in the 1 work column is fear of AI under the theme of +AI. I use this view to order the sequence of posts I am working on, and I pull together often ideas spanning several cards into a single post, and while writing that or after, the cards are retired by dragging into the 3 worked column.

I can also switch to the by theme view of the same cards. This is a cropping of that view. In the +AI column, the same card mentioned earlier — fear of AI — is now at the top of the column, and the other related card is immediately below, making it easier to consider how those ideas might work together in one post. These cards are sorted by the status field, which was the source of the columns names in the previous example.

In some projects missions, a third attribute (or more) might deserve prominence. For example, if I were assigning writing to contributors, I could create a view and a contributor attribute, where columns of the board would indicate those assignments. At present, workfutures.io does not have other contributors, but if I were to do so that would be quite straightforward to implement. Of course, the table mechanism in Projects allows you to see as many attributes as you’d like, all at once.

A Confession and Conclusions

I've only been using the `projects` plugin a few months (see First Look: The Projects Plugin from January 2025). My use of the plugin has both expanded and contracted as I discovered how it might fit in or replace other techniques for mission project management.

It's only this month that I have implemented this multi-view approach using more than one board view over a project, but I shifted quite quickly to this model for large-scale, ongoing projects, or missions (‘endeavors’, in the past).

Shorter-term, time-bounded projects might not even be complex enough to use projects management for, and in those cases a single view or just a project query might be enough.

My confession is that I had been finding projects to be not enough to manage these larger, more complex projects until I invested the time to experiment with multiple complementary views over the same domain of notes in a project folder. I had become quite frustrated until this small breakthrough led me to further embrace the projects model.

In so doing, I also decided to retire projects that were too simple to justify the time and effort to set up and manage these complex projects for them. In recent weeks, I have been retiring many projects inherently too simple for the overhead, while expanding the long-lived tiered projects with additional views and sorts.

As a high-level ‘dashboard’, I also created a query — importants — to surface all the urgent/important tasks from my four tiered missions (this only shows three):

Below the paywall, paid subscribers have access to the templates and queries that support simple and tiered projects. Users will have to play around with projects to see how it all works.

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Here is the use case: I am looking at some note in my vault, and for one of several reasons, I want to review it again at some future date, like tomorrow, next Thursday, next month, or some distant specific date, like a year from now. In some instances, I want to see if claims, arguments, or predictions laid out in the note have come to a head. In some, I just don’t have time at the moment to review the note. In other instances, I may simply want to collect other materials to support some thesis in the note, but I don’t want to wait an indeterminate duration to return to the note and the thesis.

In the past, I would have relied on the reminder plugin to accomplish this. But I noticed that my reminder list was being cluttered up with these references, and making it hard to see more typical reminders, like those associated with upcoming events.

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Settings

Here’s the settings panel for Reviews:

I chose a heading ### reviews at the location in my Daily Notes where reviews reference will be placed.

The prefix for the review I chose is - [>] [[•read closely|reviews]]: , about which more in a few paragraphs. I put this into the settings because it’s something I want nearly all of the time, and there is no way to add arbitrary text to the Review, which would be good. The plugin could display the prefix and allow it to be edited in the popup, which I will recommend to the developer.

Heading prefix and block review line prefix I am not yet using, so I just set them for creating embeds (also called backlinks or transclusions).

I defaulted the review date to tomorrow, but it can be overridden.

Creating a Review in a Daily Note

Here’s the command to create a review:

And the pop up:

In this case, I wanted to review a note a year in the future.

When executed, the plugin a/ creates the Daily Note for the day if it doesn’t already exist, and b/ adds the review reminder to the ### reviews header (creating the header if it doesn’t already exist).

The review, in this instance, in source mode:

In the Portfolio approach to task and project management, I have adopted extended task representations. In this case, a waiting task (- [<]). The task is associated with the read closely project, aliased to display reviews. (For more information about Portfolio’s tasks and projects (see Portfolio: Tasks and Simple Projects and Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge).

