Writing in Obsidian

As I slowly shift from using just my beloved Drafts to using Obsidian for more of my writing, I've needed to rethink how I organize and decide on what to write.

Before now I used to have a Drafts workspace for storing the concepts I was writing. I no longer have workspaces or store text long-term in Drafts. As soon as I start to flesh out a concept I throw it into a folder in Obsidian. Often I have enough creative inertia to carry it through all the way to publishing (like this one!) Sometimes an idea interests me, but lacks inertia. I don't have enough time for it or I'm not done working on it and it'll stay in that drafts folder for weeks.

That's where the Obsidian Kanban plugin is incredibly helpful. I'll periodically sweep through the drafts folder, reviewing its contents. I'll toss a lot because I've lost interest, but the ones with some merit I'll add to the Kanban board to then prioritize. It's as simple as dragging the file from the sidebar to the board where it's automatically added and linked.

I love that the Kanban board is markdown under the hood… I can even browse and use it in vim:

---

kanban-plugin: basic

---

## On Deck

- [ ] [[Obsidian Adjustments]]
- [ ] [[Creativity vs productivity systems]]
- [ ] [[Tolkien's Creative Journey]]
- [ ] [[Why I Don't Want My Kids Photos on Social Media]]
- [ ] [[User Experience Debt]]
- [ ] [[Tags to Maps of Content]]
- [ ] [[Periodic Notes in Obsidian]]
- [ ] [[Why Do I Still Use Alfred.app]]
- [ ] [[Changes to my layout and compromises]]
- [ ] [[Refactoring Rituals]]
- [ ] [[You Are Not the Doctor]]
- [ ] [[Flying Within Your Envelope]]

I'd like to get to the point where I have a set time in the day work on whatever is closest to complete on the board, but my writing habit is sporadic at best.1 There have been a few times I "felt like writing something" and the Kanban board guides me towards an already established seed of an idea to work on, and that has been lovely. I've considered setting this Kanban page to be my Obsidian homepage, but I don't think I'm ready to commit to that yet.


  1. I'm mostly triggered by recurring conversations… if something comes up more than once in a week, it usually becomes a post.