How To Use Obsidian: Dashboards Are OUT. THIS is IN.

Dashboards in Obsidian tend to waste time because they’re a separate “place” to visit, while real productivity comes from arranging the workspace itself so the right notes and views are already open when work starts. Jonathan Pritchard argues that a dashboard’s appeal—pretty layouts and clickable shortcuts—often turns into maintenance, tweaking, and frustration, especially when updates or context changes break the carefully built setup. His alternative is to treat Obsidian like an operating environment: use pinned tabs, keyboard shortcuts, and—most importantly—workspace layouts that can be recalled instantly.

In practice, Obsidian already remembers what was open when the app closes. If a user quits and reopens Obsidian, the same arrangement of tabs returns, which reduces the need for a dashboard-like landing page. Pritchard then leans into a core plugin: “Workspaces Save and Load workspace layouts.” By enabling it, users can create multiple named layouts (for example, a “normal” workspace with specific splits and pinned notes, plus a “clean” workspace with no extra panes). These layouts can be switched quickly through workspace management commands, effectively replacing the dashboard click-path with a single action that restores the environment exactly as intended.

He frames this as “dashboards are appearance of being productive,” while workspaces are how productivity actually happens. Instead of building a static page full of links and widgets that can’t be seen while doing real work, workspace layouts get out of the way and put the relevant context directly on screen. This matters even more for people using one vault for business, personal, and projects: workspaces let those contexts be rearranged without forcing cross-vault navigation.

A key complication arises with daily notes. If a workspace layout includes “today’s” daily note, that daily note becomes fixed to the date it was saved, not dynamically updated when the calendar changes. To solve that, Pritchard introduces a community plugin called “Homepage” (recently updated). Homepage can be configured to open a chosen note or canvas when Obsidian launches, and—crucially—to open “today’s daily note” rather than the specific daily note that was present when the workspace was created. It also supports different launch behaviors such as opening a graph view, a random file, or doing nothing; his recommended setup is to open a specific “home” workspace layout and then load today’s daily note into it.

He connects the system end-to-end: set hotkeys for daily note access (he uses Command D to open today’s daily note), then configure Homepage so that launching Obsidian from an empty state recreates the intended layout and swaps in the correct daily note for the current day. The result is a repeatable, dynamic startup experience that avoids dashboard maintenance while keeping daily-note workflows intact. The takeaway is philosophical as much as technical: stop building a “pretty control panel” and instead engineer the interface so work begins immediately, with the right context already loaded.