Effort Index

Measure the editing time and revision effort behind every note, then resurface the expensive ones you stopped reading.

Your vault does not tell you what anything cost. A note you rewrote seven times over three months looks exactly like a note you pasted in and never touched again. Effort Index measures the difference — and then shows you the notes you paid the most for and have not opened since.

Part of the Second Read suite (Note Decay, Standing Questions, Effort Index, Prior Art, Unwritten). Works fully offline. One Pro key unlocks all five.

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What it measures

Active editing time	Not "time with the file open". A burst of keystrokes ends after 60 seconds of silence, and the silence is never counted — the note is credited with the span of the keystrokes themselves. Leaving a note open on a second monitor for eight hours earns it nothing.
Revision sessions	Editing bursts more than 30 minutes apart are separate revisions. "Rewritten five times" is a different fact from "typed for two hours once".
Dwell time	Wall-clock time the note was the note you were looking at — paused the moment the window loses focus.
Coldness	Days since you last opened it.

The read surface

Show expensive notes (command, or the sidebar view): the most expensive notes you have not opened in 90 days, ranked by measured editing time. That list is the plugin. Everything above exists to make it honest.

Also: Show effort for this note, Export effort data as CSV, and Clear the activity log.

Privacy — read this

This add-on records, on your device only, which notes you open and how long you spend editing them.

• The log lives in <vault>/.obsidian/second-read/signals/.
• It never leaves your machine. There is no network request, no account, no telemetry, and no phone-home — not for tracking, not for licensing.
• Delete the folder to erase it, or use Clear the activity log in settings.
• If you sync your .obsidian folder, the log syncs with it, and "when did I open this note" becomes cross-device history. If you do not want that, exclude the folder from your sync tool.

The log is shared with Note Decay (it needs last opened; we need editing time; both come from the same events). Exactly one Second Read add-on writes to it at a time — the others read. Installing Effort Index a year after Note Decay means it starts with a year of history instead of nothing.

Settings

Idle cutoff (60 s), minimum session (5 s), revision gap (30 min), dwell cap (30 min), cold after (90 days), retention (730 days), excluded folders, and the activity-log controls.

Pro adds: the orphan threshold (0.45), the topic threshold (0.60), how many notes a semantic scan looks at (40), and the semantic-engine controls.

Pro

Free covers everything above, on desktop and mobile, with no engine and no network. Second Read Pro — $29 one-time, one key for all five add-ons:

• Orphaned investment — the expensive notes whose ideas were never reused anywhere else in your vault. Each note's own text is compared against the rest of the vault; a note whose closest counterpart scores below 0.45 is one where the hours went in and nothing came out. Open the Orphaned tab in the expensive-notes panel, or run Find expensive notes nobody reused.
• Topic-grouped effort reports — the same expensive-notes list, collected into the subjects it actually belongs to, so "where did the time go?" answers eleven hours on storage rather than forty file names. The By topic tab, or Group the effort report by topic.

Both compare notes by meaning, so both need the local semantic engine described below. Desktop only. If you have no engine installed, both say so plainly and offer to install one — neither ever returns an empty list you could mistake for "nothing found".

Second Read Pro — $29 one-time. One key unlocks Pro in all five Second Read add-ons (Note Decay, Standing Questions, Effort Index, Prior Art, Unwritten). Buy here: https://buymeacoffee.com/vaultspotlight/e/560213 — the key is emailed to you automatically, within seconds (delivery is fully automated) and pasted into settings; it is verified offline.

The semantic engine (Pro, desktop only)

The Pro features need a local embedding engine. This is the part to read carefully, because it is the part that runs a program on your computer.

• Nothing is downloaded until you click. The engine is fetched only from the settings tab (or the install offer in the panel), and only after a modal has shown you the exact URL, the version, the SHA-256, and the directory it will be written to.
• The checksum is verified before anything is run. On a mismatch the file is deleted and nothing is extracted, made executable, or spawned. The installed binary is re-checked against that digest on every start.
• It is installed outside your vault — %LOCALAPPDATA%\second-read-engine on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/second-read-engine on macOS, ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/second-read-engine on Linux. This add-on therefore reads and writes files outside your vault, and this line is that disclosure. It stays out of .obsidian/ on purpose: so your sync tool does not replicate 100 MB of binary to your phone.
• It opens no network connections. It speaks JSON over stdin/stdout to Obsidian and nothing else — no port, no listener, no server. It exits when Obsidian does.
• It never updates itself. When a newer version exists you are shown an Update engine button. Nothing happens until you press it.
• One engine, five add-ons. All the Second Read add-ons share a single engine process and a single index; installing a second one does not spawn a second engine.
• You can bring your own. Set Path to an existing engine in settings and nothing is ever downloaded — the escape hatch for antivirus quarantine, noexec mounts and Flatpak confinement.

Source for the engine: github.com/israerusan/second-read-engine.

Install

Community plugins (recommended): open Settings → Community plugins, search Effort Index, and install it — one click, auto-updates.

Manual install: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/effort-index/.

Feedback and support

Bug reports, feature requests, and questions all go to the GitHub issue tracker. It is the only place I track them, so an issue will always get further than a review comment.

• Report a bug — please include your Obsidian version, your operating system, and the steps that reproduce it.
• Request a feature — describe the workflow you are trying to make faster; that is more useful than a proposed solution.
• Browse open issues — worth a look first, in case it is already tracked.

More plugins by the same author

Small, local-first Obsidian plugins that each do one job and keep your data in your vault. All of them are in the community directory — search the name under Settings → Community plugins.

Search and views

• Vault Spotlight — keyboard-first command center — fuzzy search, saved workflows, and result actions.
• Bases Power Pack — kanban, calendar, Gantt, and outline views over your notes or a .base file.

Vault health

• Vault Triage — find stale, orphaned, unfinished, and metadata-broken notes, then work through them.
• Attachment Audit — find orphaned, duplicate, oversized, and misplaced attachments, then clean them up safely.
• Patina — score every note's staleness from edits, opens, and inbound links.
• Vault Router — move new notes out of Inbox with fast local routing rules.
• FlowKit Health Dashboard — find which add-on is breaking your vault, and score every one installed.

Writing and research

• Prose Lens — live writing feedback — passive voice, adverbs, hedges, cliches, and a reading grade.
• Prior Art — show similar existing notes while you write, and merge duplicates without losing links.
• Standing Questions — track the open questions in your vault and surface new notes that may answer them.
• Unwritten — report the notes you never wrote — unexplained link pairs, stub hubs, unreasoned decisions.

Time and billing

• Task Calendar Bridge — export dated Markdown tasks to standards-based ICS calendar files.
• Invoice Forge — turn #billable notes into numbered invoices, so nothing is missed or billed twice.
• Time Tracker and Invoicing — track billable time against notes and projects, then invoice by client.

Development

npm install
npm run lint      # tsc + the review bot's own eslint ruleset, zero warnings
npm test          # lint + vendored-core drift check + the test suite
npm run build     # production bundle
VAULT=/path/to/vault npm run install:vault

src/shared/ is vendored from obsidian-plugin-core — never edit it here. Run npm run sync:shared to pull; npm test fails on drift.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.