1. Scaffolding — People and Activities

People

Let's take care of that loose "Bob's phone number" note. We're going to create a Person folder to contain one page for each person we know.

This sounds like a phone book or a Rolodex, doesn't it? There should be some structure to this.

Obsidian has a feature to help you keep consistent structure across many pages that have the same kind of data:

Templates

To start, let's say we want to track the following data items for every person — keeping in mind we might not have all of these items for every person, but that's okay.

Find the "`" folder in your Files — that's where we store auxiliary non-page files.

Create a sub-folder under that called Template and, within that, a "page" called Person:

With the page editing frame selected, hit Ctrl+; to start inserting page Properties. Fill in the page template.

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To make sure Obsidian knows what to do with this special page, go to ⚙ → Templates and set Template folder location to

`/Template

Creating Bob's Page

In the Files list, create a top-level folder called Person. Right-click on Person and create a New Note. Name it Bob.

Hit Ctrl+P and then run the Insert template command. Select Person. Now you've got a nice structured Person record for Bob.

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Fill in Bob's phone number. You can fill in the rest of it in the future when you learn more about Bob.

Multiple tabs

You can have many pages open at the same time, and you'll want to do that for when you're triaging and filing information you captured in your Journal pages.

Here are some of the ways you can open a page in a new tab:

  • Middle-click a hyperlink or right-click a hyperlink and choose Open in new tab
  • Middle-click or right-click and choose Open in new tab on an entry in the Files list.
  • Ctrl+O "Open", type until you match the file, Ctrl-Enter for open in new tab.

Furthermore, you can open multiple pages side-by-side: Just drag an open page's tab from the tab bar to the left edge or right edge of the edit frame, and drop.

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Auto Template Trigger Plugin

If you're following along with Obsidian yourself on your computer, you might have noticed that that the Auto Template Trigger plugin we installed in the Creating Your First Vault chapter made the template process a little easier.

When the Auto Template Trigger plugin is enabled, every time you create a New page under folder Foo, it looks in the designated Templates folder. If only one template exists, that template will be applied immediately. If more than one template exists, you'll be prompted every time you create a New page, to choose which template to apply.

Auto Template Trigger goes further. In ⚙ → Auto Template Trigger, there's a list of Folder specific templates. Here you can configure an association of one template for many folders, or even a global association for the whole vault (as the default template, in case no other more specific template applies).

Page creation date

In my notebooks, I always create at a global template that applies to the root folder, and more specific templates for folders further down. All of my templates have a created property.

If you mark a property as being the type date instead of the default text, and you set the property's template value to {{date}}, then it gets transformed into the actual current date, when you copy a template into a new page.

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Activities

The Activities folder is an important part of the diary I keep for my job. Every Project and isolated Task that takes more than a few days gets an Activity page. My Activity page template looks like this:

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My own Activity properties

Jira is the cloud-based issue tracking system that most of the projects in my job use. I put here a URL that lists the Issues for this Activity. My issues is another JIRA URL, but this time for a filtered view in Jira showing only Issues assigned to me.

Contact, project manager, and owner are links to People pages within my diary.

Charge codes is a list of hyperlinks to charge code pages. (Charge codes have two numbers, the official name, and my own shorthand name, so they need to have their own page type in my diary.)

Now with Activities in place, we can go back and link every detailed task page in the Journal back to the Activity that the task belongs to:

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You'll see why this kind of link is important in the next chapter.