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00:00:03
hi i'm nick milo and welcome to linking your thinking where we talk about the how and why of making meaningful notes here we are with another obsidian update 0.9.10 it's all about
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plugins what are plugins plugins are these things that imagine there's just something very specific you want to do in obsidian but that feature doesn't exist yet so people like you and me except very
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creative and very talented created something to scratch that itch that they had and since this has come out i've had some time finally to play around with all these different plugins and kind of find
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the top 10 or so that work really well for me and that's what i want to show you in this video so in the following video we're going to explore my favorite plugins and how i'm using them there are basically three categories i
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want to explore the first are the plugins i use every single day the second are the pretty cool ones that i use every now and then and the third is actually kind of in between but there are four plugins that if you use
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together they can allow your daily note making efforts to come alive and i think it's pretty cool in my mind i call it the unofficial daily note plug-in pack it's pretty pretty awesome and i'm excited to
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to show more with you let's explore and we're in okay so this is my home note and the the command that you probably already know but i want to highlight it is command o so if i hit command o i can open a new
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note so i can open writings boom i'm in writings i can hit command o that's ctrl o on a windows computer and i can type in my zeros and i can go back to
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my home node now what you may not know is that there is another important hotkey called command p and that stands for command palette so if i hit command p i have all these different commands
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up until plugins though that wasn't really important to me now that there are plugins and all these really amazing people creating plugins with hotkeys and commands get to know command p
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alright this is when in doubt you hit command p and you're like what was that note called yeah note refactor and then we'll start to explore this okay so that's part one part two is how do we
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even get to these plugins so first go to settings and what i want you to do is check out third party plugins now we have to talk about safety for this to work you have to
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turn off safe mode and when you do that there'll be this prompt that comes up and essentially you have to sort of agree to a little bit of a less safe environment all the details are below i can tell you i feel safe
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but your mileage may vary read the disclaimers read all that stuff and kind of make your own assessment if you want to use these third party plugins which are just community plugins and the
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way that the safety mechanism works here is that the same people who are creating the plugins and the broader community stress checks these plugins to make sure that there aren't security bugs or whatnot if there are
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then that plug-in would get pulled and people wouldn't use it but you know you just have to be a little bit careful when you use and install third-party plugins that's what this message is about so let's turn off safe mode
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now i have to click on all the plugins i had let me do that okay the plugins have been activated which you can see here now let's talk about how to access the plugins what you want to do is
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when you're in third party plugins go to this community plugins and hit browse now these are sorted by the amount of times that they've been downloaded so again if you have any doubts about a plug-in use the most popular ones because just
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like wikipedia works that means the most eyes have been on it and it has had any sort of revisions basically it's been vetted by the community and if it's here that means that it's probably pretty safe to
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use at least that's my interpretation so we can see the most popular plugin is calendar which we will get to so a quick honorable mention this is why it's so cool sometimes that if you just install a bunch of plugins always
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remember command p because i can just hit watch this command p and i was like what if i wanted to create a mind map and maybe not of this note let's let's try this one of my home note let's make a mind map immediately out of this home note so if
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i just hit command p then i'm like whoa what was that mind map thing well i don't have to remember if i can remember mind map then i'm just going to type mind and then hit enter and then right next to it
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what is this this is pretty cool right so this is a mind map showing the structure of that note and it's all laid out pretty cool now you can't edit in it so it's limited
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it's of limited use i would say but it is pretty cool this is something i could always save which is an option if you go down here you can copy this screenshot and then you can save it send it to somebody and start a conversation that way
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or before you're going to bed you can review this visual mind map to kind of make sure that you're seeing whatever the context is the big thing that you're working on but i want to talk about my favorite the
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one that i can't live without and that is sliding panes so sliding panes are so cool as far as i know
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this was made popular by andy matushak whose evergreen notes and working with the garage door open has really inspired a whole community of personal knowledge management users including myself from that i was able to
