Rebuilding My Second Brain: From Obsidian CEO's Minimalist Workflow to My Fitness Journal

Have you ever found yourself endlessly debating which app to use for taking notes and collecting information?

Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Logseq—I have tried nearly every mainstream tool on the market over the years. I was even an early power user of some of them. In the end, I realized that what I was truly looking for was never the app with the most features. I wanted a way to keep records for many years without putting all the knowledge I had accumulated at risk if a company shut down or discontinued its service.

That led me to establish one principle for my note-taking system on which I would hardly ever compromise:

Important

All my data must belong entirely to me. Even if the software stops receiving updates or the service shuts down one day, everything must remain stored locally and be easy to read and migrate with other tools.

By that standard, I ultimately chose Obsidian.

Obsidian has almost no barrier to entry. A quick read through the official documentation is enough to get started. However, after reading Obsidian CEO Steph Ango’s article about designing a note-taking system, I realized that I had never truly understood Obsidian.

I therefore took a close look at his philosophy for building a vault. Using the template project he publicly shared as a foundation, I rebuilt my system around a low-friction recording workflow covering fitness logs, monthly reviews, and everyday knowledge management.

This article explains how I understand the design of that system and documents the complete process of adapting it to my own needs.

1. Why Choose Obsidian?

Before walking through my workflow, let us briefly compare today’s mainstream tools and see whether Obsidian’s philosophy, implementation, and ideal use cases match your needs.

Obsidian’s core philosophy: “Files over apps.”

With many cloud-based note-taking tools, your data may be at risk if the company closes or discontinues the service.

In Obsidian, every note is simply an ordinary .md (Markdown) file on your computer. That means that even if Obsidian no longer exists years from now, you will still be able to open and read all your old notes with any text editor. In other words, you retain complete ownership of your data.

2. Stop Over-Organizing: The Obsidian CEO’s Eight Rules for a Frictionless Vault

Obsidian is easy to learn and offers tremendous freedom. But that freedom can also tempt people into spending endless hours tinkering with plugins and configurations.

Obsidian’s current CEO, Steph Ango—also known online as kepano—has shared eight rules that he follows in his personal vault. Their purpose is to minimize the mental friction involved in capturing information:

1. Avoid splitting your notes across multiple vaults: Unless strict data or privacy separation is essential, keep your life, work, and interests in one vault so that ideas can collide naturally.
2. Avoid deeply nested folder structures: Layers of folders create decision paralysis. Let structure emerge from the bottom up through bidirectional links and properties.
3. Avoid non-standard Markdown syntax: Keep your files universal and easy to migrate in the future.
4. Always use plurals for categories and tags: Use #books, #movies, and #workouts consistently, eliminating the need to remember whether you used the singular or plural form last time.
5. Use bidirectional links extensively: As you write, connect ideas with [[concept]] links to create a network that resembles the brain’s neural structure.
6. Standardize dates as YYYY-MM-DD: The ISO date format sorts reliably on every operating system.
7. Use a seven-point rating scale: For books or movies, a 1–7 scale has a clear midpoint of 4. It offers slightly more detail than a five-point scale while requiring less deliberation than a ten-point scale.
8. Keep only one to-do list per week: Write tasks manually in your weekly note and copy unfinished items into the next week. If you cannot be bothered to copy a task for two weeks in a row, it probably is not important—discard it.

Steph Ango explains these methods and principles in detail in his article, How I Use Obsidian . To help readers understand his workflow, he also published a companion Obsidian template on GitHub. I downloaded it and gradually built a recording system suited to my own needs.

3. Putting It into Practice: My Full-Body Split Fitness Journal

Seeing an idea is not the same as truly understanding it. After reading Steph Ango’s article and downloading his open-source Obsidian template from GitHub, I decided to follow his approach closely and build a system of my own. My fitness journal became the first real-world use case.

Whenever my schedule permits, I train at the gym three times a week. I follow a full-body split, with each session covering several muscle groups. For example, one session might include chest, back, and legs, while the next focuses on shoulders and arms.

Initially, I used Google Gemini as a virtual fitness coach. I created a dedicated “Fitness Journal” vault in Obsidian and organized it with two folder levels: year and month. Before each visit to the gym, I created a new journal entry named in the YYYYMMDD.md format and copied in the workout plan generated by my virtual coach. After training, I returned to the same note to record the exercises, weights, and how the session felt. I then sent the completed workout back to the virtual coach for evaluation.

After following this process for several months, a problem began to emerge.

Although every session was documented in detail, the information was scattered across journal entries in different monthly folders. When I wanted to answer basic questions such as:

How many total chest sets did I complete this month? How much has my squat weight increased compared with three months ago? Have I been training my back noticeably less often recently?

I discovered that there was almost no direct way to retrieve these answers.

