I use Obsidian the way most people do. All my notes, random ideas, half-drafts, and research snippets get stored somewhere in my vault. And while I love the flexibility of a Markdown-based note-taking system and the local vault, I realized I wasn’t actually opening Obsidian that often unless I wanted to store some text. My notes were technically all there, but the app itself had become more of an archive than something I actively use every day.

For a tool that gives you so much to work with, this felt like a bit of a waste - Obsidian has far more potential beyond acting as a storage unit. I just needed a more stable system that could support my notes long-term and actually make me want to open the app. Here’s what I ended up doing to get more use out of Obsidian, and it didn't involve much beyond taking advantage of Obsidian’s formatting options, linking, and folder hierarchies…

The note graveyard

When your vault becomes storage

At some point, Obsidian turned into what I can only describe as a note graveyard. I have hundreds of notes just sitting there because I didn’t want to delete them, even though I wasn’t actively using them either. So I was in a situation where my vault kept growing, but I wasn’t really doing anything with it except hunting down the occasional random note. And the structure of my vault reflected this too - there was no structure, just a massive list of scattered notes.

The thing is, I don’t want to get rid of my note stack or start from scratch because there are still some useful gems in there, which is why I kept them for so long. But keeping them in the state that they were in wasn’t going to motivate me to use them. So it was just a matter of creating a system that’s easier to navigate.

Creating a dashboard in Obsidian

A central hub with easy access to everything I need

Now, you can get super creative and build an aesthetic dashboard with a bunch of plugins and snippets, but I only used two plugins, one CSS snippet, and the formatting options Obsidian already gives me. This ensures a minimalistic and easy-to-navigate space where I’m not bombarded with visuals and buttons, and don’t have to worry about constantly maintaining the structure.

Before creating my dashboard, I did the painstakingly necessary step of organizing my notes into folders and subfolders first - all of this happens in the left panel. This is so I can easily access them by topic or sub-topic, and drag them onto my dashboard. Then, I created a blank page, which is where the dashboard lives, and I recommend naming it “home”, “dashboard”, or something similar.

Just so my dashboard doesn’t look completely dead, I used the Banners plugin to add an image with a pop of color at the top. You can customize this however you want; there will almost certainly be a community plugin for the style you have in mind. Then it was time to start populating my dashboard…

Obsidian lets you collapse the Markdown headers, and this mechanism is basically the backbone of my dashboard organization. I created a main header for all the most relevant topics that I have notes for in Obsidian, with smaller headers underneath them. All of these headers are foldable, meaning I can hide/show the content on demand. And underneath each header, I simply drag the relevant notes straight from the note panel, which automatically creates a link to that page.

These headers are the foundation for my new dashboard, and it would have worked perfectly fine if I stopped there, but I wanted vertical line dividers too for a bit more structure. You can use snippets for this, which are everywhere in the Obsidian forums and subreddits, and there are plugins that handle some of the heavy lifting for you - I’m using the Horizontal Blocks plugin to create vertical lines by stacking text blocks horizontally.

Why this setup works

And keeps me coming back

Obsidian isn’t as dashboard-focused as other note apps like Notion. This means you usually dive straight into the app with a bunch of open tabs to a bunch of random notes. For a scatterbrain like me, this is like repellent. I needed more structure, which meant building my own dashboard, but also finding a way to keep it simple so I don’t end up spending more time managing it than my actual notes.

Now, Obsidian opens to my dashboard every time since I never close the page in my usual set-it-and-forget-it fashion. And everything I’m currently working on is linked under the relevant header. Moreover, my notes are now actually organized into appropriate folders, which makes it easy to populate my dashboard as I bring new content into Obsidian.

Making Obsidian usable again

Creating a dashboard in Obsidian is such a simple but underrated productivity booster. It doesn’t have to involve a million plugins or super aesthetic visuals; all you need is a structure that makes sense for the way your brain works. This setup now makes me want to keep using Obsidian as the note-taking app it was designed to be, rather than just a note storage vault.