The reference back to the file is indicated by the backlink to the original note, the note’s name in double square-brackets.

And in edit mode, in the target Daily Note, it displays like this:

The intended use is that I would naturally encounter that Daily Note on 2026-03-31, and before I would do much else I’d notice the pending review for the Claire Cain Miller article. Once accomplishing that, I’d check off the task.

I can also proactively search for Reviews, as with this embedded query:

Limitations

But what if I didn’t want to do that, despite it being there? This is a core limitation of the plugin: there is no way to postpone a Review, other than a/ creating a new one, and b/ deleting the existing one. But that to me seems to be a fair trade-off to manage this use case independently of others involving tasks and Reminders.

A similar limitation is that the user can’t stipulate that a set of Reviews be created for every Friday afternoon, for example. Reviews are limited to a single, specific date, so other complicated scheduling would require other methods or tools.

The search query code is beyond the paywall, available to paid subscribers.

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Tasks are a built-in feature of the Markdown text formatting language. A text line like this:

- [ ] this is something to do

will be rendered in core Obsidian (without any plugins) in read or edit mode, as this

Click on the box to convert the ‘state’ of the task from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ or ‘completed’.

Also, tasks can be managed in lists:

To create a bit more structure, tasks can be indented, making them an addressable group, not just a series of individually addressable tasks:

Notice that the top-most task, which a user might want to represent completing the list, does not automatically check itself off when the others are checked.

But the group of tasks is now a group with a shared block reference:

This leads to this, once applied:

Note the ‘^pzbs7r’ (which can be manually edited to be easier to remember). I can use that in block reference from any note, like this:

For many basic purposes — like creating a grocery list — that level of ‘project management’ may be sufficient. But for all serious work, more is needed.

Extended Task States

Extended task states are the first significant enhancement of tasks that I rely on in Portfolio. Instead of being limited to just ‘open’ and ‘closed’, it’s possible to have an extended list of states using the Minimal theme and others. Here's the list of alternative states that I use at this time in Portfolio, grouped by classes:

important

- [!] most important, urgent - only a few per formal project

- [>] queued - pull from queued and make urgent

active

- [/] working - in process

- [<] waiting - waiting on other tasks or people

- [ ] open - active but not started yet

inactive

- [?] maybe - unsure if it should be undertaken

- [i] info - supporting other present or future activities

- [-] - canceled

- [x] - closed, done, completed

And here’s how they render with the Minimal theme:

Minimal supports more task states. Still, I have settled on this collection, and the groups allow me to array them when using queries to collate tasks based on project and other knowledge base taxa (see Portfolio: A Knowledge Base Built on Files for a grounding on Portfolio’s knowledge base).

Tasks and Projects Are All in Your Head

Task lists are not named but are implicitly activities comprising a project. The project could involve only a single task or a bunch of them. One convention is to use the parent task to indicate the project:

There is only one active task in this ‘project’; everything else is on hold until that can be done. Note I had to manually edit the states of all the tasks to indicate their specific states, but there are plugins to help with that.1

Projects like these might be considered ‘simple’ projects: they have no other organizational overhead. There are all sorts of things in Obsidian that are simple or implicit projects. Whenever I clip something from the web into my vault, for example, there is an implied project to read (and annotate) that note and maybe take other actions, like writing something about it.

Generally, though, I tend not to rely much on simple projects because the informality and the number of projects that may be created over months or years make keeping track of things difficult.

In the next installment in the series, I will dig into a more formal structured model for managing more complex projects that form the heart of project management in Portfolio.

…

Before closing, here is a note on breaking one limitation on Obsidian’s tasks. Like Markdown, Obsidian requires that tasks start with the first non-blank letter on a line of text. But what if we could ignore that limitation and create tasks anywhere on a line, so long as the convention of a specific series of characters is retained, they can be found by search?

For example, the ‘fix the fence’ simple project could all be placed on a single line, carrying the same meaning:

Or, I might want to add a task to a block in some note by embedding the task in a footnote:

In read mode, the task state is not rendered prettily, but it can still represent a task in the reader’s mind2:

A search for all tasks regarding ‘forecasting’ would yield a list of such tasks, including the one from the footnote:

As we shall see in the next installment — more complex project management (or ‘missions’) — findability is more important than almost everything else.

