The End of the “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” Problem: Announcing Cognitive Glow
Obsidian Plug In -If you’re tired of your vault feeling like a black hole, give it a spin.
There is a fundamental problem with how most knowledge management systems are built. They assume that if you write something down, it is safe, and that the only remaining challenge is organizing it.
But for many people; especially those of us with ADHD; the real danger is not disorganization. The real danger is disappearance. If a note scrolls off the “Recent Files” list and you can’t remember its exact title, it functionally ceases to exist. “Out of sight, out of mind” is an operating reality. A massive archive is useless if you lose the thread of what you were just working on simply because you walked away from the keyboard for two days.
I wanted a way to navigate my Obsidian vault using visual and spatial memorythe feeling of; “that bright cluster of notes I was working on yesterday”; rather than relying on string-matching search queries.
Today, I’m releasing a plugin that does exactly that. Cognitive Glow is officially available in the Obsidian Community Plugin registry.
What is it?
Cognitive Glow adds a dynamic heatmap sidebar to your vault. Every time you open a note, the plugin updates a “Glow Score.” The notes you use frequently and recently “glow” brightly in the UI. Over time, notes you ignore fade back into the darkness.
It does not try to be a second brain. It helps your actual brain find where it left off.
Built Under Strict Constraints
There are a lot of plugins that offer analytics or “smart” surfacing of notes, but they often require sending your vault data to an external API or running heavy background indexing tasks.
Cognitive Glow was engineered with a completely different philosophy:
Zero Network: There are no API calls. No hidden syncing. The plugin does not talk to the internet.
Minimal Persistence: It saves its data locally to a single JSON file. It doesn’t inject metadata into your actual notes.
No Heavy Runtimes: It is lightweight, using a custom decay algorithm that relies on just two variables: hit count (frequency) and last opened time (recency).
If a tool is meant to support cognition, it should not add anxiety about where your data is going. Cognitive Glow is completely auditable and completely local.
How to Get It
You can install Cognitive Glow today directly through the Obsidian app by searching for it in the Community Plugins tab.
You don’t need a perfectly curated taxonomy for your notes. You just need to be able to see where the heat is.
If you’re tired of your vault feeling like a black hole, give it a spin.