Time Garden Documentation
The complete Time Garden documentation — the free Obsidian journaling vault with five-layer temporal rollups and optional local-AI insights. Setup guides, feature explanations, troubleshooting, and the Celestial Vault flagship docs.
“Your journal will stand as a chronicle of your growth, your hopes, your fears, your dreams, your ambitions, your sorrows, your serendipities.” — Kathleen Adams
Journaling is hard.
Staying consistent, keeping track of what you've written, and overcomplicating things keep us stuck.
And it gets worse.
Meet Obsidian.md: the most powerful private digital notebook you will ever meet. The best community included.
The possibilities are endless. And that is the pitfall. The rabbit hole that can block any journaling-beginner.
This is why Time Garden exists.
It is the peak of a customised journaling experience within Obsidian. The prettiest daily-yearly rollup vault you've ever seen.
Keeping track of your past, gaining insights, and just having fun building your own sanctuary is just a quick installation away. Free to use.
So are you ready to start your own Time Garden?
How to navigate!
Notice how the entire Docs are full of Internal links
So for "So are you ready to start your own Time Garden?"
- "start" sends you to the setup tutorial
- "Time Garden" sends you to a general explanation of the system
What's in the Time Garden documentation
The Time Garden documentation covers everything from a 60-second installation to deep customization of the five-layer temporal rollup system. Whether you're brand-new to Obsidian or migrating a thousand existing notes, the guides below take you end-to-end.
Definitions — what Time Garden actually is
The conceptual ground floor: what Obsidian is, what temporal journaling means, and why Time Garden exists.
- What is Obsidian? — the private, file-based notebook Time Garden is built on
- What is temporal journaling? — the daily → weekly → monthly → quarterly → yearly rollup model
- What is Time Garden? — the full system tour
- Is Time Garden over-customised? — opinionated answer to the most common objection
Getting started — install in 60 seconds
Most users are journaling within five minutes of finding this page.
- Install Time Garden — download, unzip, open the vault
- Open the vault — first launch
- First steps — what to do on day one
- Internal links — how to navigate Obsidian like a pro
The five layers — daily to yearly
The heart of Time Garden: every entry automatically rolls up into longer-horizon views.
- Daily notes, weekly notes, monthly notes, quarterly notes, yearly notes
- Welcome dashboard — your launchpad each morning
Core features
The 30+ charts, 100+ template modules, and signature interactions.
- Navbar, rating system, aliases & AI titles
- Quick notes, picture gallery
- Wheel of Life, charts and visualisations, Q&A system
Time Garden Eternal — optional local AI
The paid layer that adds private, on-device AI summarisation, ratings, and insight Q&A.
- About Time Garden Eternal — what you get for $150 (lifetime)
- Install Ollama — run AI locally on your machine
- Choosing AI models — pick what fits your hardware
- Customising AI prompts — tune the analyses to your style
Customisation — make it yours
- Change the startup note, change banners
- Adjust templates, CSS snippets
- Merging an existing vault, updating Time Garden
Mobile, sync, and troubleshooting
Looking for the Celestial Vault?
Karl's flagship paid Obsidian vault — built on Time Garden, layered with self-organising notes, the Celestial theme, and four signature transition animations — now has its own home and its own docs: celestialvault.app (or jump straight into the Celestial Vault documentation ✦).