I stopped trying to make Obsidian do everything, and my productivity actually improved

Published Sep 11, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Obsidian is a versatile app. It gets sold as your go-to for taking notes, but also as the tool that can run your entire productivity system. And that's largely true: it handles not only notes, but the whole workflow operation right down to the task board you're meant to check every morning. And it's a hard pitch to argue with, you've got all your stuff in plain files you actually own and can move around between other tools. However, the thing meant to run your whole life can quickly turn into another thing you're forever tidying up. The thing that sorted it out for me wasn't a better template or another plugin. I actually went the complete opposite direction: instead of loading more into the vault, I started taking jobs off it one by one, until there was basically one left. Here's what that looks like for me… Everything I tried to make Obsidian do The tool that was supposed to save me time turned into the thing eating all of it I've had an on-and-off user relationship with Obsidian for years, primarily because I test so many other note-taking tools, so it's simply impractical to only stick to one app. But whenever I did prioritize Obsidian, it was quite time-consuming because I tried to do everything with it. I used it for databases, mind maps and diagrams, notes, knowledge bases, and just general storage. It seemed incredibly productive on the surface until I realized I was spending whole afternoons fiddling with queries and filters and wikilinks. Thing is, that's not exactly unusual when it comes to PKM-style apps. Sinking hours into configuring a vault and then barely writing in it is a properly common trap. The Obsidian subreddit is full of this exact complaint, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you'll find people laying out their elaborate systems. So it's this push and pull between navigating an overwhelming vault and trying to find solutions for it, most of which probably won't end up working for you anyway. I was looking after the vault more than I was ever using it. I narrowed Obsidian's job down to one thing A filing cabinet These days, what I actually do is write somewhere else. It can be anywhere - Notepad, an email draft, a Slack draft, a sticky note, as long as it can hold text. Unless I'm already in a tool that can save it as a plain text file to my vault, I then actually hop that text over to a chatbot or agent. As long as it has filesystem access, I simply ask it to create a note with the text. Because it's generative, it not only makes the note for me, but it adds whatever frontmatter I need, either specified by my prompt or by pointing it at an .md file with organizational conventions. I'll also ask it to scan the vault and add any relevant wikilinks while it's at it, so the note hooks into everything related the second it comes into existence. I don't necessarily like having AI rewrite my notes for me, but in cases where the text is very disorganized or incoherent, I might also ask the AI to clean it up for me. What would have taken me a minute or two to set up in Obsidian now gets handled in seconds by my AI stack. But all these conventions and rules need a place to live, as well as the notes themselves once they're made. That home is the vault. The most passive thing I used Obsidian for ended up becoming its main job - it became a filing cabinet. And a pretty organized one at that. Before I installed Claude Code and Antigravity (my main drivers), my vaults were in chaos, but now they actually look like something I'm not embarrassed to show in my screenshots. So it's a bit of an Ouroboros situation - I'm using the vault to hold the index and conventions for how the vault keeps itself organized. Every note arrives with its frontmatter and its links already set, so it slots into the folder structure properly instead of floating around loose (though I do still have a folder for random notes untouched by AI). I know exactly what is where and what isn't, not by memory, but by summoning it in a session. When I open the Obsidian app now it's to look something up, or just to see what I've got and where it's sitting, or perhaps to make some minor adjustments to the writing or formatting. Writing isn't the primary thing I go in there for anymore, which saves a ton of time. The benefit I didn't plan for The metadata everyone fights to keep clean is the one part I never touch The filing paid off somewhere else I didn't even consider at first: Bases. The Obsidian Bases core plugin is basically a simplified version of Notion's databases, except you don't have to create them from scratch, they already exist. You just need to set up the filters and rules for your preferred query or view. The thing about Bases is that it only looks at frontmatter, system fields, and file metadata, not the note contents, so trying to set up Bases is useless if you didn't add or tweak that data. My AI agents handle this for me using plain language, so I can completely skip the tedious step of setting up properties and filling them in. All I have to do now is create a Base with my preferred filters and rules, and not worry whether it will actually account for every note in my vault. Same deal with the Graph view. It used to take me forever to get that thing looking connected, trailing back through old notes and adding links so the map wasn't just a mess of stranded dots. Now the links go in as the note's written, so the graph more or less builds itself while I'm not looking. My Obsidian setup got better when I stopped adding to it The one thing to keep in mind is that it's the filing I've handed off, not the thinking. If you want your graph to be a genuine map of your own head, as in links you've made because of little nuances you spotted yourself, then this setup won't cover all of it and you'll still have to go in manually. But most of the time, the thinking happens in the chatbox now, my AI stack handles the admin, and Bases handles the querying. Turning Obsidian into a storage unit is probably the most I've gotten out of it in years. And using that filing cabinet to let AI automate the tedious parts actually lets me use my notes instead of panicking about how messy they are. Obsidian OS Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, Android Individual pricing Free normally; $4/month for Obsidian Sync