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Obsidian, from absolute zero.

The tutorial that starts before step one.

Most Obsidian tutorials open with “just create a daily note in your vault” and never explain what a vault is, why there are forty plugins to choose from, or what to do when your brain drops the whole system in week two. This one assumes nothing. It was built by and for a brain with ADHD: capture takes one keystroke, nothing needs naming, and the setup still works after you disappear for three weeks.

6 steps · about 45 minutes Stop after any step Free forever, actually
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Before you download anything

Three things nobody tells you first

Obsidian is a free notes app, and your notes are just files. Every note is a plain text file sitting in a regular folder on your own computer. No subscription, no account, no cloud you don’t control. If Obsidian the company vanished tomorrow, your notes would still open in anything.

A “vault” is a folder. That’s the whole secret. When a tutorial says vault like it’s a sacred object, it means: the folder where your notes live.

This setup is designed for the worst moment, not the best one. The moment you need to write something down is the moment you have the least executive function available. So this system asks for zero decisions at capture time: no picking a folder, no naming the note, no remembering where things go. One hotkey, type, close. Sorting happens later, on a good day, in five minutes.

What you need today: a computer (Windows or Mac). Phone setup is a different day’s problem.

Step 1 Install it 5 min

  1. Go to obsidian.md and click the download button. It detects whether you’re on Windows or Mac. Run the installer like any other app.
  2. When Obsidian opens the first time, choose Create new vault.
  3. Name it something boring, like vault. Naming it something clever is the first dopamine trap and you haven’t even started yet.
  4. For location, pick your Documents folder. Click Create.

You’re now looking at a mostly empty screen: a file list on the left, a big writing area in the middle. That emptiness is correct. You did it right.

Checkpoint. Obsidian opens? You can stop here today. Nothing rots. The rest keeps until you’re back.

Step 2 Make six folders 5 min

Right-click in the empty file list on the left and choose New folder (or use the little folder-plus icon at the top of that panel). Make these six, typed exactly:

vault/
├── _inbox/        ← everything lands here first
├── _templates/    ← pre-built note skeletons live here
├── archive/       ← done things, never deleted
├── personal/      ← personal captures and notes
├── projects/      ← one folder per active project
└── reference/     ← evergreen stuff you look up

The underscore on _inbox and _templates isn’t decoration: it pins them to the top of the alphabetical list so your capture folder is always the first thing you see.

Inside projects/, make one folder per thing you’re actively working on. Not per thing you might work on someday. Two or three folders, tops.

And that’s the entire hierarchy. No subfolders until an existing folder is literally too full to scroll. Premature folder trees are how vaults die: you spend your energy building the filing cabinet and have none left for the files.

Checkpoint. Six folders on the left? Legitimate stopping point. Steps 3 through 5 are one sitting if you can manage it, but they’ll wait.

Step 3 Turn on plugins 10 min

Plugins are add-ons other people built. Obsidian ships with them switched off behind a warning screen, and this is where a lot of tutorials lose people, because the warning sounds like a virus alert. It isn’t. It’s Obsidian saying “we didn’t write these, so we can’t vouch for them.” The four below are among the most-installed, most-audited plugins in the entire ecosystem.

  1. Click the gear icon (bottom-left corner) to open Settings.
  2. In the left menu, click Community plugins, then the Turn on community plugins button. That’s the scary screen. Proceed.
  3. Click Browse. Search for Templater. Click it, click Install, then click Enable. Two clicks, both required — installing without enabling is the classic silent failure.
  4. Still in Browse: do the same for QuickAdd. Install, Enable.
  5. Same again for Dataview. Install, Enable, then forget it exists. It becomes useful at the 90-day mark; installing it now just means future-you doesn’t have to remember how.
  6. One more thing, in a different place: back in Settings, click Appearance, scroll to Themes, click Manage, search Minimal, install and use it. Obsidian’s default look is a sensory tax you don’t have to pay.
Do not install anything else. Not Kanban. Not Excalidraw. Not Mind Map, not Tasks, not anything with “second brain” in the description. Each one is a dopamine trap dressed as a productivity tool, and the browse screen is engineered to make you want all of them. Four plugins. The browser stays closed for 90 days.
Checkpoint. This was the fiddliest step and it’s behind you. Everything after this is copy-paste.

