I’m new to Obsidian (and love it already) but find it hard to organize things.
I use Obsidian for 2 things:
Daily Notes (I already have an automated template that pops up in the correct folder etc.)
and 2) Notes from podcasts / courses / books etc…
and for the latter I need help. How do you guys organize this? Is that by course, by media, by subject… I tried by subject but that doesn’t play out the way I thought…
Maybe I need to just put everything under 1 file and use tags? What do you think?
I hope it’s clear for you what I mean… I’m just struggling as a beginner I find the learning curve a bit steep.
First of all, these are text files and you can always change your mind later on, so don’t overthink this, and just try it out a little, and see what feels right after in due time.
One of my focuses when creating notes, is how will I link to this note in the future? Will I like to do [[Name of book]], or will I rather like some other reference like [[How to avoid procrastination?]]. If going for a title or topic note titles, you can consider whether you want to only use frontmatter (see below) to differentiate the notes, or whether you’d want to put all notes from a given podcast in a given folder. The latter would allow for topic/titled links, but the folder organisation would give you some sense of cleanliness in the structure.
In any case, if you haven’t done so already, do look into using frontmatter to record organisational stuff like the origin of your notes. Try to keep stuff like original title, the source of the note, and episode/series/… information, and author.
Try to imagine what you might be interested in future searches, like if you don’t ever imagine searching for who was the author, then leave it out. And vice versa, if you really see a vital need for that search, be sure to insert it into the frontmatter.
So in short, be a little playful with your titles to see what you like, but be sure to include some information in the frontmatter to keep track of the origin of your notes, if that matters to you.
I put those kinds of notes in folders by media type (Media/Movies, Media/Nonfiction (long), etc). I don’t have a strong intellectual reason for this — it just feels more pleasant to browse that way, and keeps the number of files per folder somewhat under control.
If there is anything in the notes that applies more generally, I can copy it out of the media note into its own note files elsewhere (I like to keep the media notes as a record of my experience).
