I am brand new to Obsidian but hardly new to the requirements of organising electronic documents, since I’ve been using personal computers from the beginning (of PCs that is). Can I first thank everyone for their contributions to this thread? It’s been most enlightening.
It seems that there are two main schools of thought here. The first approach uses folders to delineate different topics, knowing that linking and tagging can break out of this hierarchy as required. The second approach uses folders to indicate workflow, but with most notes (once polished) in one big container. That has never really suited the way I think or work.
My hard drives are a fascinating place. Considering only my project hard drive, where is stored material that I (not someone else) have created, there are 14 top-level folders. Some of these are divided by media (photos, videos, audio, design), some by content (poems, cv, code), some by work (teaching, project, papers), and still others have some sort of meta function (settings). No doubt there’s overlap, since audio and video get used in projects etc. etc. But having some sort of an overall structure helps my brain when I need to decide “where do I put this new thing”? So that’s my first point, based on pragmatism.
Using folders created by my operating systems helps when I need to do operating system type things, like copying to a different computer, backing up, etc. That’s simple utility.
While all that material won’t end up in Obsidian, obviously, a good deal of what is in my documents folder just might. This folder is full of general notes and research, with 16 subfolders. Perhaps that’s too many, so this transduction process (as I like to think of moving information to a new tool) will force me to rethink and reorganise. This doesn’t bother me, since no organisational structure is permanent. For me the tentative nature of a given folder hierarchy is no reason to abandon the idea of folders entirely. That’s my third point.
The way I store information is heavily constrained by the affordances of the OS folder structure. But this will also apply to my Obsidian vault. The tools and user interface Obsidian provides influences (or even dictates) how I will organise information. I am not sure that this point has been emphasised in this thread. Obsidian is not a value-neutral tool that permits all forms of knowledge organisation.
For example, the File Explorer panel can list a finite number of items without scrolling. Naturally this number depends on the size and resolution of your monitor, font size, eyesight, etc. For me it’s about two dozen. That’s a good number, because I cannot scan and comprehend more items than that in one go. So, that’s how many items I want in one folder.
Second example: The tool I’ve been using until now allows favourites to be stored in a two-level hierarchy. You choose the topic and within this you can list favourites in the order you want. The Obsidian star system is a flat hierarchy, though at least reordering is permitted. So that is another constraint on my use.
How I use a tool comes down to how much information I wish to process at a given time. The answer: not much.
If folders didn’t exist, I could create a note as an outline, then use this to re-implement a hierarchy. But this note would require maintenance that very soon would get out of hand.
The main reason I chose Obsidian is that it preserves an OS folder system, rather than putting everything into a database, for example. Not only that, Obsidian exposes this in the interface, so I get the best of both worlds.
I just have one or two requirements to solve and then I can get cracking! In the meantime, shouldn’t this long post be in a vault?