Every calculation required opening dozens of journal entries, searching through them one by one, and manually compiling the data. A system intended to help me review my progress had turned into repetitive and tedious administrative work.

How could I keep recording simple while making the data easy to analyze later?

1. Designing the Fitness Template (Templates/Gym Template.md)

I used Obsidian’s Properties feature to design a lightweight fitness template. Because each session covers multiple muscle groups, I defined the type field as a List:

---
categories:
  - "[[Workouts]]"
type:
  - "[[Chest]]"
  - "[[Back]]"
  - "[[Shoulders]]"
  - "[[Legs]]"
  - "[[Arms]]"
duration:
rating:
created: {{date}}
---

## 🏋️ Exercises

## 📝 Condition and Reflections
I slept well today, and my core felt stable.

Note: Here, created: {{date}} automatically links to the daily note for the date on which the file is created.

2. File Location and Naming

Following the recommendation, I mapped Obsidian’s Cmd + Shift + N shortcut to the “Create new timestamp note” command and changed its destination to the Journal/ folder.

Now, before each gym session, I only need to press the shortcut to create a .md file named with the current date and time in the YYYY-MM-DD HHMM.md format. I then expand the filename to YYYY-MM-DD HHMM Workout Log.md.

The default timestamp-note template adds the tags note and journal. Because Obsidian allows templates to be layered, I can press Cmd + P to open the command palette, select “Templates: Insert template,” and choose Gym Template to insert the fitness template automatically.

Every workout record remains an ordinary .md file in the Journal/ folder alongside any other notes, with no manual filing required.

3. Building a Dynamic Dashboard with Bases

Because every fitness journal entry includes the categories: workouts property, I used Obsidian’s official Bases core plugin—the Dataview plugin is another option—to create a Workouts.base file under Templates/Bases/.

filters:
  and:
    - categories.contains(link("Workouts"))
    - '!file.name.contains("Template")'
views:
  - type: table
    name: My Workout Logs
    filters:
      and:
        - file.ctime > "2026-04-01"
    order:
      - file.name
      - type
      - duration
      - rating
      - created
    sort:
      - property: file.name
        direction: DESC
    limit: 50

There is nothing to maintain manually. Bases scans the entire vault automatically and generates a dynamic table containing the date, muscles trained, duration, and pump rating.

4. Going Further: Fractal Journaling and Monthly Automation

Steph Ango is also a strong advocate of fractal journaling: beginning with fragments captured in daily notes, refining them layer by layer, and ultimately distilling them into an annual note.

To automate my monthly reviews, I designed a monthly review template. It contains a Base code block that dynamically filters and displays the current month’s fitness data based on the monthly note’s filename.

Complete Monthly Review Template: Templates/Gym Monthly Template.md

---
category: reviews
created: {{date}}
---

# {{title}} Personal Review

## 🌟 Overall Summary and State of Mind
> In two or three sentences, summarize your mood, overall condition, biggest achievement, or greatest regret this month.

## 🏋️ Fitness and Health Review
The fitness data for this month is filtered automatically below:

```base
filters:
  and:
    - categories.contains(link("Workouts"))
    - file.name.contains(this.file.name.slice(0, 7))
views:
  - type: table
    name: "This Month's Workout Logs"
    order:
      - file.name
      - type
      - duration
      - rating
    sort:
      - property: file.name
        direction: DESC
```

### 🧠 Fitness Data Analysis
* **Workout frequency:** ____ sessions completed this month (monthly target: ____).
* **Strength and pump assessment:**
* **Adjustments to next month's training plan:**

## 🎯 Progress on Core Goals
* [ ] Goal 1:
* [ ] Goal 2:

## 🔮 Next Month's Outlook and Core To-Dos
* [ ]
* [ ]

Automated Workflow in Action

At the end of the month, I only need to create a note in the Journal/ folder named 2026-07 Workout Review, then insert the Gym Monthly Template:

1. The template automatically replaces {{title}} with 2026-07.
2. In the Base block, file.name.contains(this.file.name.slice(0, 7)) automatically extracts the first seven characters of the current filename: "2026-07".
3. When I switch to Reading view, all the fitness entries scattered throughout that month appear neatly inside the monthly note. I can then review the data and fill in my subjective assessment.

5. Final Thoughts

Before I discovered Obsidian, I assumed that a good note-taking system required complex folders, polished formatting, and countless automation scripts. Steph Ango’s approach taught me that the best system is the one with the least friction—the one that lets you capture an idea the moment it appears.

Obsidian’s strength does not come from how elaborately it can be configured. It comes from giving you a blank wall on which your thoughts can grow freely. When you stop worrying about which folder a note belongs in and start asking which concepts an idea connects to, your second brain truly begins to work.