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track down the use of sliding panes back to something called federated wiki which was by ward cunningham if anyone knows the details behind that or how we got these sliding panes in the first place i'm always interested in the the
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historical evolution of these concepts but that's for another time back in the community plug-in list sliding panes is the third most popular download and just to show you what that does real fast is this the thing i do all the time
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you hold shift and then you use the scroll wheel on your mouse and you can just scroll from the left to the right very very satisfying sliding panes adds a few cool features
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now we can see the vertical bars on both the left and the right and if i click on a note let's say the home note it'll auto open so that tells me that that note is now in focus
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i use sliding panes all the time because to me it mimics me sitting down on a rustic workbench with my index cards in front of me and i'm just shifting them around i can
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kind of slide them over here and then i can work on these ones and i can slide those over there and it's just beautiful that way so sliding panes is my favorite now the theme that we're using
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is cybertron cybertron already has sliding panes so you do get a few more cool features if you use the plugin so i do recommend that and that takes us to my second favorite plugin which is
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hotkeys plus plus so i just want to show you what it does and then i'll show you how to activate it so let's uh let's go to my daily note and it looks like i have some things here but let's imagine i'm just writing
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some things randomly i don't know what i'm up to yet let me make this all bigger but then i decide hey i want to make this a list now in the past and i do this all the
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time in the past i'd have to dash and then kind of go in and you know it's a manual process but now i can hit the hotkey that toggles through list type so that's our bullet list we have a numbered list
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because if i go into preview mode we can see that the numbers are there and if we can also go back to unordered no list so this is great because often times i'm just writing quickly and then i i decide hey i want to make this into a
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bullet list and boom i'm done i can't tell you how simple of a feature that is but it's one that i essentially use every single day i'm an obsidian so number one sliding pains number two
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hot keys plus plus number three even simpler if that's possible and that's called better word count and so what we can see here is this this is the obsidian core word count and character count now
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however if i just want to for whatever reason see how long this piece of text is immediately right here we see that this is the better word count and we can see how many words and how many characters
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if you're somebody that tweets a lot you can see where's my 240 character mark in fact it is auto updating while i'm holding down and hover and changing the text so i can see that the
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240 mark it's coming up as i'm taking down less and less and essentially that's how long a tweet could be 240 characters minus that e so
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anyways that's one use of it usually though i'm writing um i could be in one article that happens to be pretty long and i just i'm curious how long that is i can go to this note and i'm curious how long if i go to edit
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mode apparently i want to see how long this little written piece is and i can see immediately it's 208 words so number three better word count now let's go back to
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where we would get these first we go to settings third party plugins community plugins and where are we going so here you can see sliding panes is right away what was number two
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hotkeys this is by argentina ortega-sans one of the moderators on the obsidian forums very very cool and so when you go into one of these plugins the creator gives a
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little walk through so you can get a better sense of what's happening here now remember i said again and again try to remember what hotkey command p it stands for
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command palette but it might as well be plugins because if for whatever reason i forget how to make a list i hit command p and i'm trying to think hotkeys hotkeys hotkeys
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uh plus plus and immediately i see oh yeah yeah that's what it was it was toggle this line oh it's shift a command shift m that's the one so i can actually just select it here and it does that
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but then if i want to start toggling through i just do that right there so that's why it's so important to remember the command p hotkey all right what was the next one better word
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count so if you go on a better word count same thing this is by luke lapon and you can see what how it works and how it's described right here and those are my top three favorite plugins that i use
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every day now here are some really cool ones that i use every now and then and then we're going to finish with kind of a secret weapon for a daily notes workflow so we covered my three favorite plugins that i use daily now we're going to cover
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the plugins that are nice to use when needed and i want to start with smart random note by eric hall and why this is so cool is because one of the foundational aspects of lumens zelkasten was the idea of
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serendipity of you know having this conversational partner that surprises you over time because you forgot you even had that note in your collection and then it comes up again and now you're off to the races having a
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fun and dynamic conversation so if we want to have a little bit of that serendipity it has already been something that exists because in the obsidian core features if you see this little dice icon
