The key to every good information management system is a consistent use of templates, folders, and properties. They allow you to automatically pull the information you need, where you need it. For instance, you might want to automatically create a list of papers that you haven’t read yet and that pertain to a specific project. Out of the box, Obsidian is not very good at this. In this tutorial, we’re going to look at five methods to automate content creation and management. It only takes about 15 minutes to set up and enables your system to grow with you to hundreds or even thousands of notes.

These are the five steps that we need to automate Obsidian content creation and Obsidian:

1. We’re going to create a number of templates for different types of content.
2. We’re going to use the QuickAdd plugin to create new nodes in their respective folder and apply the necessary templates.
3. We’re going to use Zotlit and WebClipper to capture academic papers and web content (e.g., websites, YouTube videos).
4. We’re going to add quick-access icons for all of these features in the Obsidian UI using the Commander plugin.
5. We are going to create bases which pull the necessary content based on the folder and properties these nodes have.

Collectively, this forms a single, consistent system that I teach in the information management course. If you don’t want to set it up manually, consider taking this course and using the accompanying starter vault, which has all of these things preconfigured, along with many more plugins that greatly facilitate working with Obsidian. The Starter Vault can save you up to 20 hours of configuration and experimentation.

(1) Templates: To Make Notes Structured

When you create a note in Obsidian, it is blank. But if you are using a system, you will typically want shared properties, sections, and so on. Creating these aspects of the note each time you create a new note creates friction. Friction is more than just losing a few seconds, because it throws you out of a state of flow. If you’re in the middle of a thought that you want to write down, an interruption of even a few seconds can make you forget what you thought. That’s why using automation aims to preserve your thinking rather than shave a few seconds off the process of creating new notes.

The way templates work is:

1. Define a folder under Settings > Templates where all templates will be stored.
2. Every file in this folder is treated as a template and can be “inserted” into a new note.
3. Create a new note and invoke the “insert template” command by either pressing cmd/ctrl + P and typing “insert template or using the hotkey ctrl/cmd +T, or right-clicking and selecting “insert template”.
4. The content of the selected template file will then be copied into the new note.
5. You can add templates to existing notes, too. These will be merged.

Over time, inserting templates becomes second nature.

My rule: Do not create new notes without using a template. If you don’t have a template for the note you are creating, either consider creating it, or better use an existing template, which ensures your system stays simple.

Template Variables: Title, Date and Time

Templates contain three variables: {{title}}, {{date}}, and {{time}}, which will be replaced with the title of the note you are inserting to, the current date or time. The format of the latter two can be configured under Settings > Templates.

Which templates do you need?

In my note-taking system I use 3-4 larger types of notes, with a few variants, they are:

• Source notes, for capturing sources (can be an academic paper, a website, a video, etc.). Depending on the type, different properties are used. The key is to trace back where the content came from.
• Topic notes, for capturing claims, insights, questions, or ideas. These typically have mostly “linking properties,” such as parents or related links (See Parent-Child Navigation).
• Root/Project notes for navigation around a specific topic.

Templates are deeply personal and depend on how you organise your notes. The system that I developed over the last 4 years is quite simple but powerful:

(2) QuickAdd: To Automate Creation of Notes and Capture of Ideas

QuickAdd is a plugin that bundles note creation (in the desired folder), template application, and adds an automated dialogue to fill out parts of the new note. This ensures that you always use a template, that your notes are in the right folder, and that necessary properties are never left blank. After setting it up, note creation becomes far more convenient.

Automatically Creating Files in the Right Folder

QuickAdd relies on existing templates but requires some additional configuration:

These are the steps to create a new QuickAdd “Choice”. A Choice is simply a command, which will create a new note at a predefined folder with a predefined template:

1. Go to Settings > QuickAdd and add a new choice, giving it a name (e.g. “Create a New Topic Note”)
2. In the dialogue that opens, specify the template for the new note. You need to have the template file already created.
3. Next, specify the folder where the note is being created.
4. Finally, scroll down and check the “Open” checkbox. This will ensure that the newly created note is immediately opened after creation.