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As stated in the subtitle, I am involved in a series describing Portfolio — in nerdy detail — an evolving, comprehensive system for notetaking in Obsidian. The portfolio is, first and foremost, heavily reliant on Obsidian, and this is not a primer on that notetaking platform. If you are not well-versed in Obsidian’s many capabilities, I recommend you read about that before jumping into Portfolio’s features and arcana.

In earlier posts, I described the basic motivations for Obsidian. I gave a detailed example of importing an article, annotating it, and fitting it into Portfolio’s ‘knowledge base’ (see Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge and Portfolio: A Knowledge Base Built on Files).

In this installment, I will focus on Portfolio's journaling elements, which form the system's heart.

(In an earlier post, I stated that I would cover Portfolio work management in this post, but I have shifted the order since it flows better this way.)

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Daily Notes

I use the Obsidian core plugin, Daily Notes, as an essential element of notetaking. I adhere to the model of interstitial notetaking discussed by others here and here. As usual, since I am a scruffy, I am more relaxed in how I apply it.

I hold with the core motivation of interstitial, which is to timestamp entries in a daily journal, transitioning from one activity to another, capturing what was accomplished and what new work is planned.

Simple Entries

Here’s an interstitial entry of the simplest sort in a daily note:

The header is created by a Mac app, Text Blaze assistant, based on the snippet `//h`. I often add more information to the header itself, but not here. And the entry’s content is simply a sentence, indicating that I am switching context back to working on this very article. No annotations, no links, no images, just text.

Complex Entries

Entries can be much more complex. Here’s a common form in my journaling: an entry involving material I’ve clipped using the Obsidian Web Clipper.

At the top, again, is a timestamp heading, although in this case, it includes a project reference. The entry itself is a combination of text and links of various sorts. Here’s the source:

A number of links. On the heading, a reference to a project — ‘[[•read closely]]’ — which I use to keep track of things I need to, well, read closely. If I open the ‘•read closely’ note, I would see the Rich Foot information: all the backlinks to that taxon.

I can use the string “•read closely” in searches, as in this case:

It’s clear I have some reading to do!

The content of the entry is made up of three blocks: an initial block of text, a transclusion from the Ezra Klein article, and a closing block of text. Returning to the ‘source of a complex entry’ image above the first block include two references to people taxa, like ‘[[@Ezra Klein|Ezra Klein]]`. Note that in general, I only have to type something like ‘[[Ez’ and the appropriate alias pops up:

The transclusion is tricky, and note that I did not type that out. While annotating the Ezra Klein article, that last thing I do is select the title heading and control-click to ‘copy heading embed’:

I return to the daily note and paste that into the entry.

The final block is meant to remind me that I might want to add more comments to the Bluesky thread I started, when I get back to the Klein article. At some point, I will finish reading the piece and either check the task off, or delete the `[[•read closely]] reference. Probably the latter, because the task is more closely related to the ‘[[stoweboyd.io]]’ project, where I’ll likely write a post about the Klein interview of David Shor. Then I would check the task off. (I will be digging deep into task and work management in a later post.)

Serial Entries

I often create entries on ideas I am formulating in series, like this:

Over the last few months, I’ve made a dozen or so entries of this sort: notes about ideas or modifications for the portfolio system. I can find them through a basic search or an embedded search. I might collate them at various points into a larger document and put that in my journal. I will revisit that thought when we dig into projects and ‘endeavors’ in the work management post, which is coming soon. Here’s a note with an embedded query that searches for all open tasks with a ‘[[•portfolio]]’ annotation:

Similarly, I could create a simple or embedded search for all journal entries that include ‘[[•portfolio]]’, and pull those that are of interest into a new note, and write a blog post, for example.

