Obsidian

Obsidian is where thinking happens before it becomes a task, a note worth keeping, or nothing at all. I organize the vault around PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) using LifeOS, and use Breadcrumbs to make the relationships between notes explicit instead of implicit.

Structure

• PARA folders at the top level. Projects (things with a deadline and a defined done-state), Areas (ongoing responsibilities with no end date), Resources (reference material), Archives (anything retired from the above three). Everything lives in exactly one of these at a time.
• Johnny.Decimal-flavored numbering inside Resources and Archives, so reference material stays findable without relying purely on search.
• Breadcrumbs for structured relationships. Rather than relying on backlinks alone (which tell you that two notes are connected but not how), Breadcrumbs lets me define typed hierarchies — a project note that’s part of an area, a topic note that’s a sibling of another topic. This turns the vault into something closer to a navigable graph than a pile of linked pages.
• Daily notes as a capture point, not a home. Fleeting thoughts land in the daily note first; anything worth keeping gets moved to a permanent note within a day or two. The daily note itself is disposable.

Plugins I actually use

Deliberately curated rather than exhaustive — every plugin is something that can break on an Obsidian update, so each one earns its place:

• LifeOS (Pro) — the plugin that actually implements PARA day-to-day: periodic notes, project/area indexes, and the review workflows the Structure section above describes. Running Pro for the extended task and review tooling beyond the free tier.
• Breadcrumbs (community page) — structured note relationships and hierarchy views. This is the one I maintain a fork of myself, so it doubles as a way to dogfood my own changes before they ship. Typed hierarchies (a project note that’s part-of an area, a topic note that’s a sibling of another) turn backlinks — which only tell you that two notes are connected — into something that tells you how.
• Dataview — queries over frontmatter for things like “show me every active project” without maintaining a manual index. Used sparingly, in a handful of MOC-style notes rather than scattered inline throughout the vault, so a query breaking on a frontmatter typo is easy to notice and fix.
• Templater — consistent frontmatter and structure for new notes. Every note type (project, area, resource, daily) has its own template, so a new note starts with the right frontmatter fields already in place instead of relying on remembering to add them by hand.
• Tasks — inline checkboxes and queries for lightweight, per-note to-do lists (a project note’s own scratch checklist, a meeting note’s follow-ups). This doesn’t compete with OmniFocus — anything that needs to be tracked, scheduled, or reviewed as an actual task still lives there; Tasks just handles checkboxes that are incidental to a note rather than the system of record for “is this done.”
• Obsidian Git — commits the vault on a schedule, so version history exists independent of whatever sync mechanism happens to be running.
• Linter — enforces consistent frontmatter and formatting on save, catching the small inconsistencies Templater’s initial scaffolding doesn’t cover on older notes.
• QuickAdd — capture templates and macros, so getting a fleeting thought into the daily note takes one keystroke, not a decision about where it should go.
• Notebook Navigator — a file-explorer replacement with a Finder-style two-pane layout, which matters more than it sounds like once a PARA vault’s folder structure gets a few hundred notes deep.

Sync

Obsidian Sync (or a self-hosted alternative like Syncthing, depending on the week) keeps the vault consistent across a laptop and a phone. The vault is also a plain folder of Markdown files, committed on a schedule via the Obsidian Git plugin, which means a sync outage is an inconvenience, not a data-loss event.

See Performance Tuning for how vault size and plugin count affect indexing speed, and Keeping Updated for how I handle plugin and Obsidian version upgrades.