How to set goals in Obsidian // Templates, Periodic Notes

Summary

The speaker discusses their system for tracking New Year's resolutions using Obsidian, inspired by Marcus Olsson's method for OKRs. The system is organized into five levels: Core Principles, Yearly OKRs, Monthly Initiatives, Weekly Goals, and Daily Tasks. Each level is meticulously detailed, with the speaker emphasizing the importance of aligning all goals with their core principles. They utilize various Obsidian plugins for automation and organization, ensuring that their objectives remain manageable and consistently in focus. The speaker's approach is tailored to their personal needs and past experiences, aiming to improve the chances of successfully keeping resolutions.

Takeaways

• 🎯 Only 25% of people successfully keep their New Year's resolutions, often due to a lack of tracking system.
• 📚 The speaker uses Obsidian to track their goals, inspired by Marcus Olsson's blog post on tracking OKRs.
• 📈 The system is organized into five levels: Core Principles, Yearly OKRs, Monthly Initiatives, Weekly Goals, and Daily Tasks.
• 📝 Core Principles are guiding principles in life, constantly evolving and essential to personal identity.
• 📅 Yearly OKRs are tracked on a dedicated page in Obsidian, with a template for consistency and a limit of five objectives.
• 🔍 Key Results in OKRs should be clear and measurable, unlike vague resolutions like 'fluent in a language'.
• 📆 Monthly Initiatives are planned using the 'Periodic Notes' plugin, focusing on a few key actions to achieve OKRs.
• 📈 Weekly Goals are reviewed and planned using the 'Calendar' plugin, ensuring alignment with monthly initiatives.
• 📋 Daily Tasks are managed with the 'Daily Note' core plugin in Obsidian, keeping goals visible and actionable daily.
• 🔄 The system is automated and not overly complex, simplifying the process of tracking and achieving goals.
• 🔗 Everything is linked back to Core Principles, ensuring that all actions align with personal values and long-term objectives.

Q & A

What is the success rate of keeping New Year's resolutions?

The success rate of keeping New Year's resolutions is 25%, meaning one in four people manage to keep them.

Why did the speaker fail to keep their resolutions in the past?

The speaker failed to keep their resolutions because they didn't set up a system to track them.

What is Obsidian and how does the speaker use it?

Obsidian is a note-taking and organization tool. The speaker uses it to track their goals and resolutions for 2022 in a structured manner.

What inspired the speaker to create their system in Obsidian?

The speaker was inspired by a blog post written by Marcus Olsson, a colleague at Grafana, about tracking OKRs in Obsidian.

How many levels does the speaker's system have?

The speaker's system has five different levels: Core Principles, Yearly OKRs, Monthly Initiatives, Weekly Goals, and Daily Tasks.

What are the Core Principles in the speaker's system?

The Core Principles include Learning in public, Improvement, Essentialism, Honesty, Open-mindedness, Hard work, Creativity, and Kindness.

How does the speaker ensure their yearly OKRs are manageable?

The speaker ensures their yearly OKRs are manageable by limiting them to five objectives, as having more than five can lead to forgetting what was intended to be done.

What is the difference between an OKR and a resolution according to the speaker?

An OKR has a clear way to decide whether or not it has been met, unlike a resolution which may be vague and subjective.

How does the speaker use the 'Quick Add' plugin in Obsidian?

The 'Quick Add' plugin allows the speaker to easily add an objective to their yearly OKRs page by using a hotkey and selecting from a list of templates.

What is the purpose of the 'Periodic Notes' plugin in the speaker's system?

The 'Periodic Notes' plugin helps the speaker manage their monthly, weekly, and daily note templates, automating the creation of new notes in specified folders and formats.

How does the speaker ensure their daily tasks align with their goals and principles?

The speaker uses the 'Daily Note' core plugin in Obsidian to create a note for every day, which includes embedded goals from their weekly review and a log for daily work, ensuring alignment with their objectives and principles.

Outlines

00:00

📅 New Year's Resolutions and Tracking System

The speaker discusses the low success rate of New Year's resolutions and introduces a system to track goals using Obsidian. Inspired by Marcus Olsson's blog post on tracking OKRs, the speaker's system consists of five levels: Core Principles, Yearly OKRs, Monthly Initiatives, Weekly Goals, and Daily Tasks. Core Principles are guiding life principles that inform decision-making. Yearly OKRs are tracked in a dedicated Obsidian page, with a template for consistency. The speaker emphasizes the importance of setting clear, measurable goals and aligning them with personal values.

