The Welcome Dashboard
The Welcome Dashboard is the front door of your Time Garden — a customizable home base linking to today, this week, and this month.
The Welcome Dashboard is the front door of your Time Garden. It lives at 00 Dashboard/Welcome.md and is the first note you'll see after opening the vault for the first time.
What's On It
A Banner
A subtle animated banner sets the tone. Swap it for any image or video file you'd like (see Changing the Banners).
Today's Quick Links
A live-updating line that always points you to:
- Today's daily note — clickable link with today's day name
- This month — clickable link to the current month
- This week — clickable link to the current week's note
These auto-update every time you open the dashboard. No maintenance.
Tutorial + Docs Callouts
Two prominent callouts:
- A 🎬 link to the video tutorial
- A 📚 link to this very documentation site
You can delete these once you've outgrown them.
Why It Exists
Most users open Time Garden directly into today's daily note (configured in the journals plugin). But the Dashboard is your home base — a place to land when you don't know where to go, or when you want a moment of orientation before diving in.
Pin the Welcome tab.
Right-click the Welcome tab → "Pin tab". Now it stays open across sessions, always one click away.
Customizing It
The Welcome Dashboard is a regular markdown note. You can:
- Add your own quick links (e.g., a link to a long-running project note in
07 Notes/) - Add a quote you want to see every day
- Add a checklist or "this month's intention" field
- Embed dataview queries for custom dashboards (e.g., "all daily notes from the last 7 days where rating ≥ 8")
- Embed an image or video that means something to you
Treat it as your personal cover page. You're the only one who'll ever see it.
What Lives In 00 Dashboard/
By default, the folder also contains a Question ideas for Q&A.md note — a list of starter questions you can ask the AI when you don't know what to query yet. Feel free to add your own ideas there too.
You can drop additional dashboard-style notes in this folder at any time — for example:
- A "Reading list" note
- A "Year intentions" note
- A "People I want to call back" note
The folder name is just a convention; nothing in Time Garden's logic depends on it.
Up Next
- Daily Notes — the heart of the system
- Changing Daily Note Opening on Startup — make daily, weekly, or no note open on launch
- Internal links — how Obsidian's wikilinks make dashboards possible