Flow is a life planning system using the concepts and processes from David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD).
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.” ― Albert Einstein.
It's based on the principle that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
We waste time keeping track of the things we have to do in life. From the basics such as 'buy more cat food' to the multi-month project at work – all of these responsibilities we have to store in our heads use up space and cycles that we should use for the things we want to do in that moment.
Flow will help you put every one of these projects, tasks, and ideas into Obsidian – in a format that works for you – so you can have a mind like water and focus fully on the task in hand.
Getting into the flow state when working on something is a wonderful experience. All too often we're distracted by something popping up in our head that we may have forgotten about. Flow helps you get those things out of your head and into the Flow system immediately, allowing you to maintain your focus – your Flow state.
Flow also helps you plan your day, ensuring you're working on the things that are important to you, and not just the things that feel urgent.
Flow is for you if you:
- Have a lot of things to do and are struggling to keep track of them
- Often forget things you need to do
- Can't focus on something important because other things are popping up in your head
- Often feel overwhelmed at all the open loops you have in your life
- Feel unorganised and want to get on top of things
- Struggle to get into a flow state
- Want to feel in control
- Wear multiple hats, work, family, personal projects, etc.
- Have tried other systems and they haven't worked for you
- Are neurodiverse and have trouble focusing or struggle with executive function
First, let's explain a core principle of Flow.
Flow should not dictate how you store your information in Obsidian.
Yes, it's an Obsidian plugin. We're all-in on Obsidian, and are proud to use it as the foundation for Flow. So you have to use Obsidian to get the most out of it.
People use Obsidian in different ways, and we don't want to dictate how you should use it. Flow is designed to work with how you organise your vault. We are opinionated about a few things but we try not to impact the incredible flexibility that Obsidian offers.
Flow helps you take of the thoughts and ideas that pop up in your head at any moment, as well as the requests and actions that appear in our email, in our letterbox, on our phones, through chatting to friends and colleagues – any time we have something we need to think about or do later it can go into Flow. This prevents us from storing these things in our head allowing us to think freely about what we're doing at any one time.
The steps are simple: Capture -> Process -> Plan
In GTD, the first step is to capture everything that has your attention. This is the same in Flow.
When it's stored in your head, it'll get your attention. Capture it in Flow.
To do this, you need to add the item to one of your inboxes. You can do this manually, by creating a note and adding the item to it.
Or you can use the built in command 'Add to inbox' to add the item to your inbox. You can find a button to do this in the ribbon on the left (in a default setup) as well.
Remember that as Obsidian notes are simply text files, you can use any method to get your thought into your Flow inbox. This could be an Alfred workflow, a Siri Shortcut, a bookmarklet, an Android Tasker widget, Funnel on iOS, or one of many other ways.
We've heard lots of different techniques for capturing thoughts and ideas into Obsidian quickly and with minimal friction. While we don't have any recommendations ourselves, we'd love to hear how you've set up your sources so we can share them with other Flow users.
Two great articles on 'Quick Capture' which include lots of methods for capturing thoughts and ideas quickly:
- https://obsidian.rocks/obsidian-quick-capture/
- https://obsidian.rocks/obsidian-mobile-quick-capture/
- Nothing here yet, please let me know if you have a good quick capture method!
- https://actions.work/actions-for-obsidian
- https://www.notesightlabs.com/funnel
- https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9a6af22443414858bb6adade86a30f85
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en_GB
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.markor
- https://forum.obsidian.md/t/android-quick-input-for-obsidian/16336
- Run the command: Start processing
- Go through each item in your inbox and decide what to do with it
- Run the command: Open planning view
- Open the sphere you want to plan from (there are buttons to do this easily in the planning view)
- Enter planning mode
- Select a task in the sphere view to add it to your planned actions list
- Weekly review
- Better documentation
This plugin is currently closed source and the source code has a proprietary license. We will open source it in the future.
We rely on some other plugins for Flow to work. These are amazing plugins that we're so grateful to the developers for creating. Without both their functionality and their inspiration, Flow wouldn't be possible.