Obsidian.md Templates for Personal Knowledge Management
What are templates
In Obsidian.md you are able to make templates to quickly insert markup into your document. This allows you to keep your vault consistently structured, as well as speed up your work flow.
Why should you use templates for personal knowledge management?
In order to use Obsidian.md effectively for personal knowledge management it’s important to keep your notes consistently structured. A common way of doing this is by adding metadata to your notes so you can easily categorize them. Metadata also allows you to query your notes for powerful insights. Additionally, you can also use plugins like Dataview to create powerful work spaces within Obsidian.md. Since this is not an article about metadata, I am not going to go into too much depth here.
Using templates also speeds up your workflow without you having to worry about remembering how to structure stuff. Basically, templates allow you to quickly add markup to your notes and keep everything consistent.
How to use templates?
Firstly to use templates you need to make sure that it’s enabled in “core plugins”. To find this setting navigate to settings, then click “Core Plugins”, then enable templates.
If you click on the templates settings cog, you’ll be prompted with some additional settings and options.
Pro Tip: Navigate to settings -> Core Plugins -> Command Palette: Here you can pin the “Insert Template” command. Then, all you need to do to insert a template is: Ctrl+P -> Enter -> <Name of template> -> Enter
Do you have some… Template templates?
Yep!
Here are my most frequently used ones:
Generic Note Template
[What is this most related to?]
tags:: #status/note
dates::
people::
relevant::
TRU?:: #TRU/todo
---
#
I use this template 95% of the time. This template ensures that link it to an “MOC” (Map of Content) or relevant note. I don’t take notes out of my inbox unless they’re linking to another note.
“TRU?:: #TRU/todo”, I tag all new notes with this. When I am writing my newsletter I know I can use notes tagged with “TRU/todo”. If the note is not applicable to my newsletter, I’ll remove the tag when I insert the template.
Source Note Template
[What is this most related to?]
tags:: #status/source/articles
dates::
people::
relevant::
This is for content that is not my own. Sometimes I’ll write down a quote, or quote an entire paragraph. This makes sure I can differentiate between other’s work and my own.
Table Template
| Syntax | Description |
| ----------- | ----------- |
| Header | Title |
| Paragraph | Text |
Tables suck in Obsidian.md! So I use this template to quickly insert a table into my document. In addition to this I highly recommend the advanced tables plugin.
Map of content (MOC) template
[[Library]]
tags:: #status/MOC
dates::
people::
relevant::
---
#
Similar to the note template but this is only applied to Maps of Content.
Current note title template
#
---