I stopped trying to build the perfect Obsidian vault and started using it for one thing instead

When I first opened Obsidian, I didn’t write a single useful note for days. I was too busy tweaking the theme, installing plugins I’d seen on YouTube, drawing folder hierarchies on paper, and pretending that any of it was actual work. I’d watch a tutorial, redo my structure, then watch another one and redo it again. The vault looked impressive on the surface, but most of the notes inside were either half-finished templates or filler I’d written just to test a plugin. I was building a system, not using one.

The shift came when I realized I’d been doing the opposite of what the app was for. Obsidian is a notebook, not a project. So I deleted my elaborate folder tree, removed nearly every plugin, and started writing ugly notes that solved real problems. No graph view goals, no aesthetics, just text. And slowly, things I wish I knew before creating my Obsidian vault became less about setup tricks and more about one habit I’d been avoiding: actually using it.

Keeping my Obsidian vault simple

Less structure, more writing

I started by going back to why I picked Obsidian in the first place. I wanted a no-nonsense text editor that supported Markdown and saved my files locally on disk. That was it. Not a second brain, not a knowledge graph, just a place to write where the files belonged to me.

So I made a single folder, called it Notes, and started filling it with research and article drafts. I didn’t worry about links between notes. I didn’t bother with tags. I didn’t think about how the graph view would look six months later. I just wrote.

The plugin list went from around twenty community plugins down to almost zero. The folder structure shrank to a handful of folders I actually opened daily. What was left was the writing surface, and that’s all I needed it to be most days. Write, save, close, repeat.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to accept that only the content of my notes matters. A pretty vault is fine, but it doesn’t help if I’m spending more time managing the system than getting any real work out of it.

Not falling into the plugin trap, again!

Install only what you actually need

Plugins are a core part of what makes Obsidian feel powerful, and that’s exactly why they’re easy to overdo. Every “10 essential Obsidian plugins” list I read the first time around convinced me I needed all of them, and I installed them without ever asking whether I had the problem they were meant to solve.

The second time, I flipped the rule. I only install a plugin when I run into a specific limitation that’s slowing me down. If the core app can already handle it, I leave it alone. That single change kept my vault lean and my settings page short enough to actually navigate.

The other reason I’m careful about plugins is portability. Obsidian’s biggest advantage is that my notes are plain Markdown files I can open anywhere, even if I leave Obsidian tomorrow. Heavy plugin dependence chips away at that benefit, because some plugins introduce custom syntax that won’t render outside Obsidian.

I still use a small set of plugins I’d genuinely miss, including a few from the best Obsidian plugins I keep coming back to, but each one solves a problem I actually had. Anything else stays uninstalled.

Backlinks came naturally

Linking notes only when it helps

Backlinks are the feature most Obsidian fans will tell you is the whole point of the app, and I get the appeal. The idea of typing double brackets around a phrase and creating a connection to another note, even one that doesn’t exist yet, is genuinely useful when your vault grows. But I didn’t force it from day one.

For the first few weeks, I barely used backlinks. I wasn’t going to add a link just to fill the graph view or tick a box from someone else’s tutorial. Forced links don’t tell you anything about how your ideas connect. They just clutter the panel.

The links started showing up on their own once I had enough notes to actually reference each other. A research note pointed back to an article I was drafting. A note on a tool referenced an older note where I’d first tried it. At that point, the connections meant something because I needed them, not because I was performing organization.

If you want a way to surface those connections without manually adding every link, there are tools that can auto-link related notes in Obsidian once you have enough content for the suggestions to make sense.

You won’t get it right the first time

Stop chasing the perfect setup

Perfect is the enemy of good, and aiming for a perfect Obsidian setup before writing any notes was the single biggest mistake I made. A setup designed without understanding your own workflow will break the moment your work changes, and rebuilding it every few weeks creates more friction than it removes.

You won’t get it right the first time, and you don’t have to. The setup I use today looks nothing like the one I started with, and that’s fine. It’s the result of small adjustments over many months, not a grand design I committed to upfront.

If I were starting again, I’d skip the tutorial rabbit hole entirely. The official Obsidian documentation covers everything you actually need to start writing, and it’s more accurate than half the YouTube videos pitching their creator’s setup as the only correct one. Read the docs, open a blank note, and let the system grow as your needs grow.

That last part is what most “perfect setup” videos miss. The right system isn’t one you copy. It’s one you build slowly, by paying attention to what you keep needing and what you keep ignoring.

OS

Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS

Developer

Dynalist Inc.

Obsidian is a local-first, Markdown-based note-taking application that stores your notes as plain text files and lets you build interlinked “vaults” of knowledge. It supports plug-ins, graph visualisations, and full control of your data rather than locking you into a proprietary format.

Keeping my Obsidian setup original

I prefer to keep my Obsidian setup as original as possible instead of copying someone else’s. We all have different requirements and different ways of organizing notes, and the setup I use only works because it grew out of how I actually write. I restarted with zero plugins and zero customization, and a single rule: open a note, add a title, write the article or research, close it. Tags, backlinks, and my first plugins came later, mostly because I needed to import old notes from Evernote and OneNote and clean them up.

It’s been almost a year of using Obsidian as my daily driver, and I don’t claim to know everything about it. But I’m comfortable enough that it’s quietly become irreplaceable, which is more than I can say for any of the note-taking apps I kept switching between before this one.