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How I Use Obsidian

How I Use Obsidian to Track My Brain and Tasks

I've tried pretty much every note-taking and task management app out there. Evernote, OneNote, Notion, Google Docs, Todoist, Things, Sunsama, OmniFocus. None of them stuck. As a neurodiverse person, most productivity systems feel like they were designed for someone else's brain.

I started using Obsidian a few years ago after seeing that Cassidy Williams was a fan. Didn't dig into it much at first. But after a lot of iteration, I've landed on a setup I call "matty-os" that actually works for how I think. Here's how it's put together.

Why Obsidian?

Three things sold me. First, it's local-first. My notes live on my computer, not in someone else's cloud. Second, everything is plain Markdown files. If Obsidian disappears tomorrow, I still have my notes. Third, the interlinking between notes is genuinely powerful. You'll see why that matters when I get into meetings and people.

The Philosophy

My system runs on a few core principles that took me a while to figure out:

Asana is the source of assignment. Obsidian is the source of execution. My team uses Asana for project management. But Asana is where work gets assigned. Obsidian is where I actually plan my day, track what I'm doing, and think through problems. I manually promote top-level deliverables from Asana into my Content Production area. No sync. No automation. Intentional curation only.

Simplicity over automation. I used to chase every new plugin and workflow optimization. Now I don't add a plugin unless I've felt the friction for at least two weeks. The system should feel calming, not clever.

Tasks can live anywhere. I don't have a single tasks file. Tasks live in the note where they make sense (a meeting, an area, a project, a daily note). The Tasks plugin aggregates them all into my Dashboard automatically.

Folder Structure

I use a modified PARA method. Here's the layout:

Plus a public/ folder for notes published to my digital garden at notes.mattstratton.com.

The Dashboard

My Dashboard is the home screen. It opens automatically when I launch Obsidian (via the Homepage plugin). It shows me:

That's it. One screen, everything I need. No clicking around.

Daily Notes

Every day gets a note. The template gives me:

The "Completed Today" section was a later addition and honestly one of the best things I've done. It's really satisfying to see that list grow throughout the day.

Meeting Notes

As someone who spends a lot of time in meetings, this is probably the most important part of the system. Every meeting note lives in 04 - Meetings with a filename like 2026-02-22 Marketing Sync.md.

The YAML frontmatter includes:

type: meeting
date: 2026-02-22
summary: Discussed Q1 content priorities and launch timeline
attendees:
  - Ramon Guiu
  - Hien Pham

The summary field is key. It's a one-liner that shows up on People pages so I can quickly scan what I discussed with someone without opening every meeting note.

I create meetings two ways. QuickAdd gives me a command palette shortcut: I type the meeting name, it creates the file with today's date prefix and applies the template. Or I can just create a new file in the 04 - Meetings folder and Templater auto-applies the template with prompts for the date and name.

Any tasks I create inside a meeting note automatically show up on my Dashboard. No extra steps.

People Pages

Every person I work with regularly gets a page in 05 - People. The page shows a default avatar (which I can swap for a real photo), some basic metadata (company, title, email), and most importantly: a Dataview table of every meeting where that person appears in the attendees list, sorted by date, showing the summary.

This is where the interlinking pays off. I never have to think "when did I last talk to Ramon about the content plan?" I just open Ramon's page and it's all there, reverse-chronological, with summaries.

Task Formatting

This is a small thing that tripped me up for a while. The Tasks plugin uses emoji format, and due dates must be the last token on the task line. If I'm linking to an Asana task, the URL goes on an indented line below:

- [ ] (Blog) Database Post 📅 2026-03-15
  https://app.asana.com/0/...

If the URL is on the same line after the date, the date parsing breaks. That's not fun.

Weekly Reset

I have a calendar-blocked ritual every week called the Weekly Reset. It's a checklist in 00 - System/Weekly Reset.md that walks me through:

  1. Clear completed tasks
  2. Remove stale #focus tags
  3. Review the next 14 days
  4. Review active projects
  5. Pre-commit priorities for the week

This is the thing that keeps the system from decaying. Without it, everything gets stale within about two weeks.

The Plugin Stack

I've been pretty deliberate about plugins. Here's what I actually use:

Core four: Templater (folder templates for auto-applying templates on file creation), Tasks (emoji format task queries), Dataview (dynamic queries everywhere), Homepage (opens Dashboard on startup).

Productivity: QuickAdd (fast meeting/note creation from command palette), Calendar (visual calendar for daily notes), Natural Language Dates (type "next friday" and get a date), Digital Garden (publishes to notes.mattstratton.com).

Editing: Linter (formatting consistency on save), Outliner (better list editing), Banners (header images on notes), Callout Manager (custom callout types).

Appearance: Minimal theme with Minimal Settings and Style Settings for customization, Icon Folder for visual folder icons.

Media: Imgur plugin (paste images, auto-upload to Imgur), Paste Image Rename, Text Extractor.

Search: Omnisearch (full-text fuzzy search), Tag Wrangler (rename and manage tags).

I also use the official Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension for saving web content directly into my Ideas folder.

The Digital Garden

I publish some notes publicly to notes.mattstratton.com using the Digital Garden plugin. Any note with dg-publish: true in the frontmatter gets published. It's a low-friction way to share things like this post, my garage gym setup notes, and whatever else I feel like making public.

What I've Learned

The biggest lesson: the system has to match your brain, not the other way around. I spent years trying to force myself into GTD or bullet journaling or whatever the productivity community was excited about. None of it stuck because none of it was designed for how I actually work.

The second lesson: simplicity compounds. Every time I resist adding a new plugin or workflow, the system gets more stable. Every time I give in to "this would be cool," I create maintenance debt.

The third lesson: capture freely, promote intentionally. Ideas go in 10 - Ideas with zero obligation. Tasks live where they're born. The Weekly Reset is when I decide what actually matters. That separation between capturing and committing has been huge for me.

If you want to try something similar, start with the folder structure and the daily note. Don't install 20 plugins on day one. Let the friction tell you what you actually need.

Claude + MCP Integration

One of the more recent additions to the system is connecting Claude Desktop directly to my vault via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This means Claude can read, search, and write to my notes without me having to copy-paste anything into a chat window.

How it's set up

The connection runs through two pieces working together:

  1. Local REST API plugin — already part of my stack, it exposes a local HTTP API to my vault that runs entirely on my machine
  2. mcp-obsidian — a lightweight MCP server that wraps the Local REST API and speaks the protocol Claude Desktop understands

To install, I used uvx (part of the uv Python toolchain, installable via Homebrew) and added the following to Claude Desktop's config file at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

"mcp-obsidian": {
  "command": "/opt/homebrew/bin/uvx",
  "args": ["mcp-obsidian"],
  "env": {
    "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here",
    "OBSIDIAN_HOST": "localhost",
    "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "27124"
  }
}

The API key comes from the Local REST API plugin settings in Obsidian. After saving the config and fully restarting Claude Desktop, the connection just works.

What this enables

Claude can now list files in my vault, read note contents, search across notes, append or patch content, and create new files — all from within a conversation. The practical upshot is that I can ask Claude to pull context from my actual notes rather than pasting things in manually.

I also installed the Smart Connections plugin, which generates semantic embeddings of my vault. There are MCP servers that can expose those embeddings to Claude for meaning-based search (finding notes by concept rather than keyword). That's a potential next step, but I'm living with the basic setup first before adding more complexity.

What I've learned so far

Still early days. I'll update this section as workflows that actually stick become clear.

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