Step 4 Add four templates 10 min

Templates kill the blank page: every new note opens with its structure already there. First, point Templater at the right folder:

  1. Settings → Templater (it’s in the left menu now that it’s enabled).
  2. Set Template folder location to _templates.
  3. Turn ON Trigger Templater on new file creation.

Now create four notes inside _templates: click the _templates folder, right-click it, New note, name it exactly as shown, and paste the matching block in. The <% %> parts are Templater’s placeholders; they turn into real dates and titles automatically. They look broken when pasted. They aren’t.

capture
---
created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm") %>
---

# <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %> Capture

## Brain dump


## Follow-up needed?
project
---
created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
status: active
---

# <% tp.file.title %>

## What this is
(One sentence.)

## Next action


## Notes
session
---
created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm") %>
---

# <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %> -- <% tp.file.title %>

## What we're doing


## Decisions made


## Next action
reference
---
created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
---

# <% tp.file.title %>

**Source:**
**Why I saved this:**

## Notes
Checkpoint. Four notes in _templates? One step left in the build.

Step 5 Wire up the capture hotkeys 10 min

This is the payoff step. When it’s done, writing something down costs one keystroke and zero decisions, which matters because the urge to capture arrives precisely when you have no spare executive function to spend on “where should this go?”

  1. Settings → QuickAdd. In the name box type Work Capture, make sure the type dropdown says Template, and click Add Choice.
  2. Click the gear next to your new Work Capture entry and set:
Template Path:     _templates/capture
File Name Format:  {{DATE:YYYY-MM-DD HHmm}} Capture
Create in folder:  _inbox/
Open on create:    ON
  1. Repeat for a second choice named Personal Capture. Identical settings except Create in folder is personal/.
  2. Click the lightning bolt icon next to each of the two choices. That’s what registers them as real commands; skipping it is the other classic silent failure.
  3. Settings → Hotkeys. Search “QuickAdd”. Give Work Capture Ctrl+Shift+N and Personal Capture Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd on a Mac). If Obsidian says one is taken, pick another and write it on a sticky note on your monitor. No shame in the sticky note. The sticky note is the system working.

Test it: press Ctrl+Shift+N. A date-stamped note should open, pre-structured, already saved in _inbox. You never named it, never filed it, never decided anything. That’s the whole trick.

Checkpoint. The build is done. Step 6 isn’t setup, it’s the habit that keeps the vault alive, and it’s five minutes a week.

Step 6 The weekly sort 5 min/week

Pick one day. Put a 5-minute appointment on your actual calendar, because “I’ll just remember” is not a plan for brains like ours. When it fires, open _inbox and personal/ and route each note:

Active work? Move it into its folder under projects/.
Will you look it up again? Move to reference/.
Done or stale? Move to archive/. Never delete.
Unclear? Leave it. The inbox has no deadline.
The inbox is not a failure pile. Notes can sit there for two weeks without consequence. The vault looks exactly the same whether you’ve been in it for three days or three weeks, and that is the design, not a bug. Systems that punish absence get abandoned. This one doesn’t notice.

Tape these to the inside of your skull

The five rules

  1. No new plugins for 90 days. The urge to optimize the system instead of using it is the same urge that hollowed out every other app you’ve abandoned.
  2. No new folders until an existing one is too full to scroll.
  3. One vault, always. Two vaults means two inboxes, two configurations, and a routing decision every single time you open the app.
  4. Don’t name captures. The date-stamped filename is enough. Naming costs executive function you don’t have at capture time.
  5. Nothing gets deleted. Unclear things get archived, and archived things can always come back.

And at day 90, one upgrade

After three months of real use, spend ten minutes building a Home Note with Dataview: one pinned note that automatically lists your active projects, so the vault shows you what you’re working on instead of making you remember where you put it. That’s the payoff for installing Dataview back in step 3 and leaving it alone. If you’re reading this on day one: not yet. Rule number one.

That’s enough for today.

Who made this

There’s more where this came from.

I’m Rebecca. I’m a technical writer with ADHD, and I got tired of tutorials that start at step five. I run D’Amore, a membership for neurodivergent, midlife women of color and LGBTQIA+ folks navigating menopause, work, and caregiving, built on the same rule as this guide: come and go, grab what you need, nothing punishes your absence.

See the membership

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