Obsidian templates
A tool to streamline writing, structure our thinking and documenting anything.
Mon Mar 25 2024 19:50:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)What are obsidian templates?
A template is a pre-designed format or structure that serves as a starting point for creating something. It's a reusable pattern or blueprint that outlines the layout, design, or content organization for various purposes.
I've struggled for years to harness the power of templates in my tool for knowledge collection. This at least until I exercised my writing skills and stopped doing only brain dumping when doing digital note-taking. Then something clicked. It became clear to me that a template is a framework to streamline any process.
The more I got interested into organising and sharing my knowledge, the more my notes needed to have a structure which would start me off with pure and simple writing, without falling in the pit of analysis paralysis.
Templates could serve as a method of organizing information in a systematic manner. They guide me through the process of writing a note for a specific topic, and I structure them so that I get prompted to consider essential aspects to cover while writing about a certain topic.
In my writing journey, a template acts as a guide, outlining the essential elements necessary for a well-constructed piece. In my day to day work as a developer, templates help me write fast and efficient documentations on anything I face: design decisions, bugs and lessons learned, services documentations and much more.
All of this helps me save time, improve organization, maintain consistency, making easier information retrieval, aid my memory, and, ultimately, enhance my focus.
Obsidian caught on the importance of templates quite soon, and incorporated the power of creating templates as a core plugin. Worth a mention is the community plugin Templater, which I was relying on before Obsidian made it a native feature.
How to write a template?
Writing a template is a high-level approach to structuring a problem, with the end goal of establishing a consistent format and structure for my writing. I really like to harness power of Question Answering, asking myself questions to guide me through it. The first few things I'd ask myself are:
- 🎯 What is my goal with this template?
- 🔑 What are the key steps involved for my goal resolution?
These first two questions will help me structure the template. For my writing, for example, I came up with a set of questions to guide me through introductions, main points, supporting evidence, conclusions, and calls to action.
- 🌀 What are the variations or customisation I want to include?
- ⚙️ How can I simplify and standardise the process?
I usually collect these sets of questions in an Obsidian note, and drag the note in my template folder to make it available for my next writing on that topic!
There you go, this is a template to create a template. :) I will post and share some templates soon!