# Step Four - Clean as You Go Obsidian *** **Prev Card**: [[Step Three - Using PARA with Obsidian]] **Next Card**: [[Planning for Actionability]] or [[Organizing Obsidian for Knowledge Acquisition]] *** ## Overview You've seen a little bit about how you can organize your notes for actionability, now let me tell you how I use Obsidian every day. And it all starts with the daily note. ## Meet the Daily Note Obsidian has the ability to generate a daily note, from a template, every day when you open the app (or hit a shortcut key like `Ctrl-Shift-D`). The daily note is like your mental inbox. This is where I capture anything and everything **when I think of it**. Remember I said we often have our best ideas when we can least act on them? There is something about back ground processing of information that brings unexpected connections to mind. In her [[library/A Mind For Numbers|book A Mind For Numbers]], [[Barbara Oakley]] writes that one of the best things you can do to learn is to alternate between periods of focus, and periods of rest. The rest allows the right hemisphere to come into play and help us learn better. The Daily Note is therefore your reposity for anything and everything you want to capture without forgetting. I use it to: - Record contact details like phone numbers, email addresses, etc that I want to enter in my contacts later. - Links to websites I found through google search (Capturing the website page content is another story) - Quotes - Stray thoughts that sound interesting. - Meeting minutes - Virtually anything that pops into my mind. All of this, and more can go into a Daily Note. The Daily Note is your note inbox. And the key to making it useful is to periodically, clean up your notes. > [!warning] Obsidian Sync required to get maximum benefit > If you really want to get the most out of Daily Notes, you want Obsidian on your phone _and_ on your computer. And you want them to stay in sync, so you can capture on the run, and then clean up when you get back to your office or home. Or even, as I sometimes do, clean up when I'm waiting in line. ## Review, the Clean Up Process The key to an effective PKM is that you make at least some effort to clean up your notes. This is not meant to be a herculean task, done heroically after hours and hours. The idea is that a little at a time, **every time** you touch your PKM, it gets more useful for you. What I do is have a loose weekly cycle, where I go back through my old note and **distribute them** to their appropriate folders. This does not take as much time as you think, and you can do it almost anywhere. When a note has been processed, it is either filed in a P.A.R. folder, or Archived. So everything ends up in PARA folder one way or another. The idea that I am constantly improving my note system, just by using it, makes me want to keep using the notes. > [!example] Mis En Place > Tiago Forte makes a great case for copying the work of chefs in high end busy restaurants. They do not have the luxury of shutting down the kitchen mid-shift to "get organized". They are under insane pressure to produce high quality food, in vast quantities, error free, night after night. How do they do it? First, by having everything they need at their finger tips. However, they also achieve it by cleaning as they go. When they make a cut of meat, they _immediately_ clean their knife to be ready for the next cut. Finished boiling a pot of pasta? The pot goes to the dish washers to be cleaned right away and restored to the kitchen as soon as possible. They do _both_, work _and_ organize as they go. As knowledge workers we can do the same. ## Summary At this point, you know enough to get started. You know enough to start capturing notes, and then distributing information into projects, areas, and resources. Play with it for a while, and you may discover, like I did, there is so much more you can do. ## Next Steps There are a couple of places you can go next, depending upon what is important to you. One can be to focus on productivity, like projects, tasks, and todo's. The reality is that PARA is a convention for thinking about work and organizing information to support that work. HOWEVER, there is another process for converting information into _knowledge_. That leaves you two branches to follow. If you want to keep going down the productivity path, then start reading about: - [[Planning for Actionability]] If on the other hand, you want to learn more, and get more out of the information you consume, then dive into - [[Organizing Obsidian for Knowledge Acquisition]]