05:01

🎯 Defining and Tracking OKRs

The speaker explains the concept of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and how they differ from resolutions by providing a clear way to measure success. The example given is learning Portuguese, with specific key results like passing the DELE C1 exam. The speaker also relates these goals to core principles, such as learning in public and improvement. Monthly initiatives are smaller, actionable steps towards the yearly OKRs, and the speaker uses a plugin called 'Periodic Notes' to manage these templates. The speaker also discusses the importance of having a clear, measurable goal and aligning it with personal values.

10:02

📈 Monthly and Weekly Planning

The speaker outlines the third level of their system, which involves monthly initiatives. They use a plugin called 'Periodic Notes' to create monthly notes and decide which OKRs to focus on for the month. Weekly goals are reviewed at the beginning or end of each week using the 'Calendar' plugin in Obsidian. The speaker emphasizes the importance of reflecting on past weeks and setting three goals for the upcoming week, ensuring they align with monthly initiatives, yearly OKRs, and core principles.

📝 Daily Task Management

The speaker discusses the final level of their system, which is daily task management. They use the 'Daily Note' core plugin in Obsidian to create a note for each day, which includes a template with sections for health, tasks, and a log. The speaker emphasizes the importance of having goals in front of them daily to avoid forgetting them, which has been a problem with past New Year's resolutions. The system is designed to be automated, not overly complex, and to keep core principles at the forefront of all actions.

Keywords

💡New Year's resolutions

New Year's resolutions are commitments or promises individuals make to themselves at the start of a new year, often aimed at self-improvement. In the video, the speaker mentions that only 25% of people actually keep their resolutions, highlighting the challenge of maintaining these goals throughout the year.

💡Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking and organization tool that the speaker uses to track their goals and progress. It is mentioned as a platform that allows for the creation of a structured system to manage personal objectives, which is central to the video's theme of goal tracking and achievement.

💡OKRs

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework that helps individuals and organizations set and track measurable goals. In the context of the video, the speaker uses OKRs to define clear, achievable objectives for the year, which are broken down into smaller, manageable tasks.

💡Core Principles

Core principles are the fundamental beliefs or values that guide an individual's decisions and actions. The speaker emphasizes the importance of having core principles to align all goals and tasks, ensuring that they reflect personal values and priorities.

💡Yearly OKRs

Yearly OKRs represent the specific objectives and key results set for an entire year. The speaker mentions having five yearly OKRs, which are a manageable number to focus on and remember, and these OKRs are derived from the broader core principles.

💡Monthly Initiatives

Monthly initiatives are smaller, actionable steps taken to work towards the yearly OKRs. The speaker chooses to focus on three monthly initiatives at a time, breaking down the larger yearly goals into more immediate and achievable tasks.

💡Weekly Goals

Weekly goals are the specific tasks and objectives that the speaker aims to accomplish each week. These goals are reviewed and set at the beginning or end of each week, helping to maintain focus and progress on the monthly initiatives and yearly OKRs.

💡Daily Tasks

Daily tasks are the immediate actions that the speaker plans to take each day to stay on track with their weekly goals and overall objectives. By having a daily note with embedded goals, the speaker ensures that the long-term objectives are always in mind.

💡Templates

Templates in Obsidian are pre-designed formats that the speaker uses to streamline the process of creating new notes for OKRs, initiatives, and tasks. This automation helps to reduce the cognitive load and ensures consistency in the note-taking process.

💡Plugin

Plugins are additional software components that extend the functionality of a program like Obsidian. The speaker uses various plugins, such as 'Quick Add' and 'Periodic Notes,' to automate and simplify the process of tracking goals and tasks, making the system more user-friendly and efficient.

💡Reflection

Reflection is the process of thinking deeply about past experiences, actions, and decisions to learn from them and improve future performance. In the video, the speaker engages in weekly reflection to assess progress, identify areas for improvement, and set new goals, which is crucial for personal growth and goal achievement.

Highlights

Only 25% of people successfully keep their New Year's resolutions.

The speaker didn't keep resolutions due to a lack of tracking system.

Obsidian is used to set up a system for tracking goals and resolutions.

Marcus Olsson's blog post on tracking OKRs in Obsidian was an inspiration.

The system has five levels: Core Principles, Yearly OKRs, Monthly Initiatives, Weekly Goals, and Daily Tasks.

Core Principles are guiding principles in life, constantly evolving.

Each yearly OKR is tracked on a separate page in Obsidian.

The speaker uses a template for consistency in tracking yearly OKRs.

The Quick Add plugin is used to add objectives to the yearly OKRs page.

OKRs are distinguished from resolutions by having clear, measurable outcomes.

Monthly initiatives are smaller chunks of work towards yearly objectives.

The Periodic Notes plugin manages monthly, weekly, and daily note templates.

Weekly goals are reviewed at the beginning or end of each week.

The Calendar plugin is used for weekly reviews and has a weekly view option.