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Looking Back: Yesterday

In an earlier Workings piece, You Have To Look Back To Move Forward, I wrote about using a daily retrospective each morning, to reflect on what I accomplished (and didn’t) the day before. I dedicate a section near the top of my Daily Note to serve that function:

I usually think about yesterday early in the morning while drinking my coffee. Other people are oriented toward a daily retrospective before stopping work. I have found that doesn’t work for me; I wind up distracted or called away by personal matters, like cooking dinner.

Typically, my morning ‘yesterday/today’ session leads to 20 - 30 items or tasks written or transcluded and takes 10-15 minutes.

Then, I fall into the ‘notes’ section and the day's work.

Weekly Notes

I intentionally concealed a section of my Daily Note. Just above the ‘yesterday/today’ section I transclude the Weekly Note (this includes my actual Weekly Note):

As you can see, I start the Weekly Note with a retrospective on the prior week, and then high-level plans for this week. The WN is just a click away if I want to add something, and it’s in my face when I open each day’s note.

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Past the paywall are the templates for Daily Notes and Weekly Notes.

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I use the term scruffy not just for a poetic turn of phrase, but in its application as a scientific term among those who study human organization, pro and con.

[from A Perfect Mess, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman]

What is it in your office environment that helps you figure our how to pick up where you left off or to being a new task, when you’re interrupted, leave the office, or finish a task? “Neats,” he’s [researcher David Kirsch] found, depend on a small number of “explicit coordinating structures” such as lists, day planners, and in-boxes to quickly and surely determine what to do next. Scruffies, on the other hand, are “data driven” — that is they don’t explicitly plan out and specify what they do but instead rely on the office environment to give them clues and prompts, in the form of documents lying on the desk, files piled up on top of the filing cabinet, comments scribbled on envelopes, Post-it notes (which , surprisingly, many Neats disdain) stuck here and there, books left open on the floor, and so forth.

Kirsch and others have shown that Scruffies do overestimate their ability to keep track of things in the physical world as a means of structuring work, but they have also demonstrated that Scruffies gain a significant amount of traction from this approach, anyway. Perhaps most important, Kirsch states that different folks work better in ‘different work landscapes:

“People shape their environment over time until it conforms to the way they are comfortable working, even if it seems out of control to someone else.”

Worst of all, trying to make Scruffies into Neats won’t work, and will just make them less productive. They will just end up disorganized anyway.

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So, organizations may want to be somewhat more tolerant of (slightly) cluttered desks than they generally are. Many companies have an explicit clean desk policy that simply doesn’t take into account the brain/desk landscape relationship of Scruffies.

The Iowa-based First Federal Bankshares posted their policy on the web:

Work areas should be kept neat and orderly. The Company must always look its best. Just as we are judged by our personal appearance, so is the Company. Good housekeeping makes it easier to organize your work, prevents loss of items, and provides a professional appearance. Excessive display of personal items is unprofessional. Supervisors and managers are expected to maintain a professional appearance in their department and stores, and they may request that you remove items if they detract from a professional appearance. In addition, they may require you to clean or straighten your work area.

The implication is clear: a well-ordered desk leads to better work habits. Or else.

Let’s be clear: I am not advocating McDonald’s wrappers under the desk, or a White Snake poster in the cubicle. But leaving your active work open on your desk when you leave for the day — three folders, a manual, a stack of reports on the corner of desk, and post it notes hanging off your PC monitor — could save an hour of time the next morning. Every morning. And trying to force Scruffies to be Neats just won’t work.

Some of this is driven by senior executives who have assistants to keep their desktops empty, and some of it is motivated by a misplaced overemphasis on empty desks as a good in their own right, independent of actual functionality.

Many extremely productive people rely on a messy work landscape. Looking at the desk of a busy scientific genius, it’s clear that the piles of papers and books that fill the surface give a pretty good indication of what an Einstein has been working on recently.

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Albert Einstein has been considered the patron saint of useful messiness, and once stated “The cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind; what does an empty desk sign?”

Einstein’s Desk

You might say that a messy desk is fine if you are a Da Vinci, but the average guy isn’t a Da Vinci, and without genius you need structure to compensate.

