Obsidian Dataview, building a second brain, and more about me // Q&A Livestream

A steady note-taking routine and a “second brain” built for active learning—not just storage—anchors Nicole van der Hoeven’s Obsidian workflow, with Dataview powering practical retrieval for meetings, people, and tabletop RPG worlds. Hitting over 1,000 subscribers prompted a Q&A livestream that quickly turned into a tour of how she turns scattered inputs into searchable knowledge, while keeping the system realistic enough to maintain.

Her approach starts with cadence. She processes notes daily rather than waiting for a weekly catch-up, choosing a time when she’s alert—around 9:00 p.m.—and less likely to be interrupted. The goal isn’t perfection; even if an inbox of captured items grows (she mentioned having 100+ unprocessed tags), the key is continuing to capture highlights and maintaining the habit of regular processing. For her, note-taking spans work and personal life without a hard boundary: meetings, calls, and even conversations with people she cares about become raw material for later review.

When asked how much time she spends, she estimates roughly one to two hours per day across the whole pipeline—highlighting, capturing, and processing. That time is distributed across contexts: notes from reading, notes from meetings, and notes created while talking to others. The system is designed to prevent backlog from becoming unmanageable.

For organization, she relies heavily on Obsidian “maps of content” (MOCs): parent pages that act as hubs for a topic, linking to related notes beneath them. She’s intentionally not strict about rigid methodologies—she creates pages when they feel useful and lets the network grow. In her D&D-oriented vault, this structure supports both rule research and worldbuilding, with metadata and templates feeding the rest of the system.

Dataview is the engine that makes those notes dynamic. She tags meeting notes with company and includes attendees, then links people to the meetings they attended so a person’s page can automatically list relevant past interactions. For tabletop RPGs, she uses Dataview to pull NPCs and factions by location, producing tables that update automatically as new notes are added—so she doesn’t have to manually maintain lists when players meet someone new.

She also addresses how she handles “fleeting notes” (single-line ideas) by logging them in Obsidian’s Daily Note plugin, treating it like a lightweight journal and later searching by tags or names. Tagging itself is selective: she mainly uses tags for checklists and feedback (including nested tags), while avoiding the mess that can come from overusing hashtags.

Beyond Obsidian, the Q&A widens into her broader productivity philosophy: she uses OKRs for goal-setting with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly review intervals, and she treats tasks like meetings by calendar-blocking through Reclaim. She also compares Obsidian to Notion, arguing that Obsidian’s flexibility (themes and CSS) and her ability to migrate away from Notion’s content calendar—using Fantasy Calendar—made the switch stick.

The livestream ends with personal context and travel stories, but the through-line remains consistent: tools matter, yet the real leverage comes from routines that keep information moving from capture to processing to retrieval, with learning as the purpose of the “second brain.”