Obsidian Starter Vault

A consultant's knowledge management setup built around three goals:

1. Capture fast — meetings, tasks, and daily notes require minimal friction
2. Surface later — inline tags make insights retrievable across notes
3. Stay lean — one system, no sprawl

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Folder Structure

vault/
├── Daily/          ← One note per workday; your operational anchor
├── Meetings/       ← All meeting notes, flat, date-prefixed
├── Clients/        ← One folder per client; tickets as sub-notes
├── People/         ← One note per person — a lightweight CRM
├── Reference/      ← Evergreen material: cheatsheets, reading, prompts
├── Archive/        ← Completed engagements and outdated notes
├── Assets/         ← All attachments (PDFs, images, etc.)
├── Templates/      ← Templater templates
├── Tags.md         ← Tag taxonomy reference
├── Tasks.md        ← Global task dashboard (due today + next 7 days)
├── Reflection.md   ← Aggregated learnings, decisions, patterns, etc.
└── Mindset.md      ← Personal principles and working agreements with yourself

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Core Workflow

Daily Notes (Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md)

Open or create today's daily note first thing. Use it to:

• Capture what you're focusing on
• Log tasks with due dates using the Tasks plugin syntax
• Drop quick notes, learnings, and ideas inline-tagged for later retrieval

Use the Daily Note template. The Tasks plugin due before tomorrow query surfaces everything due today automatically.

Meeting Notes (Meetings/YYYY-MM-DD Topic.md)

Create one note per meeting. Flat folder, no subfolders — date prefix + frontmatter tags handle filtering. Use the Meeting template, which auto-renames the file with today's date.

People (People/Firstname Lastname.md)

One note per person. Accumulate feedback and observations over time. Use the Person template.

Clients (Clients/Client Name/)

One folder per client engagement. Keep a high-level Overview.md and create individual Tickets/ notes for work items.

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Tag System

Tags serve two purposes:

Frontmatter tags — classify a note (used for filtering):

tags:
  - meeting
  - client/acme
  - meeting/1-1

Inline tags — mark individual bullet points for aggregation in Reflection.md:

- The client's CTO responds better to written proposals than verbal ones #pattern
- Always send a recap email after a stakeholder meeting #principle
- Pushed back on scope without enough data — next time gather evidence first #mistake

See Tags.md for the full taxonomy.

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Plugin Setup

Install these four plugins via Settings → Community plugins → Browse:

Plugin	Purpose
Templater	Powers all templates with dynamic date injection and file renaming
Tasks	Task management with due dates; powers Tasks.md and Daily Note queries
Dataview	Powers Reflection.md — aggregates inline-tagged bullets across the vault
Calendar	Sidebar calendar for navigating daily notes

Templater Configuration

After installing:

1. Settings → Templater → Template folder location: Templates
2. Enable Trigger Templater on new file creation
3. Optionally map hotkeys to your most-used templates

Tasks Configuration

No special config needed. Tasks are created with this syntax:

- [ ] Draft proposal for Q3 planning 📅 2026-04-15 #client/acme

The 📅 emoji followed by YYYY-MM-DD sets the due date.

Dataview Configuration

No special config needed. The Reflection.md queries run automatically. If results appear empty, ensure Enable JavaScript Queries is turned on in Dataview settings.

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Naming Conventions

Type	Convention	Example
Daily notes	YYYY-MM-DD	2026-04-08.md
Meeting notes	YYYY-MM-DD Topic	2026-04-08 Kickoff Meeting.md
People notes	Firstname Lastname	Jane Doe.md
Ticket notes	ID Description or plain topic	001 Setup CI Pipeline.md
Assets	kebab-case	architecture-diagram-v2.png

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Tips

• Tags over folders — resist the urge to create deeply nested folders. A flat Meetings/ folder filtered by tags scales better than Meetings/Client/Year/Quarter/.
• Inline tags are the secret — tagging individual bullet points (not just notes) is what makes Reflection.md powerful. Build the habit of tagging one insight per note.
• Daily note as a scratchpad — anything that doesn't belong to a specific meeting or project can live in the daily note and be organized later.
• People notes compound — a note that starts as one bullet point becomes a rich record of feedback and observations over months.
• Archive, don't delete — move completed engagements to Archive/ so past notes stay searchable.