The evidence suggests otherwise. There is a psychological division in the world, and all the hypothetical benefits of an uncluttered desk simply don’t play if you are a Scruffy.

There are many other benefits of (a little) mess, not the least of which is that the novelty of looking up from our task lists periodically, and scanning the real world for new inputs can enliven a hidebound agenda of work, work, work.

Kevin Kelly perhaps takes this thinking to new extremes in his writings on what he calls the “Network Economy” — this new era we live and work in. The gist is that the old measures of personal productivity don’t really matter as much as they once did, as we move away from industrial age notions of work and efficiency, and when the major challenge is not really doing many things but choosing the right thing to do:

Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.

The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.

In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice.

I think that Einstein would have thought a (slightly) messy desk can play a structural role in helping people decide what is the next right thing to do given all the things you might do. Well, at least if you are a Scruffy, anyway.

And what about places like First Federal Bankshares? Increasingly, the sort of work being done in places where clean desks prevail is being automated, so people won’t be processing banking reports, or processing claims, or any of the myriad office jobs of the past. As Kevin Kelly puts it:

Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.

Perhaps he goes a hair too far into a glistening future, but we shouldn’t accept the premise that invention, insight, and imagination are less important than and somehow disconnected from the tangible landscape of our work, either. We have to accept a (little) disorder in the world, if only for inspiration; and for Scruffies, a smidge of disorder is like a signpost, pointing the way forward.

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In an earlier installment in the Portfolio series — Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge — lays out the goals for Portfolio, and an initial use case. I recommend reading that before this.

Keeping Track

There is no shortage of advice on organizing information — writing, clippings, images, PDFs, charts, and relationships between them — in Obsidian. Some practitioners have made it their life’s work to create a foolproof system to do just that.

This post is not an analysis or review of those approaches. I will leave that to others or the practitioners themselves. Instead, this post is an exposition of what I refer to as a ‘knowledge base’ in Portfolio, the approach I have developed over the years to manage various classes of information in a relatively stable taxonomy.

These taxa (the plural of taxon, an element of a taxonomy) include concepts, people, organizations, and others.

Taxa Are Represented by Files, Not Other Information Management Constructs

A simple use case: I’ve clipped an article from the web (using the Official Obsidian Web Clipper), and as I encounter an important concept, I’d like to mark it in some way so that subsequently finding it — and others similarly marked — is easy. Here’s a paragraph in the article:

I want to capture the mention of ‘Fobazi Ettarh’ and the concept ‘vocational awe’. To create a new people note in the knowledge base, I rely on a small plugin called ‘Link with Alias’, which creates aliased linked between files. It works like this. I add a ‘@’ at sign in front of the person’s name and select the @ sign and name, and hit the shortcut I’ve selected in the plugin, which leads to this:

I then delete the second ‘@’, and hit return. This will create a note in my knowledge base called ‘@Fobazi Ettarh’, with an aliased link from the initial note:

Notice that an alias to the file has been created based on the text after the pipe in the wikilink, ‘Fobazi Ettarh’. I didn’t have to open that note manually at the time of creation, but I can at some point in the future. I can also add other aliases in the future. For example, it’s common to refer to a person using just their last name, so I very commonly add that as an alias, too.

For the concept ‘vocational awe’, the process is similar, but I use a ‘+’ as the first letter instead of the people marker, ‘@’. Note that I have linked ‘@Fobazi Ettarh’. Here’s that note, which months after creation, not looks like this, and is in use in four files as we see from the backlinks:

In this case, I’ve created three aliases with Link with Alias. The first alias deals with a concept appearing at the start of a sentence and is capitalized.

Once created, aliases can be used directly, simply by typing two brackets and the alias, and then selecting from the popup:

Why Notes, As Opposed to Tags or Note Properties?

For years, I relied on tags as a means of organizing notes. I have several reasons for making the switch to note references.

