AI Automation Saved My Obsidian Vault

this is my obsidian Vault and when I think of the word Vault I think of it as a place where you store important information something valuable that you don't want to be taken away and this is why I was struggling with creating my own personal knowledge management system using obsidian because I was not understanding the three steps of real Knowledge Management that's actually useful step one being able to get information into my vault in an efficient and frictionless way step two being able to categorize that information in a frictionless way and step three and this

is the part I was really not doing well on is how to actually get access to that information to solve a problem when I actually needed the solution as in right now that's why I finally figured out how to use Ai and automation to solve all three of these problems and finally make my obsidian Vault actually useful so useful that it helps me to make money let me show you how I did it hey there it is I versus Ai and this is the primordial soup of my second brain in my obsidian Vault this is

graph View and I wanted to scroll in to show you so that we can reference this later on how how this vault is built it is built on notes which are the blue dots it is built on links which are the green dots and it's also built on tags which are the orange dots and what I wanted to achieve with this vault is a complete Knowledge Management solution with the least amount of friction effort and struggle from me to maintain it and for that I turned to AI so all of these links tags and some

of the notes that you see in here many of them were brought into my Vault categorized in My Vault using ai ai automation let's start with this note this is a note which was automatically created using an naen automation which produces a note which is a YouTube video summary from a transcript having key takeaways call outs tables bullet points and all of this including the links down at the bottom are created from this n8n automation where I simply put a YouTube link into a GP which starts the trigger here brings through the transcript the transcript

is then summarized here sent back to the G gbt and then it goes on and creates the front matter which is otherwise known as note properties links which you've just seen creates a markdown note drops it into my Dropbox folder which is then linked to this transcripts folder in my basket where everything comes into my Vault and the key thing I want you to notice here are the properties so properties otherwise known as yaml front matter in earlier versions of obsidian is the way in which Step two of my my personal knowledge management system works

that is organizing and categorizing these notes because without welldone properties I always struggled to get the information out of my Vault and let's be honest I'm just going to be really honest here when I would create a new note I often struggled to think of all of the important properties that I could put here I might put a tag or two I never bothered with aliases and I never wrote descriptions I'd do the title created if I did that much of the time what would happen is that notes would pile up in my basket here

waiting for me to process them and I would get overwhelmed at having to process so many notes thinking of the titles the that the created all these properties I would struggle with that and I would end up just doing nothing and then I'd feel like my knowledge management system was a failure and then I'd start My Vault overing I love properties but to be honest I am just not going to sit here and add in all of these properties type in t title or Channel or author all of this kind of stuff I'm just not

going to do it but AI is really good at being able to categorize information into properties and you've seen one of the ways in which I bring information into my Vault one of the ways is through this nadn automation which creates this note but what if I have written the note or I have an automation which doesn't add properties and I need to do them myself like with this note which is the result of an automation which creates all of the metadata and even a slideshow that I use to create my YouTube videos like this

one and this section of the automation takes the input data from a form where I tell it everything that the video is going to be about and what it's going to contain it goes ahead and defines the target audience the angle of which I can approach the video keyword phrases emotion and power phrases the title suggestions search phrase description refine description it also goes ahead and creates a markdown file which is this file now let's say I want to keep this file and I want to add properties but as I've already said I'm not going

to do them by hand because ain't nobody got time for that so I'm going to head to the top of the note hit the enter key a couple of times to make some space add my cursor at at the top I'm going to go over here hit text generator templates I love this plugin so much that if it did not exist I'd have a hard time using obsidian and it does so much more than just generate text text generator is an open-source AI tool that brings large language models right into your Vault and for those

of you who are thinking wait wait wait hold on I do not want some uh other company open AI or Google Gemini or what ever having access to my Vault you can use local private models that are on your computer they can be used just like any other model with text generator in fact both of the AI tools I'm going to show you in this video allow use for local large language models but what I love about text generator is this template right here and templates are what allow me to remove friction from My Vault

so I created a template which would take the entirety of the note as well as the title and with a click generate the front matter or the note properties for the entire note when it comes in it will always come in with a space at the top and front matter properties don't show up properly unless they are at the very tippy top of the note like so here in the created field comes into play another plug-in that I love called templ templater allows me to make My Vault really really useful powerful by putting in little

spots where you can add in information that is static such as date creation of the note for example there's so much you can do with templater I've just scratched the surface but in this case I'm using it to automatically put the created date as the file creation date The Creation date of the actual Note file and to do so I simply rightclick and if you're wondering how I have added in all these lovely colors here and how I've done so over here with these buttons that is from the plug-in called Commander I love this plugin

because I love to make my obsidian Vault look peaceful easy on the eyes I'm going to spend a lot of time here so I have a color scheme that I use throughout my Vault I'll show you other plugins that I'm using as I move through through this process this three-step process of how I made my obsidian Vault useful and solve my Knowledge Management problem I'm going to click on templatized Note here and it simply assigns the date and you can also see templater at play in my daily note which is based upon this template you

