Workflow optimization centers around one question. ### **_What are the factors that increase/decrease the activation energy for you to start being creative?_** ### With that in mind, think about the chain of events which feel most natural to your creative process. The best way to figure this out is to simply start writing. Try not to worry too much about organization: things like naming conventions, file structure, tags, backlinks, and other references too much at this stage. But *do* leave as many tags and as many links as you feel is relevant. Two things will then happen: 1. You will encounter roadblocks / quality of life issues during this process, and know *which* features, optimizations, and workarounds, actually fit to make your creative process. If you’re installing apps and setting up optimizations because they seem to have a cool functionality but doesn’t fit your creative style, then it’s of relatively little benefit to you and distracts you from being actually creative. ***Think***: Which factors will make me **_want_** to be more creative. 2. The structure of your tags and links will, given enough time, emerge, and there will be an intuitive direction as to how to structure your knowledge database. With that said, there are a few very powerful tools that I’d recommend for new Obsidian users: 1. Advanced tables: this adds a lot of quality of life issues to the natural way Obsidian handles tables, such as insert column, insert row, shift contents left/right/up/down, etc. 2. Dataview: this plugin creates metadata for pages and other notes which makes referencing them easier. It allows for database queries based on tags and other information. 3. ZoottelKeeper: this plugin automatically generates table of contents for each section of your knowledge database, making finding files and keeping track of organization easier. If a lot of the content you wish to produce benefits from referencing another piece of content, such as writing a post in two different languages, then I’d also recommended the Multi Column plugin. *Please note that plugins generally don't work with Obsidian Publish.*