You can repeat this process for multiple templates until you have used up all your templates and assigned them to the right folders. In my example above, I have about a dozen templates for different types of notes I use in my vault – each with its respective template.

To invoke a menu that allows you to use these QuickAdd “choices” you need to run the “QuickAdd: Open Quick Switcher” command. Hit Ctrl/Cmd + P and type in QuickAdd to find it. Since this is a command you will use often, you can either assign a hotkey to it by going to Settings > Hotkeys, or add an icon somewhere in the UI using the Commander plugin (see next section of this tutorial), so you can click instead of using the keyboard.

QuickAdd Variables

Obsidian templates have only three variables: {{title}},{{date}} and {{time}}. QuickAdd allows you to add additional variables. When running a QuickAdd choice, a dialogue will prompt you to enter the variable value. For example, if you create a new note on a specific topic, you might want to add specific tags or specify a short summary, which will be added to the properties at the time of creation. This ensures that you fill out any properties that need to be there, and don’t neglect them.

To add QuickAdd variables, you need to modify the original template file and add {{VALUE:Name of Variable}} placeholders. When QuickAdd uses this template, it will ask you to fill out the values defined in such a way. You can, of course, use these variables outside of properties and add them to the body of the note.

By default, you will be asked to fill these variables one by one. If you want a dialogue like in the screenshot above, where all variables are filled at once, you need to go to QuickAdd Settings and enable the “One-page input for choices (Beta)” option. The only downside of this is that if you want to add links to your variables e.g. [[Someother note]] QuickAdd will not provide an auto-completion dialogue, like it does when entering the values one by one.

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(3) Commander: To Make Features More Accessible

Commander is a straightforward plugin that lets you add clickable buttons anywhere in the Obsidian UI and link them to any command. An icon helps you remember that a feature is available and lets you place it where it belongs. Here are some locations where you can add custom buttons for quick access to your most used Obsidian features.

Every Obsidian plugin, as well as Obsidian itself, is based on commands. For instance, switching a text to bold, applying a template, or moving a note to a new tab are all considered commands. You can see the commandlet using the Cmd/Ctrl+P hotkey.

What Commander does is allow you to add an icon and link it to any command (or to a combination of multiple commands, in quick succession). While this doesn’t sound very powerful, it provides a visual cue to help you remember where specific features in your UI are located. For instance, you can add an insert template right next to the title of the note, or import from a paper from the Zotero command in the ribbon. This way, you always remember the features that make your role function, greatly increasing your chances of sticking to it.

(4) WebClipper: To Automate Information Capture

Web Clipper is an extension for your Chrome-based browser which allows you to copy content found online into your Obsidian vault. It works by using different WebClipper-specific templates filled with variables. Each variable is then linked to a specific part of the website. For instance, when capturing a YouTube video, the {{content}} variable is replaced with the video’s transcript, which is then available in your note.

WebClipper is specifically designed to capture content from your browser. If you are using it for academic papers, it’s better to first add them to your Zotero library using the Zotero Connector browser extension and then use the ZotLit Plugin to pull the information from there (see next section).

There’s a full tutorial on how to use WebClipper and even integrate some AI. For instance, the same YouTube transcript you captured with the WebClipper can be automatically summarised by AI and the summary added to the note:

(5) ZotLit: To Automate Academic Paper Management

Zotlit is an Obsidian plug-in that connects to your Zotero library and extracts papers along with their metadata (e.g., authors, journal, publication date, etc.) into Obsidian. The plugin uses an additional set of templates to format the data coming from Zotero, which are not the standard Obsidian templates.

This tutorial describes exactly how to connect Zotero to Obsidian and start importing academic papers with one click.

A really useful feature of the Commander plugin is the ability to add an icon for importing papers to the ribbon bar, which makes the import truly effortless. Here is how it looks:

To add the button to the ribbon bar of Obsidian, go to the Commander Settings and select the Ribbon Bar tab. There, you can use the plus button to add any command from Obsidian. Select “Zotlit: Open Quick Switcher for Literature Notes.”

