Using Obsidian as a Life Record
Obsidian is powerful and extensible enough to fill many roles: academic notes, CRM, blogging center etc. One space it fills admirably is as a life record. Using a combination of native and community plugins, you can use Obsidian as a way to record every facet of your life that you want to preserve, from health metrics to media consumption.
Your Daily Note
The hub of a life record is usually the daily note. Using a template, you can record a variety of information. In my own setup, I record the following:
- Wake time
- Status (work, home, travel)
- Daily weather
- Appointments
- Things I learned
- A chronological record of the day
- Gratitude list
- Notes created that day
- Notes modified that day
- Tasks completed from my task manager (Things 3)
Other metrics that are popular to record are body weight and exercise. The Obsidian Tracker Plugin is useful for generating charts and graphs for any metic you can capture numerically.
Task Management with Things 3 and Obsidian
Media Consumption
Using RSS feeds from popular services like Goodreads (for books), Trakt (for movies and TV) and Last.fm (for music) you can automate recording your media consumption. Additionally you can gather information on video games, board games, and manga using the Media DB plugin.
Automating Obsidian - Generate Notes About Your Media Consumption via RSS - Books, TV, Movies, Music
Web Content
If you are inclined to save content from the web, there are a variety of ways to import pages into your vault. Read-it0later services like Omnivore and Readwise have plugins that automate imports. If you want to import pages on a case by case basis, you can use the browser plugin Mark Download, or community plugins like Slurp, Read It Later or Extract URL Content. There is also a bookmarklet written by Obsidian CEO u/kepano to import web pages or excerpts. On IOS, a shortcut works the best.
The Omnivore to Obsidian Connection Enhanced
All the Ways to Get Web Content Into Obsidian
MarkDownload - The Browser Extension that Works With Obsidian
One of the things people miss when transitioning from Evernote to Obsidian is the custom email address used to send information straight to their notes. Obsidian doesn’t have that feature built in but there are still ways to achieve the end result. Readwise has a “mail to Readwise” feature that will in turn import into Obsidian. My personal choice is an IFTTT applet that creates text files in my Dropbox account that are then converted to markdown and imported into my vault by Hazel, a Mac file management app.
How to Send an Email to Your Obsidian Vault
Other Info
I also keep notes on restaurants where I eat. My template has property fields for location, web site, type of cuisine and rating the body of the note has bullet points for each visit recording the day, who I was with and what I ordered.
For places I visit, I use either the MapView plugin or a Drafts action that captures geolocation.
I have a people template that records basic contact information (email, phone, address) and the body of the note is bullet points recording date and time of interactions with the person and details of the meeting/visit.
My Dataview Use Cases in Obsidian