Daily tasks are managed using the Daily Note core plugin in Obsidian.

The system is automated, not overly complex, and keeps core principles in mind.

The system does not cover content creation tasks, which are addressed in a separate video.

Transcripts

- Your chances of actually keeping

all of your New Year's resolutions is 25%.

That's one in four people.

Now, there are many reasons for this failure,

but one reason that I've personally not kept my resolutions

is that I didn't set up a system to track them.

Here's how I'm doing just that in Obsidian

for my goals in 2022.

A colleague of mine at Grafana, Marcus Olsson,

wrote an excellent blog post

about how he tracks OKRs in Obsidian

and that was the inspiration for this video.

So check out the link in the description below

to also read his blog post.

My system has been tweaked slightly from his system

just to make it fit into my needs a little bit better.

My system has five different levels

depending on the broadness of the perspective of my life

that each level encompasses.

So the first level is Core Principles,

and then we've got Yearly OKRs,

Monthly Initiatives,

Weekly Goals,

and finally, Daily Tasks.

I have a separate page in Obsidian for my core principles,

and this is always changing.

They're being renamed and merged and added to,

but the point is that

these are guiding principles in my life.

So when faced with a decision

whether to do one thing or another,

I review these core principles

to remind myself what it is that I, as a person

have identified to be of crucial importance.

They are essential to who I am.

You can see here that I've got "Learning in public",

"Improvement", "Essentialism",

"Honesty", "Open-mindedness",

"Hard work", "Creativity"

and "Kindness".

And for each one,

I've also added a little description of what it is,

what it looks like when I'm practicing this principle

and what it looks like when I'm not practicing it.

This is the foundation for everything that I do in my life.

Every yearly OKR or initiative or task

or goal has to be related to something on this page,

because if it's not,

then maybe I shouldn't be doing it.

The second level is Yearly OKRs.

I have a page in Obsidian

that tracks five different objectives

that I've decided I want to do this year.

Five is a pretty arbitrary number.

You choose the number that's right for you

but I just have found that when I have more than five,

I end up forgetting what I said that I would do.

So five is like really manageable for me, at least.

And here's what that looks like.

Just for consistency I've created a template for this

and that's using the "Templates" core plugin.

So I've also got that hot keyed, which is right now,

it's command semi-colon.

So I do that and I can bring up all my templates

and I just type in "Yearly OKRs"

and this is what I fill out every year.

So if you want to have a look at the template,

this is what it actually looks like.

So it always brings in today's date.

Okay. So I have three different categories here,

"Work", "Health" and "Wealth".

I can really change that to whatever,

but it just jogs my memory on what I need to think about.

You may notice that I don't have a personal category.

That's because I kind of put that under work as well.

I don't often make the distinction in my life, in general,

between work and personal,

because I think it's all work and it's all personal.

And so I've done the same thing here.

Work is anything including my career,

but it could also just mean self-improvement for me.

I'm not actually going to be showing you my yearly OKRs,

because that's a little bit private,

but I'm just walking you through a demo

of how I've set it up.

So now once I have my yearly OKRs page,

I use a plugin called "Quick Add",

which is right now also hot keyed to command apostrophe.

And that adds an objective to this page.

I'll say, maybe learn a language.

So this Quick Add plugin,

which is a community plugin does a few things.

First, it adds in something according to the template

that I had,

which was the year and zero zero.

And that's just how I delineate objectives.

In addition to that, it also creates this page.

So if I click on it,

it's already been pre-populated with a different template.

So that's actually the objective,

yearly objective template.

But the Quick Add plug-in was just a really easy way

to do it from there.

Then I would fill in the key results.

So if I want to learn a language,

well, what is that exactly?

Let's say that,

let's change this and I'll say, "Portuguese".

What are the key results for this?

Well, I could say

"Pass DELE C1 exam" for it.

One of the things that distinguishes an OKR

from a resolution

is that there is a clear way to decide

whether or not you've actually met it.

So in this case,

a bad example would be "speak Portuguese fluently",

because what does that mean exactly

and who gets to decide whether you speak fluently or not?

A better key result is passing an exam

or take 30 lessons of Portuguese.

Maybe something that's a little bit more social.

So have a 10-minute conversation in Portuguese

without resorting to English,

to another language.

Clear goals that I know I can meet.

What are the values that are related?

Well, I can bring up my core principles

and go through them.

Maybe learning in public,

because maybe I want to blog about my struggles

in Portuguese.

Copy that.

Definitely improvement as well,

because that's still self-improvement.

And I actually think that every language

helps with open-mindedness

because you're learning somebody else's culture,

along with a language.

I'm also thinking about specific things

that I could do on a monthly level to make it happen.

Find a teacher on Italki for Portuguese.