First, tags are added to notes or sections of notes out-of-line, whereas references to ‘@Fobazi Ettarh’ or ‘+disaffected’ occur inline and, when aliased, read as the original text was written.

Secondly, tags are managed in a quite different way than wikilinks, in their own taxonomy, one that stands to one side of folders and notes.

Thirdly, many of the most widely used approaches to leveraging tags rely on quite complex plugins — like Dataview — that introduce new data-oriented approaches to organizing information in Obsidian but which are not native to the platform. It is well-known that the folks at Obsidian are working on an alternative to Dataview, but one which might operate in significantly different ways. As a result, I have decided to wait and see, and in the meantime, rely on wikilinks as the primary tool for organization of — and relationships between — notes.

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Where do the notes reside?

I rely on another plugin — Auto Note Mover — that uses text matching rules to move notes to specific folders. Concepts and people each have their respective folders in a parent ‘00 knowledge’ base folder:

Along with concepts and people, there are also events (like ‘∞Hurricane Milton’), images (‘2025-03-06 ¡impact of covid on WFH’), organizations (‘ºTesla’), places (‘~Los Angeles California’), projects (‘•portfolio’, or ‘•booklets project’), queries, and works (like ‘©What’s the Matter With Kansas’).

Each taxon starts with a distinctive first character, which makes rules for their auto moving easy, but also makes it easy to differentiate between a common term like ‘universalism’ with the concept of ‘+universalism’ as political philosophers apply it.

Note also that the backlinks on each taxa note show all references to the note:

And, of course, a plain vanilla search would lead to the same results, and the use of the ‘+’ means only the references to the concept are found, and all everyday uses of ‘universalism’ are filtered out:

What About The Other Taxa?

Some of the other taxa are quite simple, like ‘works’, which are things like books, articles, or works of art, such as the book ‘©Cognitive Capitalism’. Organizations are obvious, like ‘ºApple’ and ‘ºCornell University’.

But others, particularly ‘projects’, are quite sophisticated, and that’s why the next in the series will be dedicated to work management in Portfolio.

One Final Metaphor

Writing about the Portfolio taxonomy disconnected from the daily flow of my notetaking makes it seem just a bunch of links. But in day-to-day use, the taxonomy constantly provides scaffolding for my work.

For example, I was struck the other day by a quote from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in an article by Jonathan Kirshner:

I imported the article, linked the references to the ‘@Thucydides’ note in the knowledge base, and traversing the graph, I saw this:

I followed the link to a W.H. Auden poem I had filed away in 2023, entitled ‘September 1, 1939’… and found this:

When I captured that poem in my notebook in 2023 I could not have known how it would shade my understanding of Kirschner’s 2025 article. And that through a reference to Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War was unfinished at his death in 411 BC.

That’s why all the linking and annotation is worth the work.

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Beyond the paywall are the settings for the Auto Note Mover plugin.

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I guess it’s meant to sidestep complications from manually fooling with images.

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I won’t take the course of recapping what Folio was and all the changes I’ve made. However, Portfolio is the outgrowth of actively pursuing the goals of Folio over the course of an additional year in the trenches of the daily use of Obsidian as a notetaking, work management, and knowledge management platform.

The Goal for Portfolio

People have used notetaking for centuries to accumulate insights, ideas, quotes, and drawings with the end goal of capturing a body of knowledge in search of consilience: that is, the aspiration that cross-pollination of various — perhaps initially unrelated notes and clippings — can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in both personal understanding and perhaps in the advancement of ongoing explorations in science, art, and social relations, individually and communally.

The rise of digital notetaking systems has amplified these aspirations, and provide means to push notetaking to new levels of sophistication and greater depth of understanding for users. However, the effective use of notetaking systems like Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research and others requires more than reading the manual and jumping in.

Portfolio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian.

I chose the name based on the notion of a physical portfolio, ‘a hinged cover or flexible case for carrying loose papers, pictures, or pamphlets’, but in this instance the ‘portfolio’ is metaphorical, since the Obsidian platform does not really involve printed materials, but rather a collection of notes captured in a digital file system.

