# Step One - Setting Up Your Second Brain With Obsidian *** **Prev Card**: [[How I Setup my Personal Knowledge Management System]] **Next Card**: [[Step Two - Using the PARA Convention]] *** ## Overview Starting with the basics, I recommend downloading and installing Obsidian on your computer, then creating the essential folders to hold your notes. ## Content Start by downloading the free Obsidian installer from [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/). When you run the installer, you will get a default "vault." A vault is just a directory where Obsidian saves your text files. A fresh vault will look like this. ![[NewObsidianVault.png|600]] On my computers hard drive (a Windows Machine), I could find a new directory on my `D:` drive called `D:\MyVault` and it would be empty. Now we need to create some folders. ## Create the scaffold to hold our knowledge. ![[Obsidian-Create Folder.png]] Create the following seven folders in your vault.[^1] 1. `1 Projects`[^2] 2. `2 Areas` 3. `3 Resources` 4. `4 Archives` 5. `attachments` 6. `Daily Notes` 7. `templates` Your new vault will probably look like this: ![[Obsidian Clean Folder Setup.png|600]] Now there are a couple of settings you will want to make before we begin. 1. Set the default folder for your daily notes 2. Set the default folder for your templates ## Daily Note Settings ![[Obsidian Daily Note Settings.png]] 1. Click on the gear in the lower left hand corner to bring up the settings dialog. 2. Select Daily notes from the Core Plugins. 3. Enter the `Daily Notes` folder name in the New File Location setting. 4. If you have a daily note template (more on this later), enter it here. 5. Switch on the Open daily note on startup. Before you leave the settings dialog box, I also recommend setting the templates. ## Template Settings ![[Obsidian Template Note Settings.png|600]] 1. Click on the `Templates` tab 2. Sett the Template folder location to your `templates` directory. Now you can hit `Esc` or click the `X` in the upper right hand corner of the dialog box. ## About colors. There might be one other thing you would want to do. If you are from the generation that likes black text on a white background, you can easily change this. ![[Published/img/Obsidian Light Theme.png]] 1. Click on the `Appearance` tab 2. Select Base color scheme 3. Select the theme you want. ![[Obsidian Light Theme 1.png|600]] I will use dark for the rest of this tutorial, but you can switch it at any time, and obviously there is a LOT more you can do, but this is enough to get started. ## Next: Using the system Now let's talk about how you can use the system. [[Step Two - Using the PARA Convention]] ## Footnotes [^1]: Remember this is how **I** do it. There are lots of ways to do this. [^2]: I use numbers at the front of my PARA folders so they sort correctly and always appear at the top of the list.