That's one initiative

that'll probably take more than an action

because I'd have to find a few teachers

and decide on which one I want to continue with.

Some other initiatives might be,

look for Portuguese YouTubers,

find a good Portuguese TV show on Netflix,

read "The Little Prince" in Portuguese.

So this just gives me a list of ideas of smaller chunks

that I could do to work towards this objective.

Now, the third level is monthly initiatives,

which is exactly what I was trying to generate ideas for.

And many people do,

I think Marcus Olsson does a quarterly view of it,

but I find that three months is, I don't know,

it's just too much time for me to really grasp

and I work better within smaller times.

So I've chosen to do monthly initiatives

rather than quarterly ones.

I use a plugin called "Periodic Notes"

that manages all my monthly, weekly

and daily note templates.

And here I just did the command pane

and opened up a monthly note,

and it automatically creates a new note in the folder

that I've specified

and in the format that I've specified

with this particular template.

And from here,

I'm going to look at the different OKRs

that I already identified

and decide on which of these OKRs

I'm going to work on for this month.

So maybe I'll choose this Portuguese one

and maybe I'll decide that this is one of the objectives

that I'm working on for the month.

I usually only like to do three monthly initiatives

because they're only four weeks.

And again, just trying to simplify a little bit here.

The fourth level is weekly goals.

At the beginning or end of every week,

I have a weekly review of everything

that I want to get done that week.

And also everything that happened in the week before.

To do that, I use the "Calendar" plugin,

which already has an option to enable these weekly views.

And then when I click on it,

it's pre-populated with the template that I already use.

So it has the weekly review again in the same format

and in the right folder, with the right dates.

And the first thing I've got is an end-of-week checklist.

These are all the small tasks

that I really should do at the end of every week,

so that I start each week fresh.

So these are the things like getting to inbox zero

on my various mailboxes,

opening physical mail and restarting my computer

and that sort of thing,

going through my task management system,

doing financial reconciliation for different countries

and my companies.

And then I also have the monthly initiatives

and this is embedded, an embedded block.

It's actually taking the monthly initiatives.

So if I go and scroll up here a bit,

this takes and embeds the content from this note.

So this is what I was writing earlier,

and it takes it in,

it pulls it into the weekly review,

so that while I'm doing things,

I remember, oh yes, this is what I said

I wanted to get done this month.

And then I go over what happened last week.

What were my goals last weekend?

Did I finish them?

What am I changing so that I can do them this month?

So this is more of reflections

and it forces me to think about what I could do better

from the previous week.

And then I write down three goals

that I want to do this week.

These questions help me keep my focus

on the monthly initiatives, the yearly OKRs

and the core principles behind them.

So just to see this through,

maybe based on the fact that my monthly initiative

would be to find a teacher,

maybe what I want to get done this week

is book a lesson with three teachers on Italki.

And then we'll say there are two more

that I'd like to get done.

The fifth and last level is the daily tasks

because it doesn't matter what objectives I've set,

if I don't have it in front of me every day,

then I'm probably going to forget about it,

which is what has happened

with my previous New Year's resolutions.

So for that,

I enable the "Daily Note" core plugin in Obsidian,

which creates a note for every day.

And it creates it according to a template that I specify.

This is the daily template.

So it's automatically taking the local date,

the local language.

So let's look at today's daily note.

Here's what it looks like with all the fields set.

I've got the Dutch language chosen.

So that's why the data's displaying in Dutch.

And if I flip to preview mode,

we'll see that I'm also embedding the three goals

that I have in my weekly review note.

So I've got this health section as well,

'cause I'm trying to be a little bit more conscious

of my health.

And then I have a section for frogs

with a link to my tasks list

of the three things that I want to get done today.

Then there's a log which I, during the day,

will fill out with whatever I'm working on

or this is like my scratch pad for the day.

And then I end with a review.

I am definitely not saying

that everybody should do it like this.

This is just what I'm doing

because I know myself and I know my previous failures

and I think the system addresses issues

that I've had in the past.

Firstly, it's automated.

So I don't have to think about the format,

that my notes have to be named in

or the method that I already agreed on.

It just is populated for me using the templates

and the periodic notes plugins.

Secondly, it's not overly complex

because after the initial setup,

things just happen for me.

And five OKRs per year,

it's not a lot to keep track of.

And thirdly,

they keep my core principles front of mind at all times.

Everything is linked.

This is kind of like in testing,

how you always want to link back

to a non-functional requirement or something like that.

It is making sure that everything that you're doing

still revolves around things that you hold dear.

Now you may have noticed the one thing

the system doesn't cover is content

and the tasks I need to do to create stuff.

That's because I already kind of made a video on that

and that's here.

So check that out for more details.

Thanks for watching and happy 2022.