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💡 The Big Idea: How I Built a Master Content Calendar for All My Writing Projects in Obsidian.

This week, I spent some time figuring out how to create a master content calendar in Obsidian.

I wanted something that would show me all the newsletters, blog posts, video scripts, and other broadcast emails I needed to send all in one place.

But this isn't what I set out to build. This entire project started with what I thought would be a straightforward and simple task: make a master content calendar in Notion.

The Limitations of Notion

I started in Notion because that's where a lot of my collaborative content projects already live.

I currently have several databases in Notion, and they're all shared with different people:

• A YouTube Calendar database shared with my editor (Max)
• A Bookworm database shared with my co-host (Cory)
• A Focused database shared with my other co-host (David)

The problem? I don't want to create a new database, move everything over there, and have everyone rejoin.

So I tried to create a Calendar view that pulled together all of these databases. I figured if I could get that, it would be easy to add another one with all of my broadcast emails and newsletters.

After beating my head against the wall for an hour or two, ChatGPT & I both came to the realization that you just can't do this in Notion.

But then it dawned on me that I already know how to do this in Obsidian using the Bases core plugin.

Since I manage all my writing projects in Obsidian anyway, I decided I may as well try to create it there.

Creating the Calendar View in Bases

One of the quieter upgrades to Obsidian Bases was the release of the Bases API, which allows plugin developers to create additional views.

One of the beta plugins that was highlighted on social media by Obsidian CEO Steph Ango was the Obsidian Calendar Bases plugin. It's technically a beta plugin and needs the Full Calendar plugin installed to show things properly, but the end result is a monthly calendar view for your Base that displays items based on the date property that you set in the View settings.

So after about 10 minutes, I was able to create a Master Content Calendar view that shows all my newsletters, articles, emails, and YouTube videos on the same calendar:

The setup is pretty simple:

• The filters for the base include all notes in the Emails, Newsletters, Articles, or Video Scripts folders
• The publish dates are set based on the date property in the notes
• The emoji give me a visual indication of the platform (📬 = email, 🌐 = blog, ▶️ = YouTube)

This gives me a visual calendar of everything I need to publish or send. I can click on the note title to open the note and start writing, and I can still manage the status of these writing projects using the Kanban boards I wrote about here.

Command Central for All My Content

It's not just a Master Content Calendar, though. Using the same Base but multiple views, I created separate calendars for the different ways I wanted to visualize my creative projects.

For example, here's a simple one that adds an additional filter just for the current view that limits the results to just the notes in the Video Scripts folder that I use for YouTube:

I also have a view that shows me all the blog posts for my website, but because those could be in multiple folders that filter looks for notes where the platform property contains the 🌐 emoji:

I have another view that shows me all the emails I need to send, but again because these could be newsletters or just broadcast emails they may live in different folders so the filter looks for the 📬 emoji in the platform property. This view also shows the tags so I know what kind of email to send and those tags are visible on the calendar view as well:

I also have a view which lets me see me just the newsletters which has an additional filter that looks for the newsletter tag.

The one downside to this is that I do need to link to the Notion page for my collaborative projects, but it's really not that big a deal because I keep different kinds of information on those pages in Notion anyway.

For example, in Obsidian I write the full script for each YouTube video and then I take that text and put it in the Teleprompter Pro app when I record. But in Notion, Max & I collaborate on title and thumbnails ideas which often have multiple image attachments and comments.

Should You Add This to your Vault?

Personally, I love having this content calendar in my Obsidian vault (where I do all of my writing anyway).

But the real question is: Should you add this to YOUR vault?

It's complicated. But maybe.

The strongest workflows tend to be the simplest ones. As a general rule, if you can pull off what you want to do using core functionality, you should. This one not only uses a community plugin for Full Calendar, but also a beta plugin to extend the functionality of Bases.

The ideal scenario would be if I could do this all out-of-the-box.

And if you wait a couple months, you'll probably be able to.

The Obsidian team keeps a public roadmap that shows what features are planned and which ones they're actively working on. In the roughly 24 hours that I've been writing this post, a Calendar View for Bases was actually added to the Planned section:

I have no doubt this will be a better implementation, and will probably provide options for calendar views as well. A Kanban View for Bases is also planned, so it's quite likely I can replace my entire content creation workflow with native Bases features at some point in the near future.

Which means that if you're not in a rush to cobble something like this together, you may just want to wait a little bit.

That being said, the foundation of this Content Calendar is simply note properties filtered using Bases views. So even when I need to rework the views, I don't believe what I've done so far will be in vain as all of the underlying data will still be formatted correctly.

The Bottom Line: Obsidian Bases Makes a Killer Content Calendar.

Even though my creative workflows currently rely on beta and community plugins, I absolutely love this. I do think my workflow will get simpler once Bases adds the Kanban and Calendar views that are currently on the roadmap. It's quite possible that Bases becomes the only plugin I need to manage my creative workflows in the future. But for now, I love having my content planning calendar inside my Obsidian vault.

— Mike

P.S. It's been awhile since I did a live Practical PKM cohort, but the next one kicks off on January 5th! This one is also going to be the most affordable 😉 I'm still putting the finishing touches on everything, but click here if you want to know when it's open.