Obsidian Properties: The New Feature That Changes Everything
Why you need it and how you can use it.
The last few months the Obsidian developers have rolled out some incredible new features for the app: Bookmarks, Canvas and most recently, Properties. These elements further cement (for me at least) the status of Obsidian as the best personal knowledge management system. And I’m so excited to continue to grow alongside it.
Although I use all of the new mentioned updates and find value in each, this article focuses on the last one: Properties. (I’m planning new articles on the other two and how I use them in the coming weeks.)
So let me tell you why I find Properties so revolutionary and how it can help your vault too.
First, let’s settle the basics. What are Properties?
You can understand them as being additional information about your notes, readable by programs such as the Dataview plugin. More concretely, they cover anything from Tags, to Aliases, Keywords, Date, to Boolean rules (such as True or False for a statement).
When you add properties, you can then use them to more easily find, organize and sort your notes.
Example: you can use the Dataview plugin to list for you all the notes in a folder that contain a certain tag or all the notes in your vault that are related to Buddhism.
Before I talk about Properties specifically, let me set the stage so you understand where I’m coming from and why I needed a feature like this.
My vault has been steadily growing. You could say that it’s mirroring the expansion of my mind, safely increasing in depth and breadth. In September this year, it will be 2 years old. (cue confetti)
Its growth has come with new challenges: finding what I’m looking for or linking new notes to existing ones isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. I can’t just create a new note and abandon it into the ether, hoping I’ll remember about it and magically find it when I need it.
Organizing my notes has also left me a bit overwhelmed. After a certain vault size, which you could call a critical mass, you need a support system in order to get the most out of your vault and not get lost in the sea of ideas.
I love my folder system (I use Nick Milo’s ACCESS structure), but I also need the freedom to fly above it.
So just one month ago (perhaps one week before the Properties feature was dropped — talk about synchronicity), I finally took the plunge to add metadata to my notes. That was going to be my “support system.” Being without it just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Beforehand, I attempted to solve my folder issues by creating MOCs (Maps Of Content). But the endeavor felt flat because they needed constant updates. For example, if I had a MOC about all things writing, every time I encountered a new idea that could be related to the topic, it had to be linked there. The process just didn’t make sense to me. That’s why, unfortunately, my MOCs morphed into abandoned notes, empty husks that reminded me of my failure to engage with my notes properly.
So that’s where metadata, YAML and Dataview come in. Why did I see metadata as a necessary addition? Because I wanted to leverage the power of Dataview, one of the most used and loved Obsidian plugins developed by the amazing community. And you need metadata in YAML to run Dataview.
Metadata can contain any kind of information that you want to add to your notes, such as aliases (other names by which you can find a certain note — so helpful!), type of note (ie. journal, article, book or idea), related note or external links and basically anything that told you (and more importantly, told Dataview) “what the note was about” or what’s related to it. (You could think of Properties as metadata as well.)
I have to admit, I found the process of writing my own YAML headers from scratch to be tedious, unintuitive and messy. Thankfully, I didn’t have to use it for long, because the shiny Properties feature arrived just in time to save me, but the brief time I inserted those YAML headers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there could be a better way to go about this.
(If you’re not familiar with how YAML headers worked, they looked like you can see in the image below. You needed to create them from scratch, by adding 2 sets of three dashes, and in between those include the properties you wanted to keep track of.)
In the example above, “tag” and “publish” are called a Keys, while “journal” and “publish” are called Values.
My goal was to be able to use Dataview to query all the notes related to a topic, for example: all the articles I wrote, the newsletters I sent, the philosophical concepts I am interested in, the books I finished and so much more.
By adding a property like “Status” to all my book notes, I can then tell Dataview to compile a list of all the notes which contain the property “Status: Finished.”
The new Properties look very different than the YAML headers, though the use is identical.
First, the new feature allows you to create different Types of properties. They can be:
- text
- list
- tag
- number
- checklist
- date
- time
You can see them exemplified below:
You can also notice a big change in design and interface. The new Properties are more dynamic and interactive.
Tip: Obsidian’s default command for adding a new property is CTRL + ;, but I was already using that commend to create a checkbox, so I switched my “add property” command to CTRL + ‘. It works for me.
One of the most useful aspects of the new Properties is that it remembers the value you added to each property (or Key) you created, and you can select from a list of the ones you used before. Previously, to counteract this drawback, I had to create a new note where I kept track of all the Keys and Values I used. For example, for the “Type” Key (which referred to the type of note), I had various values to choose from: quote, idea, practice, concept, etc. Now, you don’t have to juggle all that information in your head. Obsidian has it prepared for you.
You can see what I mean the image below:
Tip: If you don’t want to see the Properties blocks at the top of your notes, then you can go into Settings -> Editor -> Properties in document -> and select Hidden. Then, when you want to view your Properties or add a new one, they’ll be displayed in a separate panel, usually found to the side of your note, most likely on the right, close to tags and backlinks.
I hope you found the article helpful and were inspired to use Properties yourself, if you haven’t already. I’d also love to hear in what ways they’ve been helpful to you, if you were already making use of them.
Thank you for reading. You can find more articles on Obsidian here.
