How Mike Schmitz uses the Obsidian app as a Content Creator | LYT House Episode 2

Mike Schmitz uses Obsidian as a “brain map” for turning books, sermons, and writing into searchable, connected knowledge—without letting note-taking become a passive text dump. The core move is structuring notes so they can be queried later (via tags, folders, and links) and then forcing a synthesis step (like a strict three-sentence summary) so insights turn into usable thinking.

His book workflow starts with YAML metadata at the top of each note, including separate ratings (his and Joe’s) and tags that classify the entry. Dataview then pulls those ratings into sorted lists, letting him answer practical questions like “best books I’ve read” by browsing Obsidian rather than relying on memory. Each book note also links out to the book’s page, the episode’s MP3 from Libsyn, and the bookworm website links gathered at publish time. For deeper understanding, he builds a Mind Node mind map (published as an interactive iframe) and then exports the mind map to Markdown so the content can live inside Obsidian with proper headers and internal links.

A key theme is signal vs. noise. Schmitz adds “action items” from reading, tracks only incomplete tasks in a task format, and uses an emoji system (quotes, key ideas, mind-blown moments, talking-head icons) to make scanning faster. He also treats “belief” as something that changes through a learning loop: needs and beliefs drive actions and results, feedback reshapes beliefs, and the cycle repeats. That mindset shows up in how he reads and summarizes—especially in his “three-cent summary,” a constraint he uses to distill what matters into exactly three sentences. He says the difficulty of choosing what to include reinforces the same signal-vs-noise principle.

For reading strategy, he leans on Mortimer Adler’s “levels of reading” (inspectional, analytical, and synoptic/“centopical”), framing reading as a conversation where disagreement is allowed. He connects this to creativity too: after feeling blocked by the myth of originality, he draws on Austin Kleon’s “connect the dots” idea—creativity as a process of collecting and linking better inputs rather than inventing from scratch. In practice, he uses Obsidian to represent his thinking visually and structurally, including graph-based connections.

His most distinctive workflow is “atomic note taking” for sketch-note sermon study. He redraws key ideas from sermons as images in GoodNotes, then breaks scripture into one-verse-per-file “atomic” notes. Obsidian’s local graph lets him click a verse reference (e.g., Galatians 5:22) and instantly surface every sermon note that used it, giving him context and a visual memory trail. He says this helps him prepare to preach by quickly identifying themes from past sermons.

Beyond knowledge capture, he uses Obsidian for planning and review. He runs personal retreats inside Obsidian with a radar chart (via a charts view plugin) to visualize a “wheel of life” and sets goals based on low-scoring areas. He journals with “daily questions” scored 1–10, then uses the Tracker plugin to render line charts over time so he can spot dips, click into the underlying days, and adjust systems.

Finally, he manages writing projects with Kanban: article notes live in an articles folder, while a Kanban board tracks status and due dates, with drag-and-drop movement between columns. Across all these workflows, the throughline is consistent: capture in plain text, connect aggressively, and synthesize on purpose so notes become decisions, outputs, and feedback loops—not just stored quotes.