can see a lot of templator code here which makes uh the note show up the the previous note the note for the next day and even assigns a place where my cursor will automatically show up when I click in the note because this is where I want to add the task the first task for that day and the links make it very easy to move through my notes by yesterday or tomorrow and if you're looking at this daily notes and would like to have this for yourself as well as the template which creates the note

properties and also the template which adds all of the links for your content that means everything that's in the note it will give you a block of internal relevant links which you can go through and keep what you think is worthwhile or trim the block down as you wish and these two templates that generate front matter note properties and the links template along with my daily notes template is available for you to get a hold of yourself right right now on my gumroad shop there's a link in the description and the pinned comment below and

you can have these and remove friction from your obsidian Vault too because these really were a game Cher for me when I struggled so much to make value out of my notes a lot of the challenge came from not actually getting access to my notes later on because I had not properly categorized them just like trying to find a book in the library you need to have an idea of where that book is and that book needs to be carefully and properly categorized so you can find it in the card catalog I've just dated myself

and I'll show you step three of how I get useful information that solves my problems now out of my Vault whether that information is stored in just one note or across many notes but before I show you that I want to show you how I use my obsidian Vault to help me make money and particularly how I use it to create AI automations how I use it for promp crafting and promp chaining which is part of what I do and also how I use it to help me in building out my AI automator prompt crafting

society which opens on January 1st this is a real life use case for how I use my Vault here is my folder structure with my basket where I've shown you that everything comes in this is my personal folder my professional folder and my knowledge folder over here in my I versus AI folder you'll see my products folder and if you're wondering how I have made these lovely icons and colors for my folders that comes from two plugins iconize which is a fantastic plugin and file color which allows you to change your files to whatever color

scheme you would like this is the folder for the YouTube notes automation I have shown you earlier when I'm building out out in automation there's a lot of prompt crafting for example this transcript breakdown prompt here this whole double lines here breaks up prompts shows me this is a system prompt and this is a user prompt and this corresponds to this node in the automation where you can see the same prompt here and it's a system prompt and here's the user prompt and so on this is called prompt chaining and when I'm working with a

very large prompt like the final prompt in this prompt chain a prompt that is very long like this I have found that obsidian is the best tool for working with those long and complicated prompts and prompt chains and that's because of one word markdown obsidian is a markdown editor and markdown in case you're wondering is just a way to make text format it in this case this means header two to or bullet points or Bolding all of this here is markdown and I have it hidden for readability but obsidian which is by the way I

should have mentioned this early is free allows you to work with markdown now if you're thinking I could not work with markdown I don't understand what that is that's where a plugin like editing toolbar comes in which allows you to quickly assign bold italics headers and lots of other things including tables to your text markdown is key and obsidian and large language models make great Partners so by using this to create inad in automations which I then sell and I use for my own problems every automation I create is for a problem that I am

personally experiencing that I've created the solution to and then I offer it to you if in case you have the same problem as well well I also use obsidian to help me make money by creating quick start guides that go with my product this quick start guide is another way that obsidian helps me to make money with my Vault by creating a quick guide that goes with each of the products this is the one for the YouTube metadata automation I am able to add images and I can then turn this into a PDF and include

this with the product I also create a node notes PDF that goes with the product this basically shows all of the node notes for the automation so basically every node what it does in the Automation and how to think about it what gets stored in this node the output data and Next Step this also goes out to the buyer so they can see exactly what they're getting how the information flows and also use it as a way to learn and perhaps build out their own automation I also use obsidian to help me build out my

AI automator prompt crafting Society from storing the prompts for the images to helping me build out the onboarding to helping me understand how the profiles work so that when it's time to set up the community all I need to do is go into the table here see what I'm going to add to the profiles for my members get an explanation of those fields so I can quickly do so when it gets time to set up the community so not only do I store notes in My Vault I literally work inside my Vault another neat trick

about text generator and another way that you can bring information into your vault in very few clicks is here with this feature for text generator called extractor I've just added this YouTube video link here I'm going to click on text extractor and if there's anything in that note here it will come up as a file URL this can work with PDFs it can work with images as in OCR it can read what's in the image and input that as text into your Vault it can do that both with images on your machine and images that

you just have a URL for it can also do so with web pages and audio including all the different formats m4a MP3 and so on I'm going to right click here and I'm going to click on text extractor and click convert and you can see it takes a second literally a second to add this entire transcript here and it's exactly from the video I'm just going to click copy and you'll see here that the entire transcript comes through but you might be thinking this is a mess and nowhere near as neat and organized as this

