Nine templates, 255 lines: what I measured before calling it a system

I sell an Obsidian template pack (Working Notes, $6). Before I could write
that sentence honestly, I ran the numbers on the files themselves — because "9 templates" is a count, and
a count is not a claim about whether anyone will still be using them in March.

Here is what the measurement said, what it exposes about template packs in general (mine and everyone
else's), and the four checks you can run on any pack before you spend money on it.

The numbers

Nine Markdown files, no plugins, no automation:

area-dashboard.md      37 lines  14 tokens   8 headings  1 checkbox   3 table rows
book-note.md           29 lines  13 tokens   7 headings  1 checkbox
daily-journal.md       23 lines   5 tokens   4 headings  1 checkbox
meeting-notes.md       26 lines  16 tokens   6 headings  4 checkboxes
one-on-one.md          27 lines  14 tokens   6 headings  4 checkboxes  3 table rows
project-note.md        27 lines  14 tokens   6 headings  2 checkboxes  3 table rows
reference-note.md      28 lines  11 tokens   6 headings
source-note.md         28 lines  15 tokens   7 headings
weekly-review.md       30 lines  12 tokens   7 headings  2 checkboxes

Totals: 9 files · 255 lines · 9,837 bytes · 114 {{placeholder}} tokens
        57 section headings · 15 checkboxes · 9 table rows

Three things came out of that table that I did not expect when I wrote the files.

The longest file is the one I use least, and the shortest is the one I use daily. area-dashboard
is 37 lines with 8 headings; daily-journal is 23 lines with 4. The dashboard is the file that should
be used monthly, so length is tolerable there — but it's the honest example of the failure mode: a page
with eight sections is a page where you fill three and feel behind about the rest. The journal survives
because it has nowhere to be incomplete.

114 placeholders across 255 lines is roughly one decision made for you every 2.2 lines. That number
is the whole product. A template with two placeholders under-specifies — you're writing the structure from
scratch every time, which is the thing you were trying to stop doing. A template with twenty-five turns
into a form, and forms get skipped by week three. I don't have a universal threshold, but I now have a
way to count mine, and you can count yours.

Only 15 checkboxes across nine files, and 8 of them are in exactly two templates (meeting-notes and
one-on-one, 4 each). That's deliberate: action items are the only content that reliably leaks out of a
note into the rest of your week. Book notes and source notes have no checkboxes at all, because a reading
to-do list inside a reading note is a second system nobody maintains.

The one structural decision that carries the pack

project-note.md has a table with five columns:

| Date | Decision | Options you weighed | Why this one | Revisit by |

Everything else in the file — the done-definition, the next three actions, the blocked list — is
reconstructable later. The "why" column is not. Six weeks out you will remember that you chose the
monthly ceiling over the weekly one; you will not remember that the weekly one had been missed twice, or
that the runner-up was a per-client cap. That single column is the reason a decision log beats a notes
paragraph, and it's the only line in the pack that costs you anything to fill in honestly.

The same reasoning shaped area-dashboard.md, which exists because an area — money, health, a client, a
house, a subject you're studying — has no deadline. Nothing forces you to look at it. A project gets
attention from its due date; an area only gets attention from a page you agreed to read on a cadence,
which is why that file opens with a review-cadence line and a "last reviewed" date rather than content.

What this pack does not do

Worth saying plainly, because most listings in this category don't:

• No plugins. The archive ships a .obsidian/ folder with two config files so it opens as a sane vault on first run. Nothing in it requires Community plugins, Dataview, Templater or Tasks, so it will not break when a plugin updates or an author abandons one.
• No automation. Nothing fills itself in. A template is a decision about what to write down; the writing is still yours. Any product that promises otherwise is selling you a second system to maintain.
• No sync or publishing. Obsidian's own app is free, including for work — the commercial licence requirement was dropped in February 2025 — and Sync and Publish are optional services this pack does not need.
• No promise that nine is the right number. It's nine because those are the events that repeat: meetings, one-on-ones, projects, areas, reading sources, references, daily notes, and the weekly review that connects them. If your week doesn't have one of those, don't buy the pack for it.

Four checks to run on any template pack before you pay

I'd rather you use these than take my word for it — including on the files above.

1. Count the lines of a single template. wc -l *.md. Over 50 lines, ask how many sections you'd realistically fill on a bad day, not a good one. Templates are used on bad days.
2. Count the placeholders. grep -o "{{[^}]*}}" file.md | wc -l. Too few and it's a blank page with a title; too many and it's data entry. Compare that number to lines, not to your hope for yourself.
3. Check whether anything is un-reconstructable. A good template reserves at least one field for information you genuinely cannot recover later — the options you weighed, the reason, the exact wording someone used. If every field is inferable, the template is a formatting preference.
4. Check what happens on week three. Ask whether the pack requires a review ritual to stay useful. If it does, the review is the actual product and the templates are accessories — which is fine, as long as the listing says so. Mine ships a 30-line weekly review because I think that's true, and I'd rather you buy it knowing.

The uncomfortable general finding

The most useful thing in the pack is the shortest file in it, and the file I'm proudest of is the one I
use least. That gap isn't about Markdown structure — it's about the fact that a template's cost is paid
every time you open it, while its benefit arrives weeks later, usually to a version of you who has
forgotten what the benefit was for.

Anything that reduces the per-use cost wins, even if it looks less capable. That's why the daily journal
is 23 lines and why the meeting template puts its four checkboxes at the bottom where they can be filled
in under a minute of leaving the room.

Measure your own before you buy someone else's — mine are in the table above, and they are $6 if the
shape is the one you were already reaching for: Working Notes: 9 Obsidian Templates.
There's a free five-question self-check for your current vault at
monkeyrun-dr51ev2mrte.qoder.website if you want the
diagnosis first.