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this will open a random note so let me just go over to this one now i will open a random note boom and we open a random note however what if i want to kind of be a little bit more deliberate
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in my randomness what would we call that like deliberate serendipity if that is such a thing i think it is i think you can have that paradox be a real thing that has a real value so what might that look like
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well if we search for a term quote so just this tag for quote right this is all i have that's showing up in our library that we're looking at right now so what if i want to now open random
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note from search this is what this plugin does and immediately it takes me to a random note that has the hashtag quote in there somewhere here's another one and we can see
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right here that's quote showing up let's just do a couple more here's another one a best practices note back to the poem back to this one let's get a little bit more random all right so
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you know here's kind of a standard quote and we can dive into different sources now what was that hotkey again command p and then if i want to hit random because that's the only word i can think of
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oh smart random note and look these creators are brilliant they're innovative and even if it seems like such a small plugin even here we have three different options so instead of just random note from
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search which is what i was doing how about open a tagged random note now searching all of your tags like develop which is pretty cool i can hit submit and then say immediately whoa the concept of cause and effect
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which is huge and i've been kind of maybe not wanting to work on it well hey why not work on it now because of that serendipitous feeling so that's the smart random note by eric hull next on the list advanced
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tables by tony grassinger now this is super powerful and does it does in fact really intimidate me but what i want to show is just sort of the basics of how you can use this table so first check
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out the shift you know get the pipe symbol going and then type whatever you know like titles here and then i'm going to hit the pipe or let me just try titles and then tab
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that's it okay so the magic of this feature is somehow tony grossinger has made it work where if there is a pipe going on and you hit tab it kind of understands that you want to create a markdown table
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so then i can hit you know whatever here tab whoa that's pretty cool one more time and tab again cool now these let's see what we have so far so preview gives us this
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now let's go i hit enter that's all i did i just hit enter and now i can hit um first title right first title goes here tab i'm into the next piped area
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this is i mean this is pretty cool i mean because what's so nice about this is no it's not the the most functional microsoft excel air table notion table that exists but in a pinch
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it's pretty fast and it's marked down so it's future proof we can take it with us wherever we go different applications can view it and then who knows what they can do in the future but we have potentials
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that they can so if we preview this hey that looks pretty cool now other things you can do is you can put a colon on the front right there and now see how that title is now left aligned which is i
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don't know just such a fascinating feature so let's try the same thing with this one we'll put a colon on the right and we see it's right aligned so i mean pretty awesome thank you tony for the amazing
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advanced tables now you might be wondering about all the functionality so what you do guess what command p i really want you to drill that in because if you're anything like me you're you're not a programming genius
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you need all the help you can get so by having command p i can just pick what was that thing tables tables and then boom these are all the commands that tony has worked into the plugin that he has created and this is pretty cool
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so you have all that power at your fingertips and it's worth noting too that for many of these plugins when you go to settings you'll see features that you can control here settings that you can control here and
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so advanced table well that has one and we can look at all sorts of things that you don't have to touch but if you wanted to you certainly can and we can look into some sliding panes and see some of the
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sliding panes options from gordon peterson's amazing sliding panes and that takes us to the third kind of cool nice to use when needed plugin and and by the way like these plugins are amazingly powerful
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so my nice to use when needed is somebody else's essential plugin so paste url into selection so for this i just have google's url here i copy it and what i
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want to do is if i go to this note and you just highlight text and then you hit the little url hotkey and it gives you a markdown link
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url style nice little trick if you're linking a lot from urls this is something that you might want to do and that is the paste url let's check that out so that's paste url
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into selection and if i'm not mistaking you know how i said that some of these plugins have their own plugin options paste url does not so where does it exist two places if you're really curious it
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exists in the hotkeys options so if you go there then you can hit paste and then there it is and you can see the hotkey that i've chosen to use which on a mac is command option u it
