Obsidian October O_O 2024 Vault Self-critique Checklist

100% yoinked from here

Reminder

Although we proposed some ways below to maintain and improvement your vault, likely the user of your vault is you and only you. This is different from plugins and themes where we can make relatively more objective suggestions.

So feel free to remove anything from the checklist that doesn’t make sense to you and add your own items.

Vault Maintenance

• How well is your vault doing what it’s supposed to do? (What is the purpose of your vault/notes? What measures might you use to judge how well it’s working?) ¹

  Have kinda fallen out of the loop of reviewing/using it much really. So measures for judge would mostly be spending more time on it

• How quickly can you find notes you used one week ago?

  Pretty quick tbh. Omnisearch is good, most stuff is in “recents”, but comfy that between search and linking most stuff will be findable.

• If your cat intentionally deleted all of your files, how recent is your backup?

  Decent. Between version history via obs sync, iCloud backups of my phone/ipad, and locally got Time Machine running on the mac, so at most losing an hour of work, but with sync doing its’ thing, got more granular versioning

• Do you need to document anything about your workflows? It can be surprisingly helpful to write out how you work and create checklists for important but uncommon tasks.

  Probably not at the moment, but could be good to do as I’m using it more.

Vault Maintenance Checklist

• Delete unused attachments ✅ 2025-01-07
• Delete or refactor notes that are not linked or tagged or in a folder (“orphan” notes)
• Delete unused tags ✅ 2025-01-07
• Delete empty folders ✅ 2025-01-07
• Process items in inbox notes/folders/tags ✅ 2025-01-07
• Make templates for frequently-used snippets or note types
• Remove unused plugins ✅ 2025-01-07
• Remove unused themes ✅ 2025-01-07
• Remove unused snippets ✅ 2025-01-07
• Add properties missing from notes
• Convert tags to properties where appropriate
• Fix up broken links
• Browse through the plugin gallery for new ideas

Vault Rediscovery Ideas

• Open both Backlinks and Outgoing Links to see if there are any unlinked mentions that make sense
• Sort the files in Files Explorer by “Modified time (old to new)”, take a look at the top files and see how they can be made better.
• Enable the Random Note core plugin and randomly visit some notes for surprises.

Footnotes

1. Remember that “joy” is a valid measure! ↩