u/highcryer

Hello all,

I wanted to share about my journey with Obsidian - maybe it can help others. I recently grew out of my vault and therefore searched a lot for ideas and principles on how to design it for the future and this is what I came up with. I have been inspired by a youtube video and an article:

https://stephango.com/vault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq3R3uS0sQ4&t=1321s

The before:

My previous system was heavily relying on a folder structure and tags.

For example I had folders for work, travel, productivity, projects, politics etc...

The main issue with this system were the constraints of using a folder system. To give an example, let's say I had a note about a business travel, should I put it into the travel or the work folder? In the end I put it in the work folder and created a tag #travel  - not good.

The principles:

1. Friction sucks. The new system must be as easy as possible to apply

2. Scalability. My vault grew a lot and is still. I need a system that can grow without restrictions.

3. Search is king. Omnisearch is cool on mobile, however on PC (Linux Fedora) I am using Neovim and Telescope - it's just the fastest way to access everything at the speed of light. I'm a nerd. Forgive me please.

The after:

YAML Frontmatter became one of my main helpers to give notes more structure and meta data. In order to reduce friction as best as possible I am using many templates. Inside frontmatter I am relying on three main fields for organization:

1. "type": "What type of information is it?" Examples: Book, Article, Bookmark, Document, Quote. Important: I created those types before as separate notes and link them inside Frontmatter - for example: [[quote]]. This creates backlinks and makes it incredibly easy to use bases as filters

2. "Contexts": "Where does it belong to?" - A list of contexts where this note belongs. For example [[travel]], [[work]]. You see: Also here I created contexts as notes and link them - super cool!

3. Tags: "What is the status of this note?". for example #todo when the note is not finished and something important is missing. Or #want for a book that I want to read but have not done, or #closed for a project that has been finished. For me the key to success is having limited myself to just a handful of defined tags instead of inventing new ones every day.

I changed a couple of other things:

Folder structure simplified: I have only a couple of folders: notes, contexts, types, attachments, templates. That's it. Technically it could make sense to reduce even more by merging contexts and types into the notes folder - and I might even do so in the future. However for the moment I decided to keep it like this.

Field "Owner" added to some types, for example to a Bank account or an insurance contract. I link this to dedicated persons, such as [[me]] or [[wife]].

Lessons learnt:

- no system is perfect. I found again some things that might bother me in future

- A system that works for me might not work for you. Individual people need individual solutions.

- Having no or a bad system is better than not having any notes at all. You can still search and see it as a starting point.

There you have it. Hope you enjoyed the read and I am open to hear further ideas and suggestions, how to improve. Thanks

Hello,

I recently watch a video on a very friction-reduced approach to Obsidian. I like it a lot and think about redesigning my vault.

The key concept here is the usage of categories and bases for organizing notes.

My question is: Why categories and not tags? Categories seem to me like someting completely custom made inside properties whereas tags are a native feature built into Obsidian and not that different. I would be thankful for some experience and help understanding this.

Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq3R3uS0sQ4&t=1321s

And the underlying article from the original author: https://stephango.com/vault

Thanks all!