Portfolio is a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian's notetaking capabilities, starting with the primitives of its form of Markdown, as well as more complex and sophisticated functionality from core and community plugins. Portfolio is also a set of principles and practices intended to support the development of a deep base of knowledge for whatever domains the user wishes to explore, and to assist the user in generating new insights, personal understanding of these domains, and perhaps the creation of new materials advancing communal understanding as well.

But first and foremost, Portfolio is a system organized around personal management of information, and the management of that information for purposes of work and knowledge management. Said in a simpler way, Portfolio is intended to help users keep track of things, to be able to find them, and to provide the infrastructure to harness that information — whether gathered from the outside, like clipped articles, or notes created solely within Obsidian — to accomplish whatever goals.

My goals for Obsidian, since I am a writer, consultant, and analyst, often revolve around reading and writing, so many of the examples are derived from use cases close to those interests.

Setting Context: Not an Obsidian Tutorial

This post presupposes the reader will have a basic understanding of how Obsidian works: this is in no way a tutorial to the Obsidian platform.

Also, much of what it proposed here might be applicable to other platforms, like Notion, or Roam, but I have not undertaken experiments to see how that might play out. So, in general, Portfolio is pretty specific to Obsidian, and relies directly on features specific to Obsidian, such as transclusion, Obsidian’s versions of Markdown and search, and wikilinks.

I intend to take the reader through a use case central to my everyday use that introduces some elements of Portfolio, a taste of things to come in this series. In the coming weeks, I will be writing others in this series on topics like these:

1. The Portfolio knowledge base (based on file references (or taxa), not tags or the Dataview system); and how that enables networked knowledge.

2. The central role of interstitial journaling rather than dashboards (daily, weekly, monthly notes);

3. Portfolio work management (multistate tasks and task search), the use of the Projects plugin, and its model of notes, states, and views, and ‘taxa-based’ search.

4. Annotations (sidenotes, footnotes, highlights, ‘precis’);

5. How Portfolio’s parts all work together, and other considerations, like events, cadence, notifications, and the pros and cons of plugins.

A Core Use Case: Clipping and Annotating a Web Article

I read a lot, and I mean ‘close reading’. I heavily annotate materials, adding footnotes, highlighting text, inserting links to other materials. My intention is generally to use such information in my research and writing, and I try to associate imported materials with ongoing or new projects. Note that all of these purposes rely on importing the materials: I can’t simply rely on a hypertext link to, for example, a post on Paul Krugman’s Substack, or an article on the New York Times. I need to manipulate and augment the starting materials and enmesh it in an information network on Obsidian.

I rely these days on the official Obsidian Web Clipper on Chrome, but in the past I used other less sophisticated tools.

Here’s an example, a recent post by Paul Krugman, The Economics of Left-Behind Regions. I glance at the article and realize that it fits with my ongoing research on ‘left-behind’ regions in the Western world. I decide to clip it into Obsidian:

Hovering is the pop-up for the Web Clipper on Chrome. Based on its templates (see The Official Obsidian Web Clipper Plugin), a lot of key information is pulled into the various elements of the to-be note. I’ll describe the various bits in a minute, but I have crated the Wen Clipper template specifically to work with Portfolio. The template is past the paywall at the bottom.

Once imported to my ‘00 journal folder’ in Obsidian (directed by settings in the Web Clipper template), the new note is ready for my manipulation. Here’s what the top of the note looks like after I’ve read and annotated the note:

At the top of the note are various note properties, followed by a region of the note I call the ‘precis’ which runs from the H2 headline of the clipped article (with link back to the original), various notes I’ve taken or quotes I’ve pulled from the imported material, and ending with an H2 heading, ‘## body’, which acts as the endpoint for references to the ‘precis’ region of the note. Note that the remainder of the Krugman piece starts with ‘A few days ago the New York Times’.

