# Time Garden — Documentation > Time Garden is a beautiful Obsidian journaling vault with optional local-AI features. The Celestial Vault is its closed-source flagship product. This index lists every documentation page with a short description; each is plain markdown at the linked URL. Site: https://timegarden.app Docs: https://timegarden.app/docs - [Time Garden Documentation](https://timegarden.app/docs): 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. ## 💛 Definitions - [What is Obsidian?](https://timegarden.app/docs/what-is-obsidian): A short intro to Obsidian — the local-first notebook app that Time Garden runs inside, and why it matters for journaling. - [What is Temporal Journaling?](https://timegarden.app/docs/what-is-temporal-journaling): How temporal journaling works: a five-layer time-based structure that turns daily entries into long-term insights. - [What is Time Garden?](https://timegarden.app/docs/what-is-time-garden): Time Garden is a sophisticated, free Obsidian journaling system that turns daily entries into long-term insights through five auto-aggregating layers. - [Is Time Garden Overcustomized?](https://timegarden.app/docs/is-time-garden-overcustomized): An honest look at the trade-offs of using Time Garden — what it costs, what it gives you, and who it is and is not for. ## 🌱 Getting Started - [Download and install Time Garden](https://timegarden.app/docs/install): Step-by-step installation of Time Garden: download Obsidian, download the vault, unzip, and open. Free. Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. - [Opening Time Garden](https://timegarden.app/docs/open-vault): How to open the Time Garden vault inside Obsidian for the first time, plus the introduction modal walkthrough. - [First Steps After Installation](https://timegarden.app/docs/first-steps): Your first 15 minutes inside Time Garden — what to click, what to ignore, and what to come back to once you have momentum. - [Internal links](https://timegarden.app/docs/internal-links): How wikilinks work in Obsidian and Time Garden — the navigation backbone of the entire docs site and your future journal. ## 🧰 Obsidian Basics - [Appearance Settings](https://timegarden.app/docs/appearance-settings): How to access and tune Obsidian appearance settings — themes, accent colors, and the CSS snippets that ship with Time Garden. - [Editor Settings](https://timegarden.app/docs/editor-settings): How to open Obsidian editor settings and what defaults Time Garden expects. - [Reading and Writing View](https://timegarden.app/docs/reading-and-writing-view): The difference between Obsidian Writing View and Reading View, and why most Time Garden interactivity only works in one of them. - [The Command Palette](https://timegarden.app/docs/command-palette): The Obsidian Command Palette is the single most useful keyboard shortcut for any Time Garden user. How to use it. ## 🪻 The Five Layers - [Daily Notes](https://timegarden.app/docs/daily-notes): The anatomy of a Time Garden daily note: banner, alias, rating, picture gallery, quick notes, AI buttons, and the Q&A box. - [Weekly Notes](https://timegarden.app/docs/weekly-notes): How weekly notes auto-aggregate seven days of entries into rolled-up summaries, charts, and a Wheel of Life snapshot. - [Monthly Notes](https://timegarden.app/docs/monthly-notes): Monthly notes turn a month of dailies into a single, navigable view of your life — with charts, summaries, and AI rollups. - [Quarterly Notes](https://timegarden.app/docs/quarterly-notes): Quarterly notes are the layer where the shape of your life starts to emerge — three months of patterns, one page. - [Yearly Notes](https://timegarden.app/docs/yearly-notes): The yearly note is the highest layer in Time Garden — the chronicle of your year, with auto-aggregating top days, summaries, and charts. - [The Welcome Dashboard](https://timegarden.app/docs/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. ## ✨ Core Features - [The Navbar](https://timegarden.app/docs/navbar): Every Time Garden note has a navbar at the top that lets you move through your journal without ever touching the file explorer. - [The Rating System](https://timegarden.app/docs/rating-system): The single number that powers half of Time Garden — how to use the daily rating, what it feeds, and how to keep it honest. - [Aliases & AI-Generated Titles](https://timegarden.app/docs/aliases-and-ai-titles): Aliases are