Working in Obsidian is a pleasure most of the time, but with such a customisable application things are bound to get out of hand at times.

When this happens, you need a way to reset and get back to work. I do this by simplifying and clearing out my vault, and I’m going to explain my methods in this article.

Simplifying my vault is focused on subtraction rather than addition, doubling down on making sure that the most important 20% of features work well.

This is how to regularly recenter your vault for better content creation and all-around work.

Let’s get started…

Step 1 — Clarifying inboxes

Many people work with an inbox in their Obsidian system, and without careful attention, these can overflow with ideas and notes that aren’t clarified to any specific point in the vault to allow them to be executed.

I’m no different, and I keep an inbox in my Obsidian vault. Its role is to be there if I have to create any kind of note or file quickly that isn’t part of any one category that I have preset in the QuickAdd or Templater plugins.

This could be a quick list that I don’t want to forget, or something similar, but often they’re useful for a short period of time before they need deleting or clarifying.

So what do you do when you’re finished with the notes

Step 2 — Archiving used files

When creating with your vault, you’ll find that notes that you no longer need to use pile up and become distracting.

When simplifying your vault, you have to remove these to stop this from happening.

Ideally, this removal is non-destructive, so that you can access the files at a later date should you decide to come back to it.

This is what the archive is for. I use the P.A.R.A. method of organisation in my vault, so I have an archive for notes built-in to my vault. Whenever I finish using a note and don’t see it being particularly useful in the future, I move it to the archive. I’ve installed a plugin called Auto Note Mover to do this automatically when I change the metadata of a note.

When you don’t use plugins you have to remove them…

Step 3 — Removing plugins

Plugins are the secret to unlocking the extensive power of Obsidian.

But they’re also a double-edged sword. You can distract yourself unnecessarily by tweaking and messing around with plugins that aren’t actually helping you to create work.

Check your list of community plugins, and do one of three things with each:

  • Leave it be because the plugin serves an active purpose in your vault
  • Deactivate the plugin if it doesn’t serve a purpose currently but will in the future (academic writing plugins for me — they’ll be necessary again once university starts back up in September)
  • Uninstall the plugin if you’ve extracted all the value that you require from it, perhaps you were doing a one-time cleanup of the metadata of your notes and no longer require the plugins involved. Perhaps it’s another reason. The plugin should be removed from action regardless because it no longer serves a purpose.

These are my steps for simplifying your Obsidian vault. This should be done on a regular basis, even if you don’t feel yourself becoming overwhelmed, because the simpler you keep things, the more you’re going to be able to focus on creating rather than maintaining the system.

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