Take Fleeting Notes in Obsidian

A practical system for “fleeting notes” in Obsidian is built on one core idea: capture fast, then route each note into the most useful destination—without forcing every thought to become a permanent note. After months of trial and error, Joshua Duffney’s workflow treats fleeting notes as highly flexible material that can later turn into tasks, literature notes, permanent notes, project notes, or even long-term learning references. The payoff is fewer blank moments about what to do next and less overwhelm from the expectation that every note must be expanded into a full write-up.

Fleeting notes arrive in two main forms: tasks and ideas. Ideas can mature into tasks, but they can also be filed as research leads, queued for later reading, or attached to ongoing projects. A morning example illustrates the speed and variety: after waking early, Duffney captures ideas triggered by reading (including a note tied to “Think Fast and Slow”), a reminder about being focused and present for his wife, and a new idea sparked by a YouTube comment about managing multiple Obsidian vaults. None of these wait in an inbox. Instead, they’re pulled into Obsidian and immediately tagged so they can be rediscovered when relevant.

A key shift comes from rejecting “processing” as synonymous with expansion. In the Smart Notes mindset, it’s easy to assume a fleeting note must be turned into a literature note or permanent note. Duffney’s experience is different: many fleeting notes simply need a place to go so they can be cataloged and stumbled upon later. That requires lightweight “garbage collection,” but it prevents the system from stalling under the weight of constant rewriting.

To make routing automatic, Duffney uses tags and dynamic lists to build collections of fleeting notes. When an idea becomes relevant to current work, it gets moved into a collection tied to that context. For instance, a note about “Think Fast and Slow” becomes useful research for a book manuscript. Rather than interrupt current deep work, the note is tagged into a collection system for productivity, which then triggers a related task in the project area—keeping momentum while still preserving the idea for later.

Project notes act as dashboards. In a “knowledge worker” project note, Duffney uses queries to surface essay sections and link to permanent notes that are being drafted. Once those permanent notes are ready for editing, the system can pull in the earlier fleeting ideas as supporting material. The same approach scales to learning: when starting a new language project like Go, he creates separate collections for reading lists and “watch later,” filtering content by learning modality. Within those collections, permanent notes represent progress (e.g., “Installing Go”), while fleeting notes become references such as language specs that will be reused.

The system’s central promise is practical: fleeting notes should be processed into the most relevant bucket, not into a single mandatory end product. Duffney frames the result as a solution to both sides of the problem—no more uncertainty about what to do next, and no more fear that every note must become a 30-minute permanent note.