(6) Bases: To Aggregate Captured Content

Bases are essentially Excel files which initially contain all of your notes, but through different filters, filter them down to a subset of notes you need in a specific context. Technically speaking, a bass is a markdown file, a text file, which can be embedded into your notes just like an image using the ![[nameofbase.base]] notation. Here’s a detailed tutorial on Bases:

There are two types of bases:

1. Collectional bases: these bases simply aggregate/filter a specific subset of nodes and display it as a collection. The contents don’t change regardless of where this base is embedded.
2. Navigational bases: bases in Obsidian can be programmed to be aware of the node they are embedded in. For instance, if you wanted to display all backlinks to a node inside the base, this would be possible. The same base could be reused in all of your nodes and always display different content because these bases are aware of the context and their main purpose is navigation. I call them navigational bases. (Here is another detailed tutorial)

Let’s use a collection base to find all sources with an untouched property set to true. Remember, the untouched property indicates a piece of content that was added to the Obsidian vault but not yet read and processed by you. Essentially, it creates a reading list. (An alternative to bases would be a more visual mind map approach).

Building a Reading List Base with an “Untouched” Property

A good combination of bases along with templates and a capturing mechanism like WebClipper or Zotlit is a reading list of content that you haven’t actively read yet. Here’s how it works:

1. Add an “untouched” checkbox property to your template so that whenever you capture something, this checkbox is selected. I call it “untouched” because you haven’t interacted or touched this content yet. You could also call it “unread”, but this sounds strange for videos, hence: “untouched”.
2. Add a description property to your template, and whenever you capture something, use this description property to write down why you want to read something.
3. Create a base which filters out all items that have an untouched property that is checked.

And here’s the result:

In this base, I went a step further and introduced a type property to my notes, which can be, for instance, a video, an academic paper, or website content. The base is grouped by this property, resulting in a nicely organised list. The summary property will contain the summary of the content once I’m done reading, but at the moment it is used as an indicator why I want to read specific content. Here we are reusing a property rather than introducing a new one. My rule is to reduce the number of properties as much as possible, to keep the templates minimal.

How to change properties of existing notes in bulk: Multi Properties

At some point, every Obsidian system needs an update. That means adding new properties to existing files. If you have hundreds or even thousands of notes, this quickly becomes infeasible. Luckily, the Multi Properties plugin makes adding and removing properties in bulk from existing files much easier. Simply select the files you want to edit, right-click and add or remove properties from them.

You can also run a search for specific notes and then use the plugin’s “Add properties to search result” function to add properties to the search results. This gives you a little bit more flexibility in the selection process, as you are not limited to folders.

Summary

The six elements presented here are part of a continuous whole:

• Templates (paired with QuickAdd) allow you to quickly create notes that always have the same structure and are placed in the right folders. For me, this method allowed me to completely forget about folders or templates.
• Commander (3) makes all of this easier to access by creating a clickable link somewhere in the UI, so that you don’t have to remember to invoke your templates in QuickAdd, but just click one button, which is always visible.
• The WebClipper and Zotlit plugins (4,5) allow you to feed your information management system either from the web or from a Zotero library, thereby making it easy to capture information. Moreover, they ensure that the appropriate templates are used and that the note ends up in the correct folder.
• Bases (6) allow you to find and display the notes that you create based on their properties. Without bases, organising a large vault is difficult, and bases require that properties be well-defined and that notes have the right folders, which is why elements 1-5 are necessary.

Collectively, this system allows your vault to automatically follow the rules you define, so you can easily find and catalogue your ideas, claims, questions, sources, and insights.

Think of a well-organised vault as a house. Every single brick (a note) that this house is built out of needs to be uniform so that everything fits together. These steps in this tutorial make sure that all your notes are uniform, just like the bricks for the house, but a pile of perfectly uniform bricks is still not a house. The last step, you will need to assemble the house, is the system or the architecture of it, the way you connect these bricks to form the rooms of the house. This is what an information management system does. If you have never thought about it, start with this tutorial; or, if you want a shortcut that covers all aspects of creating this house for your research, check out the information management course.