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makes sense to me however command p can also save the day because if i forget whatever it is and that's the the word i want to link i hit command p paste there it is enter
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boom that link is there now that takes us to four very cool plugins that actually can all work together in tandem to unlock a certain sort of workflow if you are
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somebody who loves the daily note creating a new daily note then these are four hotkeys you definitely want to check out to see if it will work for your workflow now for the special four
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starting with calendar by liam kane so calendar is probably well it is it's the most popular app so if we go again to settings third party plugins if we hit browse we can see immediately calendar is the
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most downloaded so here it is you can always check to see the intended use by the creator these walkthroughs are very helpful when you really want to understand functionality the nice thing about
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calendar is once you get it set up it'll look something like this and what's so cool is you do have some features that we can play with but essentially if you see a dot that means there are roughly 250 words
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in this day's note so this is today's note the 31st and what's really nice about this is some of the built-in functionality that liam has thought through for example if you're somebody that uses a lot of daily notes
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if you're somebody who wants to do a weekly review guess what there's a weak column and i can hit this button guess what happens i can create a new note and immediately i have a template you
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can even have a template that comes in here and then right just some basic things so i keep it as clean as possible this is not like a template that i am going to advocate for and say it's the one for
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you but you can just quickly type out your win you know other things i want to keep it broad whatever's kind of on the top of my mind and you know what's coming up next if i really want to get into it i can explore the seven dimensions of wellness
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i also prefer you know like the four virtues of stoicism that i've kind of modified a little bit you know whatever whatever refraction you want to put in between you and what you're reviewing
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whatever lens whatever looking glass this is a place that you can just make a little template out of it so that's a pretty wild feature that liam came up with so when you want to mess around with these features go to calendar
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and everything is right here that you can control too many to look at right now but it's a pretty cool feature so what does calendar play nicely with so another one from argentina
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is natural language dates so this is cool and it goes so nicely with another obsidian moderators plug-in which is a review by ryan murphy and it's another example of
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something so incredibly simple but it makes a major impact on what you're doing so if i if we want to click open the note that we were in let's talk about this a little bit so what does
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argentina's natural language processing note do well i kind of forgot what it does so let me just hit command p natural language processing i'm like okay those are some
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of the things that i can program date picker insert so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into hotkeys same thing natural language and parse
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natural let me just yeah let's keep it command y that's pretty cool so if i double click tomorrow and hit command y you see what just happened there let's take that back tomorrow and i hit command y the hotkey
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for the natural language processor and we get tomorrow's date new year's day however we could say in two days in two days now check this out i highlight this
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i hit command y and it knows to put that in i mean that's insanely wild so when you combine this with ryan's review plugin this is really cool let's say this shoppenhauer quote is
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really standing out to me so something i might choose to do is um review this i want to review this on sunday january 3rd so let's
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first command p because i review okay so here's what we can control add this note to a daily note for review command option m is what i've chosen for now okay so
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command option m set review date and i want to send set it for january 4. now if you look at the calendar you should see a dot it's going to take
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a second i think to populate let me okay january 4th so now if we look here give it a second and then we can see that it has been created and we can click on it and we can say oh part of what i wanted
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what i told my future self i wanted to review imagine this is january 4th it's monday now what did i want to review i wanted to review this note so then we can go back to this note and you know maybe i put
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review right here whatever whatever that special note is that you use for yourself and now we have a shop in howard's quote and i'm reviewing it i mean i'm i'm imagining this has major applications for task management
00:23:13
and for sort of an anki flash card sort of management i stay away from those two but that is certainly something a person can do as far as simple reviews that's pretty wild isn't it
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and now calendar natural language dates we can see how we can now hit tomorrow or in two days and how that ties into ryan's review well let's look at james lynch's note refactor
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i mean this thing is powerful we definitely want to check it out so for a quick example let's pop into some notes i took on a book that i really really enjoyed by brene brown called daring greatly and so i just have a few
