How I Organize Everything at Work

Lonneke Heijnen / June 21, 2025

5 min read •

Recently, a few of my colleagues showed some interest in my notetaking tool. I was talking with them and on my screen was my daily note indicating my sorted to-do list and other notes I took during the day. Increasingly, more people started asking me about it, which in turn made me realise that it could be fun to show how I organise and structure my own workload at work.

I use this neat productivity tool called Obsidian. It's based on local files on your computer, making it very secure and private, which is a good thing in a corporate environment - I know there are some security people at the company that I work at who also use Obsidian.

Okay so what the heck is it and how can you use it?! Obsidian is in its simplest form nothing more than a Markdown editor, but the charm is in the fact that there are lots of plugins that can be added to make it everything you want. Obsidian in its core has a few nice features:

  • Markdown editor: All Markdowns files are automatically in the nice format they generate. Obsidian also allows a nice front-end for the frontmatter properties that you can give to a Markdown file.
  • Links: By using [[]] you can create connections between notes. This can result in your own personal Wikipedia style system.
  • Graph: The links between your nodes can be seen in the graph view. This visualises any patterns that may occur after storing multiple notes and linking them.
  • Tags and folders: You can use whatever you prefer to organize your notes. If you're using tags, then you can later aggregate all tagged notes by using a community plugin called Dataview.
  • The Daily Notes core plugin: By setting a template, you can generate a daily note in the same outline each day, making it very fast to start working in your preferred set-up. By also adding the Calendar community plugin, you can get a nice calendar in your sidebar, making all your daily notes visualised month-by-month.

How do I use these things for my day-to-day work?

  • I have a daily note for each day that I'm working with
    • A to-do list that I usually refine at the end of my previous work day. I have a small mantra called "Eat your frogs first" which means that you identify your most important task for the day — the one you're likely to procrastinate on — and complete it first for highest impact. I do not always follow that, but this is a nice reminder.
    • A meeting header with links to any meetings (that needed me to take notes) that happened on that day. I link to these meetings by using the double-bracket technique
    • A note section where I dump any small notes that do not need to have its own note for future reference Here's my daily note template so you can use it too!
# 🚀 Daily tasks
"Eat your frogs first"
- [ ]

---
## 📅 Daily meetings
-

---
## 📝 Notes
-
  • I create meeting notes with my tagging system. For example, if I have a client meeting with applecompany (fake name), then I'll tag it by using #applycompany.
  • For each client, I have a master note with a section where I aggregate all notes that have the client tag. I order them by date and thus get a very nice sorted database of all relevant notes about the client.
  • I write down most of the feedback I get. The performance reviews that I receive, but also small things that people say to me. I just really like to do this, so I can look back on these things if I'm ever doubting myself. These notes, of course get the tag #feedback so I can easily find them later.
  • Sometimes I use it for technical knowledge bits that are very personal and do not need to be in a general team knowledge base. If there are things that could be helpful to other, I try to add this information to some form of documentation that can be easily accessed by my team members.

There's lot more you can do with Obsidian: it has a large community and a very large plugin library. Note that using community plugins can bring some security risks, which might not be preferred if you're using it for work stuff. Also, the advantage of Obsidian having a large community means there are answers to almost all possible beginner-level questions, which makes life easier.

Some of the community plugins I do like:

  • Omnisearch for a better search functionality
  • Dataview for aggregated views. It does involve doing some light-coding, but it has an elaborate documentation.
  • Linter to automatically format files the way you want to. In my case, it automatically adds the file creation date to the frontmatter properties of the Markdown file.

The Obsidian team is also working on adding dynamic views, which could make creating a database of information easier - think of a Notion-like database vibe. This would lead to no longer needing Dataview for aggregations. This feature is called Bases and will be rolled out in the upcoming time.