transcript you showed us but with text generator you can simply type in what it is you want to do with the text above it like format this text you can even use something like rewrite text for readability adding paragraphs and punctuation this is another template that I use in text generator and if you would like this template as well let me know in the comments and if enough of you ask for it I will add it to the product that I've already put up on gumroad which has these two templates in my daily note template

all right so I've covered step one how I solve my problem of having a useful Vault by getting information into it effortlessly through AI automation now I showed you how to add properties to My Vault both through automation or through one click with text generator templates and now I'm going to show you how I process a note and then finally how I get information from My Vault when I need to solve a problem in order to process a note everything comes into my basket here here is a transcript by Anna Hickman who has a YouTube

channel and she is a very smart person her channel is wonderful and she offers really great information so I would highly recommend giving her a listen and after I watched this video I really wanted to get its benefits Into My Vault so I'm going to head down here to the bottom right above the link block and I'm going to show you Auto note mover in order to get this file where I want it to go and you might be wondering what system I'm using what personal Knowledge Management System I'm using obsidian the tool I'm using

but what system am I using within that it's I'm not using any system it's basically just a folder system I looked at zle cast in and you'll hear of Pera and you'll hear of maps of content and there are many different ways to organize your system in a way that works for you and I found that the way that works for me are folders because I don't ever go looking for notes I go looking for the knowledge in those notes but if I ever do need to find a note it's very easy because it's pretty

simple as to where it's going to be it's a knowledge note it's going to be in one of these folders if it's a personal note here in this folder and it's pretty easy for me to find things for example this is a sovereign craft note that just means something that I use to earn money my craft what I do for a living and I'm going to just hit the tab button here and hit Sovereign craft and when I do so I want you to take a look up in the upper right hand corner you'll see

this pop up here and you'll see the note has left the transcript file and is now in my sovereign craft folder and it is here this means that I don't bog myself down by having a lot of things in my basket that I need to process it's basically a few clicks just put in whatever the t uh tag is that I've assigned to the note to the folder where I want it to go I just put that tag in and the note goes where it needs to go and that's important because even though these folders

look like they're here they're not actually here these notes aren't actually here they are Sim linked here using uh Sim link because they are in a Dropbox folder that's where they come into at the end of any automation I run and this is an automation that I run to create all of the metadata for any new product I create on gumroad because I have now four different products on gumroad the one that's about to go live with the templates that I've just shown you and I found myself again with that same old kind of dread

friction feeling of oh I have to write out this entire product description and I just again and do not have time for that so this adds everything I need for the description and it also adds a frequently asked questions page uh a section here at the bottom a custom link a summary an additional details and it even includes an image prompt that's how this looks when it's done this is the product page for the templates that I've just shown you this is the summary this is all of the description that that was written by gbt

this is the additional details the features of the product here and all of this again is written by gp4 and this is one of the images that I create for every uh product I create an image of the product being held with a laptop and I also create the Box image as well too so now we have step one covered that's bringing notes into the Vault we have step two covered that's categorizing and also putting those notes where they go in as frictionless a way as possible but now we need to get that information out

of our notes and that is where co-pilot comes in co-pilot is a plugin by Logan Yang and this plug-in is awesome it's really wonderful because it turns your entire Vault basically into a knowledge base you can query your entire Vault and ask it questions which it will gather from the contents of your notes to answer basically the desire is to build the ultimate AI assistant based upon your personal and this is the key Point your personal knowledge base while also being privacy focused and that's because this one also takes in and I am using GPT

4 with this but you can use local large language models as well and a local index that you use for the questions so this one works by heading over over here and typing in anything that you would want a problem or a question that you might have and when you realize that you can answer your problems by knowledge you've already gathered it really fuels your fire to gather more useful knowledge and bring it into the privacy and safety of your own personal Vault for this I'm going to ask something about business I've typed in what

do I need to focus on in my business according to Justin Welsh who is someone that I have several notes about here and it will give here some overview but you can also go in further like for example I know that Justin Welsh talks a lot about systems creating Business Systems so I can ask about that and what I love about this response is that it is actually referencing real notes in fact notes that came into my Vault automatically using my YouTube notes automation brought in all of the properties all of the information and if

I want to go back into the information and check it out I just need to click on one of the timestamps for the area that is of interest to me and I can head straight into the video from there by clicking on this link the information that you talk about and the chat that you talk about here can be turned turned into its own note so you could begin a note about the 8020 principle here go to YouTube search for videos about the 8020 principle bring that knowledge into your knowledge base and then keep learning

by talking about that new information right here in your Vault because here is the deal 2025 is just a few days away but automated knowledge that you can use to solve your real problems that that is here now right now and in order to get the most of it you need to understand about automation how it works and how you can use it to remove the pain and stress and solve your own problems if you'd like to know how I created the automation for this nadn process where I bring in a YouTube link and it

turns into this wonderful transcript that video is on screen right now