[Obsidian] Improve inbox processing features

For two years my system had the same death cycle. Capture notes all week. Inbox fills up. Open Obsidian on Friday feeling vaguely guilty. Spend 40 minutes reorganising instead of processing. Close it. Repeat. I rebuilt the vault twice. Tried four different folder structures. Added plugins I never used. Nothing worked — because none of it was the actual problem. The problem was simple: notes were coming in and nothing was moving them forward. Ever. The inbox wasn't a system. It was a waiting room where ideas went to be forgotten slowly. What fixed it was one 45-minute session, every Friday, run the same way every time. No exceptions. Here's the exact sequence: **0–5 min — Orient, don't evaluate.** Notebook open. Obsidian inbox on screen. Phone face down. Just locate the week's material. How many pages? How many inbox notes? Get a rough sense of volume. Nothing is being judged yet. **5–20 min — Process the notebook.** One page at a time. For each entry: still interesting or not? Tick for yes, line through for no. No maybes — a maybe is just a no you're too tired to make. Then classify each marked entry: does it become a permanent note, a literature note, or does it just add to something already in the vault? **20–30 min — Process the Obsidian inbox.** Same sequence. Read, mark, classify. Delete anything that doesn't survive the filter. This block ends at zero — not zero except the hard ones. Zero. Hard ones either get developed or get deleted. Leaving them is procrastination with a productivity label. **30–42 min — Write the notes.** Only block where real writing happens. Rewrite every marked note in clean language — never copy-paste. The rule: write it as if explaining to yourself two years from now who remembers nothing. If you can't rewrite it clearly, you didn't understand it. That's useful to know now. For each note, spend 20 seconds looking for one existing note to link it to. One connection. That's enough. **42–45 min — Close the loop.** Line through the processed notebook pages. 90 seconds scanning what you wrote today — any open questions worth flagging for next week? Then close cleanly. Inbox at zero. Pages archived. Done. Typical output: three to five permanent notes, one or two literature notes. That's a productive week. That's the whole thing. Two things that took me too long to understand: **More notes is not better.** A vault of 400 excellent notes beats 2,000 mediocre ones every time. The whole power of the system — the surfacing, the unexpected connections — only works if every note in there is worth engaging with. Mediocre notes are noise. The processing session exists to filter ruthlessly, not to preserve everything. When I'm on the fence about a note I ask: *would I want to link to this six months from now, when I'm thinking about something completely different?* Yes — develop it. Maybe — it's a no. **Consistency is the only metric that matters.** One missed Friday is fine. Two in a row starts building the weight that eventually turns Obsidian into something you open once a month and feel bad about. Protect the session the way you'd protect a meeting with someone important. Because the meeting is with your future self. Happy to answer any questions on the note types, linking logic, or inbox structure. I also wrote a full article walking through this in detail — including how a fleeting note becomes a literature note becomes a permanent note, with real examples from Kahneman, Gawande, Newport and Burkeman. Each example shows the actual thinking process, not just what the notes look like. And if you want the whole system set up in Obsidian from scratch, there's a book on Kindle for $2.99. **Drop a comment or DM — I'll send both links.** [*https://medium.com/@mohammadzeyaahmad/the-45-minute-weekly-ritual-that-stops-your-notes-from-becoming-a-graveyard-fe87cbf0b6e9*](https://medium.com/@mohammadzeyaahmad/the-45-minute-weekly-ritual-that-stops-your-notes-from-becoming-a-graveyard-fe87cbf0b6e9)