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examples here we're going to hide most of this stuff and dive into the note refactor what we have here are three headers and each of these has a good amount of words in it and so
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as i'm taking notes however i might be taking them i get a lot of content and it's all in one note and that means that the note is a little bulky and it makes it harder to link
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this specific header to another note sure i could do a header link but sometimes at least for me i prefer strong ideas to be in their own note so now with note refactor you can
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accomplish just this now once again i hit command p because i can't remember what the command is so note refactor and extracts this is the one i like so this
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is this is kind of magical i must say so i want to make sure that i have everything highlighted and i'm going to do the note refactor which is
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my hotkey okay check this out whoa what just happened so everything i highlighted is now a link to a new note that new note is now header one which i like which you can control
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and there's all the content so let's that's pretty wild now we can actually just do it again right here so once you get good at this this is why note refactor is so powerful because these notes i mean just check
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this out everything is highlighted if i collapse and do this i'm going to hit the note refactor button boom new note let's do it again
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boom new note so if we look in daring greatly we see that there are links to the three notes that i just created like that and we go to each note we can see the content that stands out and it's already looking in good shape
00:25:46
like if we do do this in preview mode we can see this is one that relies a little bit more on quotes than i would normally prefer but it's definitional so i rationalize that it is okay and if we go to this note then we have a
00:25:59
note that is um you know a whole different this does even really directly relate to daring greatly the book but because of daring greatly the book it spurred this whole
00:26:11
push in a different direction so i'm you know i'm kind of proud of this the point being is that is the power of note refactor is if you have a lot of headings or something then this is a situation where it's very easy to break it apart
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into a new note and when in doubt if you forget the hotkey you can just hit whatever it is that sparks your memory and you're off to the races so the big takeaway here with these four
00:26:38
different plugins is that this can kind of explode how you use daily notes i mean can you kind of see it right now you have the calendar view the calendar view shows you dates that you have daily
00:26:50
notes using natural language dates and the review plugin you can push content around to future dates where you can review it
00:27:00
and as you create interesting content within a daily note like hey this show power quote right that's so cool i mean i didn't create it but it's a neat quote and shouldn't it stand on its own well maybe maybe i'd like it to now as you're
00:27:14
typing as you're in this messy daily note here's what you do you have this little nice header whatever you highlight this thing and then you just hit your special hotkey and boom here it is and not only that
00:27:26
but if we go to the graph view it is linked to that day that is the power that is so cool that is so cool now we can go to the schopenhauer quote if we wanted to and we could make this a review note so we hit
00:27:38
whatever that review button was what was it i can't remember so we go to command p and i hit review and add this note to daily review okay so it's m okay it's right next to n okay and then
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we say um tomorrow and then boom now this shopping hour quote is pushed to the note for tomorrow and we see in the
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review section we have it right here that is awesome that is so powerful that is how you can use calendar and natural language dates review and note refactor which are these four
00:28:17
in a super powerful way um i tried so hard for this to be a fast video but unfortunately the plugins in obsidian are just too many and i got a little excited so i apologize for as long as this is but let's get to the conclusion
00:28:33
plugins are powerful but plugins are completely optional try them out when you have some time but don't worry if you get overwhelmed when in doubt hit command p or control p on a windows and you'll have a list of all the
00:28:46
commands at your fingertips and as a reminder that i think is just so amazing is that all these plugins and all this new power still operates within plain text markdown that means that everything that we're
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doing is just working on a bunch of plain text files in a folder on your computer how amazing is that that means that if obsidian disappears
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which fingers crossed it never does if software becomes bloated which fingers crossed it never does or if you just want to use a different application to access those same files
00:29:22
at the same time you can that is the power of plain text and it's always worth remembering how that future proofs and gives us so much optionality when we manage our knowledge
00:29:38
as always thank you so much for listening i hope you got something out of this video if you have share it with a friend subscribe like do all that good stuff more importantly though 2020 has been a crazy year
00:29:50
whatever you had planned at the start i am sure that it's different than that i hope first and foremost that the end of the year finds you healthy and safe going into 2020 it is the year
00:30:02
of the note maker i hope that we can all have a more normal year and as we do so continue the great conversation on that note the fall workshop was a massive success we had about 50 people
00:30:14
and the results are incredible you'll be seeing a lot more of those results coming up if you are interested in the upcoming workshop which starts january 26th there'll be a lot of information about that that is cohort 3
00:30:25
is going to be incredible i expect such diverse perspectives such inspiring people just like we had in the fall and i can't wait to see you be part of that group if you're interested but to wrap this up stay connected and i'll see you in the
00:30:39
next one [Music] you
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