Taking notes on people in Obsidian

Taking notes on people in Obsidian sounds weird, but I think it just shows how much I care. If I take notes on things that matter, why shouldn't I take notes on people that matter? Here are the templates I use to remember important things about significant people in my life.

// TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro
00:25 Why take notes on people?
01:51 When should you take notes on people?
02:44 Meeting template
04:23 Person template
11:27 Knife theory
12:56 In-person meetings and conferences
16:12 Consuming content from people
16:57 Following up with people
18:42 Privacy
22:09 Outro

---
// ABOUT ME

// APPS I USE

// GEAR

// WANT TO SUPPORT ME?

[nicolevdh]

PLUGINS MENTIONED: QuickAdd, Dataview, Dice Roller, Obsidian Publish, Obsidian Sync, Meld Encrypt

[MrSomethingred]

Bruh, imagine your in a meeting and the person goes to share their screen and accidentally opens up your "Flaws" section

[kevinfernandes]

I like your videos showing how you're using obsidian and using examples rather than just talking in a general manner. I think people can internalize the information better when they're seeing a "real life" example exactly as you're using it.

[linkingyourthinking]

Taking notes on people is a compliment :)

[mcwhinns]

I've had the experience of being told that I'm weird for writing a reminder on my calendar about other people. "Why isn't it important enough for you to just remember?", but this is me remembering in a very permanent way.

[feloneewebster]

I use obsidian for notes as a peer assessor for a social interaction assessment at my undergrad college. I assess the actions, professional online presence, and key behaviors of students in a group discussion and I use obsidian to note observations, assessor consensus, narrative feedback with my student, and written feedback. Additionally, I think notes on people helps with biographies like Austin Kleon offers the idea of building a family tree of influences in his book, Steal like an Artist. Research people you admire/inspiring/influential and discover their influences and repeat. I note all of my medical/mental health appointments and work meetings too. I also started taking notes for events like at a conferences and summits, workshops, lectures, etc…But I like the idea of taking notes of people we encounter too. Thanks for sharing this method. 😊

[marketingpower]

Ahahah, when you say "I take note on people" it sounds a bit creepy yes, but when you approach it with a business angle, what you're doing it just a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) extended to your personal life also.

It's the basis of any efficient sales team to use a CRM, it enhances your abilities to build relationship, it's a productivity tools like we use a lot of them in everyday life so relax it's actually only smart on your part and show that you are a great businesswoman 🙂

Loved the video! I'm learning Obsidian, need to tackle this big frontmatter/dataview thing. You video helped a lot! Obsidian is a life saver! Thank you 🙂

[GaelyneGasson]

I love the role playing game additions - being able to 'get to know' a person by using some of the tools available is fantastic. I'm aware there's fiction writers that use some of the same tools for bringing their characters to life. Having back stories really helps with that kind of thing and I imagine with a good note taking system like this when you do chat with or perhaps interview people, you would have more interesting questions to ask than the basics. It makes for good material for interviews and meetings, I'm sure. Meld encrypt sounds interesting but I'm wondering how that could work with Dataview? I'm looking forward to trying these templates out - and I must install the dice roller plugin. So many ways to have fun with that! Cheers!!

[JeffreyStarke]

Really great idea!

At 4:25, how does Obsidian know to create the new note in your people directory? and how do you configure it to automatically apply the person template?

[lillithsleeps]

Thank you, a thousand times thank you!

[nicolevdh]

THEME: AnuPpuccin
PLUGINS MENTIONED: QuickAdd, Dataview, Dice Roller, Obsidian Publish, Obsidian Sync, Meld Encrypt

[stamatispsarras]

Very interesting ideas for a people template! I was curious about a very small part of your presentation, which might have been also editing magic! When you clicked to create Hanna's page, it looked like templater already knew this was a "person" template. How did you do that? Awesome video as always!

[Scott_Stone]

Yeah, I also tried to keep track of when I last talked to people. Turns out I'm extremely asocial and there is no point in tracking that - the stats are too depressing when you pull them. I mean 2 years is a good result!

[dradic]

I'm trying to get into the habit of doing this. I think it is a good idea to remember things about people. But I'm thinking maybe ill setup up a template with my details, so people can use QR code to scan it directly into their vault. :)

[aliasgur]

I've been taking notes on people the past year and it's been so effective I've been struggling to understand why I didn't do it before. You imply at the outset that people may consider it weird - I'd not considered that but yes they _would _ consider it weird! Perhaps that's the explanation - subconsciously I recognised it was weird so never did what should have been obvious.

[dlta_p]

Using knife theory for your coworkers and aquaintances is unhinged and I am absolutely going to use it in my vault :)

[falopaideologica]

How did you do so that when you create a new note like [[hanna]] the person template is automatically applied? :o

[TeambitDK]

Hi Nicole
I'm wondering what I need to set up to have my Vault know that when I cmd + click "Hanna", the Vault knows that's it's creating a new person using the correlating template for that. Seems it's defaulting to the note template at the moment. Can you give me a hint?

[mageprometheus]

I should do this and include a photo as I'm rubbish at associating names and faces. The only exception is when I like them and they have red hair. 😄

[Negative_Light]

Interesting. I meant to start doing this. Going to try your method a bit.