Workspaces is a core plugin in Obsidian. I don’t give core plugins much attention, especially when there are options such as Dataview and QuickAdd available.
However, Neglecting the Workspaces core plugin was a mistake. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using this plugin to speed up my workflow and in this piece, I’m going to tell you how.
Many of my readers know that I use Obsidian for both writing online and also doing university work. One day, looking through my plugin list whilst re-centring my vault, I noticed the Workspaces plugin staring back at me, unused.
Because I was juggling online business and university revision then, I noticed a potential use for the workspaces plugin. I knew what it did and just needed some time to experiment with the idea.
I found some time to experiment, and to this day I still use the workspaces plugin — here’s how…
Have you ever ended up with several panes open in Obsidian, with tabs and other views in the sidebar too? And then you need to switch context to do some other work without losing the view that you’ve carefully organised over hours of work?
This is where the workspaces plugin comes in. You can save these workspaces and access them again later. Beyond this, you can go about doing all the other work that you need to do.
The way I’ve used this has come in handy when I’m revising for university. I like to have three panes for this — one for the lecture notes, one for lecture slides and one for the conversation that I’m inevitably having with AI to understand certain topics in more detail.
This workspace isn’t something that I want to have to set up every time I want to work on university topics, so I use the Workspaces core plugin.
Now, I have two workspace configurations within the plugin. One is for university and the other personal — I have a hotkey that allows me to switch between the two seamlessly.
So what’s the benefit of creating multiple workspaces like this?
I like to think of templates as a good example. Almost everyone’s aware of using templates for notes, creating a consistent environment within each page that you’re writing. This allows you to save time by not having to repeat certain functions.
You can consider workspaces as templates not for your notes but for your working environment. Time is saved because you improve consistency and reduce the energy required to switch between different work instances.
Remember though, try to keep things simple. If you don’t have many different contexts that you require for different work in your vault, it’s probably not worth you using the plugin. If, however, you juggle different views and layouts for different roles that you take notes for, this plugin might be exactly what you need to save a little bit of energy in context switching.
If you want to hear more about how I use this plugin, clap for the article and I’ll think of making a more in-depth guide. Thanks for reading!