The 3 Obsidian Plugins I Recommend (and How to Install Them)

TL;DR: I’m by no means an advanced Obsidian user, but even at surface level adoption, I have found tremendous value from my Obsidian setup, and three plugins do most of the work: Periodic Notes, Templater and Dataview. Obsidian works well right out of the box, and plugins make it work even better for you. Here’s what each of mine does for me, why I recommend it to other people, and how to install them.

Once a quarter, my husband Daniel and I sit down for our life check-in. We look back on the last three months- we review our household finances, reflect on the last quarter, review what we decided, identify what we want to change or improve going forward. My Obsidian Vault is foundational to helping us look backwards. Time goes by so fast now that I can’t rely on memory for this. Without notes, the quarter blurs into “busy.”

We start the meeting by reading the monthly summaries I build from my daily notes. I used to write these manually, but AI has made our check-ins more efficient because we’re no longer relying on memory. Obsidian is the key to making this process work, but the plugins I’ve installed are what make it easy to keep up. They’re the machinery behind those summaries.

Obsidian works well right out of the box. Without any plugins, it already lets me link notes together, search everything, and see how it all connects in graph view. Plugins are how you shape it to fit the way you work, and these are the three I’d point a friend to.

Periodic Notes: the one I actually use every day

Periodic Notes creates my daily note for me. I open it, and today’s note template gets dropped in my Daily Notes folder. No hunting for the right folder, no copying yesterday’s note and renaming it. That sounds tiny, but a habit lives or dies on how much friction the first step has.

I try to log my daily life in these notes so AI knows what’s actually happening with me, my family, my work. The template gives me a few prompts to fill in: three notes from today, then sections for work, projects, family and household, and a capture area for random thoughts. I don’t write essays. Some days it’s just a few lines. It’s like a personal diary, but with less emotional ranting. (Anything that requires a venting session actually goes into my Claude Therapy project, which is a post for another day.)

The payoff comes later. AI turns the daily notes into a monthly summary, and those summaries are what Daniel and I read at our quarterly check-in. I find that Claude does a good job of understanding what I’d like to see in the summary, but you can always tweak these with a skill if there’s specific things you’d like to see in your own monthly summaries. Three months of days becomes very digestible quarterly highlights we can read in one sitting.

Note: I can’t stress enough how AI is supposed to make life easier – not harder! – thus, any time you find yourself feeling frustrated at manual processes, I encourage you to consider how you can offshore tasks to AI, or just ask your AI to help you figure it out!

Why I recommend it: Periodic Notes removes the first bit of friction, which is starting. If you want a record of your life, whether it’s for yourself, for your family, or for AI to use as context, this plugin makes the daily habit nearly automatic. It’s the one I’d tell anyone to install, even if they never touch the others.

How to install it:

1. In Obsidian, open Settings, then Community plugins, and choose Turn on community plugins. Obsidian’s help page on community plugins explains what this step means.
2. Click Browse, search for Periodic Notes, then click Install and Enable. Here’s the Periodic Notes plugin page if you want to read about it first.
3. Create a note to use as your template, with the prompts you want each day. If you’re not sure what to include, ask your AI to draft one for you.
4. Go to Settings, then Periodic Notes. Turn on daily notes, then point it to your template note and to the folder where your daily notes should live.
5. Open the command palette and search for today’s daily note. Your first note will be created from your template.

Templater: it fills in my templates for me

Templater fills in the boring parts of my templates automatically. I have 22 templates in my vault, for things like my daily note, a person, a decision, a vendor, a book, etc. My rule is that anything I create repeatedly gets its own template, so every note of that kind contains the same information in my vault. I’m an operations girl at heart, so I love me my organized and structured data. Even though AI is touted as being able to make sense of your unstructured data, why not make it easier for AI anyway and be more efficient with your token usage?

Templater helps guide me (well, mostly my AI who updates my notes) on what information I need for each note. In my daily note, it also stamps today’s date and the day of the week, and it automatically builds two links, one to yesterday’s note and one to tomorrow’s, so I can step through my life one day at a time. This also helps me build out my Obsidian graph view.