short, human-friendly titles you (or the AI) give each note. They become the spine of every overview view. - [Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress](https://timegarden.app/docs/quick-notes): Highlights, Ideas, and Progress — the three quick-tap categories in Time Garden that auto-aggregate up through every layer. - [The Picture Gallery](https://timegarden.app/docs/picture-gallery): Drop a photo into a daily note. It auto-appears in your weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly galleries — forever, free. - [The Wheel of Life](https://timegarden.app/docs/wheel-of-life): The Wheel of Life is Time Garden’s eight-dimension life snapshot, tracked weekly, that reveals patterns across months and years. - [Charts & Visualizations](https://timegarden.app/docs/charts-and-visualizations): A tour of every chart Time Garden ships with — bar, line, polar, radar, progression — and what each is best at showing. - [The Q&A System](https://timegarden.app/docs/q-and-a-system): Ask any question of any period in Time Garden. Local AI answers from your own journal, with no data leaving your computer. ## 🔮 Time Garden Eternal - [What is Eternal?](https://timegarden.app/docs/eternal): Time Garden Eternal is the local-AI bundle that adds rollup summaries, auto-rated Wheel of Life, year-in-review, and Q&A. - [Installing Ollama](https://timegarden.app/docs/install-ollama): How to install Ollama, the local AI runtime that powers every AI feature in Time Garden Eternal. ~10 minutes, one-time setup. - [Choosing Your AI Models](https://timegarden.app/docs/choosing-ai-models): Pick the right AI model for each Time Garden operation — fast for short tasks, smarter for synthesis. Defaults are good. - [Customizing AI Prompts](https://timegarden.app/docs/customizing-ai-prompts): Every AI button in Time Garden runs a prompt you can customize. How to tune them so the AI sounds more like *you*. - [Chunking Settings Explained](https://timegarden.app/docs/chunking-settings): How chunking lets Time Garden’s AI summarize months and years that would otherwise exceed any model’s context window. - [Dealing with useless AI answers](https://timegarden.app/docs/useless-ai-answers): Generic AI output? Vague summaries? Hallucinations? The full troubleshooting flow for getting better AI answers. ## 🌗 Tweaking Time Garden - [Changing Daily Note Opening on Startup](https://timegarden.app/docs/change-startup-note): Time Garden opens today’s daily note on launch by default. How to change that to weekly, monthly, or no auto-open. - [Changing the Banners](https://timegarden.app/docs/change-banners): How to swap the rotating banners on Time Garden’s daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes. - [Understanding the CSS-Snippets](https://timegarden.app/docs/css-snippets): A guide to every CSS snippet that ships with Time Garden — what each one does, what to keep on, what to disable. - [Adjusting Templates Yourself](https://timegarden.app/docs/adjust-templates): Time Garden’s templates are editable. How to safely modify them to match your needs without breaking the system. - [Merging Time Garden](https://timegarden.app/docs/merging): How to combine Time Garden’s temporal journaling with an existing Obsidian vault — without losing what you already have. - [Updating Time Garden](https://timegarden.app/docs/updating): How to update the Time Garden plugin and templates when a new version ships, without losing your customizations. ## 📱 Mobile & Sync - [Opening Time Garden on Your Phone](https://timegarden.app/docs/mobile): How to open and use Time Garden on your phone — capture on mobile, reflect on desktop. - [Syncing Time Garden Between Devices](https://timegarden.app/docs/sync): A comparison of every sync option for Time Garden — Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Syncthing, Dropbox — with honest trade-offs. ## 🐞 Troubleshooting - [Daily note bugs](https://timegarden.app/docs/daily-note-bugs): Common visual glitches and weird states in Time Garden daily notes, and the fast fixes for each. - [AI not responding or Ollama issues](https://timegarden.app/docs/ollama-troubleshooting): When AI buttons stop working — the diagnostic flow for Ollama connection issues, missing models, and silent failures. - [Performance & Slowness](https://timegarden.app/docs/performance): When Time Garden feels slow — the actual things that fix it, not the things that sound right but don’t help.