Gamifying Obsidian can be a powerful way to make your notes more accessible and engaging, whether it’s tasks, chores, activities, or even choosing recipes for next week’s dinners and shopping list.
Why randomness helps
While I enjoy many of Obsidian’s core features, such as Bases for managing notes and metadata, I still find it overwhelming when trying to sift through notes in search of inspiration I actually want to act on. The spreadsheet-like grid is easy to maintain, but its rigid structure can remove some of the flexibility and curiosity that made taking the notes worthwhile in the first place.
What should be a tool to help you remember good ideas can quickly start to feel like a chore. Instead of guiding you toward action, the focus shifts to reading and maintaining notes rather than making the small but meaningful choices that lead to doing something.
A thought experiment, The Dice Man
The Dice Man, published in 1971 by Luke Rhinehart, explores the idea of surrendering personal choice to randomness. The protagonist in the novel assigns actions and behaviors to dice outcomes and commits to following them, regardless of comfort or convention. While the experiment quickly drifts into the absurd and extreme, the core idea is surprisingly useful as a mental model.
The point isn’t to abandon responsibility or decision-making, but to expose how often we get stuck not because of a lack of options, but because there are too many. Randomness becomes a tool to bypass overthinking and habits, forcing action where analysis would otherwise stall it.
Applied in a controlled way, this idea can be liberating rather than chaotic. Instead of letting dice decide everything, they can help narrow the field, surface forgotten ideas, or gently push toward action you might otherwise postpone.
While I enjoy many of Obsidian’s core features, such as Bases for managing notes and metadata, I still find it overwhelming when trying to sift through notes in search of inspiration I actually want to act on. The spreadsheet-like grid is easy to maintain, but its rigid structure can remove some of the flexibility and curiosity that made taking the notes worthwhile in the first place.
What should be a tool to help you remember good ideas can quickly start to feel like a chore. Instead of guiding you toward action, the focus shifts to reading and maintaining notes rather than making the small but meaningful choices that lead to doing something.
From idea to practice
This is where introducing a controlled roll of the dice can help. By adding a layer of randomness, Obsidian can help break down an ocean of choices into smaller, more manageable parts.
Below is an example of how I use this approach for recipe planning with my implementation of a recipe roulete. Instead of scrolling endlessly through notes, I let Obsidian surface a small, randomized set of options to choose from.
The only prerequisite is the community plugin Dataview, with dataviewjs enabled in its settings. There is a link to the actual code snippets at the end of the post. The setup works equally well on mobile and desktop and is fully customizable, limited only by your imagination.
Here are a couple of use cases from my own workflow.
My top two use cases are recipe planning for dinners and finding activities for weekdays or weekends with the family, both making everyday life feel a bit more engaging and fun. The same template has since been reused for Read It Later, tasks, a movie picker, and book roulette. After all, notes aren’t meant to be hoarded, they’re meant to be used.
Snippets for Recipe Roulette & Activity Roulette Github Gist: Dataviewjs Roulettes
Comments