Creating a content calendar in Obsidian

Obsidian can be turned into a full content-calendar system—complete with table-like idea capture, Kanban-style workflow stages, and a true calendar view—by combining a few community plugins and a simple metadata workflow. The payoff is practical: a developer advocate can track blog posts, videos, presentations, and even code-related tasks through research, production, scheduling, and post-publishing steps without bouncing between tools like Notion.

The setup starts with the Kanban plugin, which provides the “board view” that Obsidian lacks natively. A single Kanban board becomes the content pipeline, with each list acting as a stage (for example: ideas/research, filming or writing, editing, scheduling, and post-publishing before “done”). Moving items between stages is straightforward, and each card can generate a linked note (“Create Note From Card”) so the workflow stays connected to the detailed task list. Those notes are where progress updates and checklists live—especially pre-production and post-production checklists.

To make new content notes fast and consistent, the Templates core plugin is used. When a new idea appears—say, a video—an inserted template pre-populates the fields and prompts needed for that content type (thumbnail, title, and other production considerations). Different templates can support different outputs and tones, such as separating personal-channel content from work content for k6.io. The result is less blank-page friction and fewer missed steps.

For “table view” style capture, the workflow leans on Markdown as the closest substitute. Instead of relying on a dedicated table interface, ideas are dumped quickly in Markdown, then converted back into the Kanban board view when it’s time to manage status. Visual cues help keep the board scannable: emojis are inserted via the Emoji Toolbar plugin (not as part of filenames), and thumbnails are added directly to cards so titles don’t have to be read to understand what’s coming.

Dates are handled with a deliberate workaround. While the Kanban plugin can attach dates to cards, the workflow avoids relying on card-level dates for sorting and filtering. Instead, dates are stored in note metadata so the calendar view can drive planning. That calendar view comes from Fantasy Calendar, a plugin originally built to track time in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Using its Gregorian preset, auto-incremented days, and event categories (e.g., Personal vs Work), content items are scheduled onto a “My Content Calendar.” From there, the calendar’s day view and expanded “big” month view show linked events; published items can even embed the video directly in the note so it plays from the calendar context.

By stitching these pieces together—Kanban for pipeline stages, Templates for repeatable note structure, Markdown for rapid idea capture, and Fantasy Calendar for scheduling—the workflow replicates the core strengths of Notion’s table/board/calendar combination. The end goal is consolidation: Obsidian becomes a single system for knowledge management, D&D tracking, and content planning, reducing reliance on Evernote, Notion, or Roam for day-to-day execution.