The value: every note starts with the same structure and no manual setup, which makes my vault easier for AI to read and cheaper on tokens. Obsidian’s built-in templates can insert a date, but can’t shift it by a day, so the yesterday and tomorrow links are what Templater adds for me.

Why I recommend it: if you keep dated notes, those yesterday and tomorrow links make the habit feel like turning pages instead of managing files. It’s worth installing for dated templates.

How to install:

1. Install it the same way as Periodic Notes: Settings, Community plugins, Browse, search for Templater, then Install and Enable. Here’s the Templater plugin page.
2. Go to Settings, then Templater, and set the Template folder location to the folder where your templates live.
3. Turn on Trigger Templater on new file creation, so a new note built from a template fills itself in.
4. Add Templater’s fields to a template. For example, <% tp.file.title %> inserts the note’s title, and <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %> inserts today’s date. Add , -1 after the date format for yesterday or , 1 for tomorrow.
5. Not sure what to put where? The Templater documentation lists everything it can do, or ask your AI to write the fields for you.

Dataview: my notes answer questions for me

Dataview turns my notes into a database I can ask questions of. Every note in my vault carries a few labels, like a tag that says it’s a trip or a credit card. Dataview can then ask, “show me every note tagged trip,” and build a table from the answer. When I add a new trip note, it shows up in the table by itself. I never edit the table.

For example, I write one note for each trip, and I have more than 20 of them. My travel dashboard lists all of them. The page for each family I travel with lists only the trips we took together. Both are Dataview reading the same trip notes, so I write the details once and they show up everywhere, with no copying and nothing going stale. My credit cards work the same way. Dataview doesn’t store anything itself. It reads my notes and displays them where I want them.

Why I recommend it: once you have a handful of notes with the same kind of label, Dataview saves you from building and updating lists by hand.

How to install:

1. Install it the same way: Settings, Community plugins, Browse, search for Dataview, then Install and Enable. Here’s the Dataview plugin page.
2. Give your notes a shared label, such as a tag like #trip on every trip note.
3. In a dashboard note, add a Dataview block. This one lists every note tagged #trip, newest first (it assumes your trip notes have a start_date field):

TABLE start_date
FROM #trip
SORT start_date DESC

4. Want something different? The Dataview documentation covers the query language, or describe the table you want to your AI and ask it to write the query.

Do you need all these plugins?

No, of course not. It’s totally up to you how you want to set up your Obsidian. If you wanted to try these, I would recommend Periodic Notes first. If you only install one plugin, make it this one. Pick a template with three or four prompts, let the plugin create a note each day, and write a few lines. Don’t aim for a perfect journal. Aim for a note that exists.

Add Templater second, once you want your daily note to stamp the date and link to yesterday and tomorrow. Add Dataview third, and only after you have a pile of notes with consistent labels, because it has nothing to ask until they exist.

You can ignore everything else while you’re starting out. You don’t need to master Obsidian for these three to pay off. When you’re ready for more, there are plenty of other plugins to explore, and I’ve listed some popular ones at the end.

If you want a shortcut, ask your AI of choice to write you a daily note template with a few prompts. Then try it for a week and see what you actually fill in. That’s how mine got to where it is.

Where to go from here

Obsidian is useful on day one, and plugins are how you make it fit you. Mine are only a starting point. The community has built thousands, and browsing them is half the fun. These are some of the most popular, by all-time downloads on Obsidian Stats at the time of writing:

• Excalidraw for sketching and diagramming next to your notes
• Tasks for tracking to-dos with due dates across your whole vault
• Advanced Tables for easier editing of tables
• Calendar for a sidebar calendar to move through your daily notes
• Kanban for project boards
• Git for version history and backup
• Copilot for chatting with your notes using AI

My advice is to add one at a time, give it a week, and keep it only if it earns its place. If you find a favorite I didn’t mention, I’d love to hear about it.

Frequently asked questions