Status: Tags: Links: Obsidian Weekly, Monthly, Annual Review Video Project
Obsidian Weekly, Monthly, Annual Review Video Project Script
Introduction
- Hey! Thanks to your guys' support on my videos, I’m over halfway towards getting monetized on youtube! if you like what you see and want some more helpful obsidian or productivity content in the future, please consider subscribing. it’s free, and i’d appreciate it a ton. Anyways, onto the video.
- In this video, I’ll share my workflow for periodic review notes in Obsidian, whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. I’ll share the benefits of such reviews, as well as provide the plugins and templates i use to make the process easier. If you’re looking to constantly improve and work towards your goals, be sure to watch until the very end.
Principles
Benefits
- If you aren’t already spending time on reviews, I would highly suggest you do so. At first I thought doing all this reflection and planning was quite extensive and unecessary, but i’ve genuinely noticed a decline in my productivity as of recently from not using it. It helped me find order amidst the struggles that accompanied the covid pandemic, allowing me to stay on top of my studies and projects for my personal development.
- I use these periodic reviews to reflect on my progress within certain timeframes, ranging from a week to a year; by sitting down and filling out these reviews, I can better prepare and plan for the upcoming one by creating relevant and detailed goals. It’s helped me stay on track with attending to the different areas in my life, and has kept me organized with both short-term and long-term projects. With that out of the way, let’s start off with some plugins to help make the process frictionless and effective.
Plugins
- It’s a little change, but saving a workspace for your periodic reviews can help you spend less time preparing for the review, and more time actually finishing it
- As for community plugins, I find that the calendar, templater, and dataview plugins are most important for my workflow. First off, I use the calendar plugin to easily access daily notes and weekly reviews. Next, I use the commands of templater’s
date nowfunction as well as the search query capabilities of dataview to help automate the connection of relevant and adjacent periodical notes. It may not make much sense right now, but hopefully it’ll make more sense after seeing my review template.
Template
- To show you my workflow, I’ll guide you through my monthly review template.
- Despite the different lengths of the periodical time frames, I have the same prompts for all templates to keep things consistent and simple.
- If you find the template useful, there’s a link in the description to a github repository that contains all the templates I mention in my videos, so be sure to check that out. While you’re at it, i would really appreciate it if you could help my channel out by liking this video and subscribing for more obsidian content.
- Inspired by Bryan Jenk’s weekly review template, the top has a navigation line for the monthly note before and after it, as well as a dataview query to refer to the weeks within the month.
- On a side note, I also have a quick reminder to look at the bigger picture review note, and a cheesy quote to prepare the right mindset for reflection
- This note is separated into three sections, being reflection, overview, and future plans.
Reflection
Under the reflection header, I describe and rate the previous month, think of some notable events that happened, and reflect on the different career and personal projects I set for myself. For each project, I have some prompts I answer that make me think about my achievements, progress, obstacles, and possible improvements for the future. For smaller, more minor tasks, I have a miscallaneous section to just do some brief journalling. Now that I’ve considered the different components of the month, it’s time for an overview.
Overview
- First off, I keep track the amount of hours i focused each week to see how effective my time management has been. Then, I answer some more prompts to assess whether I was content with my progress, whether I found it to the workload to be too exhaustive, and whether I managed to stay focused on my goals or if I got sidetracked often.
- Finally, I think about some things I should continue, some things I shouldn’t and some lessons I learned along the way, and all of this effort will finally pay off in the next section where I plan my next steps
Future Plan
- Last but not least, I try to think of a general motive for the future month, and begin to plan the various projects and tasks to help me achieve it.
- One thing I like to do is choose a book I’ve read that is relevant to my motive, creating a to do, daily task, and habit to implement it, also adding some reflection prompts in my daily note.
- Next up is my checklist where I prepare for the execution phase by coming up with projects and implementing them into my task and project management workflow in Habitica and Obsidian. Looking back at the prompts in the overview section, I integrate anything useful that can help me in my daily workflow. Next, I like to think of 2-3 projects for both my career and personal life, but of course, your available time and priorities may vary. If you’re interested in my personal task and project management workflow, I have a video on how I use habitica, and I’m planning on making the one for obsidian as my next video.
Now that all the reflection and planning are done, I just have to work on actually doing what I set out to do, with the trusty review as a good foundation and reference for when I’m feeling lost. Before I end the video, here’s some tips and advice for making the process less of a hassle, as it can get a bit messy at times
Tips
- Be sure to create the reviews during the appropriate times, as creating the notes too early or late can mess up the automated connections and date commands. The weekly review is intended to be created on a sunday, but if you alter the offset on these commands you can change it to any other day. I also haven’t tested these queries and commands on the quarterly or yearly templates, so let me know if there’s any issues with it.
- As a reference, it usually takes me about an hour to do each review, which isn’t too bad when you look at the grand scheme of things of 5 hours a month.
- Thanks for watching until the very end! If you’re looking for more obsidian workflows, consider checking out my daily note video to help make the most out of your day, as well as my literature notes video to learn and apply the books you read. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two from my workflow, and that my practices can be somewhat to you in your own. Anyways, if you found my advice helpful be sure to like and share this video, and subscribe for more obsidian and productivity-related content. This has been John Mavrick, stay mindful.
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Created:: 2021-07-29 13:55