Here’s the source version of the top of the note, which helps to understand what’s going on:

One core concept in Portfolio is the use of taxa — notes that represent elements in a taxonomy. In the top-most heading, there is a wikilink reference to a file called ‘@Paul Krugman’:

[[@Paul Krugman|Paul Krugman]]

In the Portfolio knowledge base, I have created a folder called ‘people’, and notes created with ‘@’ as their first character are automatically moved there (using the ‘Auto Note Mover’ plugin). The section with the bar — ‘| Paul Krugman’ — denotes an alias without the ‘@’sign.

In edit or reading mode, clicking on that reference will open that file, and with the help of the ‘Rich Foot’ plugin, we can see all the notes in my vault that refer to ‘@Paul Krugman’:

Trust me, there are hundreds of people being similarly tracked in my Portfolio.

Returning to the previous screenshot, you can see other sorts of taxa in the precis section, in particular this task:

- [?] [[•stoweboyd.io]] [[+economics]] [[~peripheral America]]: [[2025-03-02 The Economics of Left-Behind Regions - Paul Krugman]]

The question mark in ‘- [?]’ denotes a ‘maybe interesting’ task using the extended task states supported by various Obsidian themes: in my case, Minimal. Then, left to right, three additional taxa references:

1. a ‘project’ denoted by leading ‘•’, ‘•stoweboyd.io’;

2. a ‘concept’ denoted by ‘+’, ‘+economics’; and

3. a ‘place’ denoted by ‘~’, ‘~peripheral America’.

And at the end of the task, a wikilink back to the note itself, ‘[[2025-03-02 The Economics of Left-Behind Regions - Paul Krugman]]’.

Each of these taxa — and others — have their corresponding subfolders in the Portfolio knowledge base. Note that the next installment in this series will focus on taxa — their use and purpose — is great depth. For now, suffice it to say they serve to annotate the task with information so that

• the task can be found by taxa-based search, and

• aggregated with other tasks and notes.

So at a later point, I might want to find all ‘@Paul Krugman’ posts that touch on ‘+peripheral America’, ‘~East Germany`, and the ‘+far-right’, or any permutations of those taxa. These annotations make that possible.

I have not touched on other annotations of this and other notes. I will save that for another installment in the series. However, the liberal use of many taxa leads to a Rich Foot for that note like this:

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Linking That Use Case To The World

Clipping a note into my Obsidian vault, ends with at least one connection to other notes. I rely heavily on Obsidian ‘Daily Notes’. Each day I create a Daily Note of the form ‘2025-03-02’, and as I undertake various actions — like capturing ideas, or clipping/annotating web pages like the Krugman post — I add entries to the Daily Note, like this:

A heading timestamp is the top of the entry, and then the entry, which in this case is only the transclusion of the ‘precis’ from the imported Paul Krugman note. That transclusion source is this:

Yes, that is complex, but I never hand construct it: I created in the Paul Krugman note after I finished annotating it, by creating a 'copy heading embed’ through a right-click menu supported by the ‘copy block link’ plugin.

I then paste that link to the note entry.

Conclusions

I’ve thrown a lot at you in this one use case, but I tried to approach it on a step-by-step technique, rather than arguing grand principles. Trust me, those principles will surface in the coming series, which will include these elements of Portfolio:

1. The Portfolio knowledge base (based on file references (or taxa), not tags or the Dataview system); and how that enables networked knowledge.

2. The central role of interstitial journaling rather than dashboards (daily, weekly, monthly notes);

3. Portfolio work management (multistate tasks and task search), the use of the ‘Projects’ plugin, and its model of notes, states, and views, and ‘taxa-based’ search.

4. Annotations (sidenotes, footnotes, highlights, ‘precis’);

5. How Portfolio’s parts all work together, and other considerations, like events, cadence, notifications, and the pros and cons of plugins. And how Portfolio is likely to change based on Osodian’s Roadmap.

The accumulation of tiny actions — creating taxa, embedding links, using plugins — leads to a rich tableaux of notes and connections, which leads to a graph like this, centered on Paul Krugman:

The full graph is so large and dense it isn’t profitable to look at it in full: only smaller, shallower graphs are useful. You’ll see how useful they can be.

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