A comprehensive guide to organizing multiple types of Obsidian vaults for improved performance and workflow
Why Multiple Vaults
When I first began using Obsidian, I maintained a single vault for everything—personal notes, research materials, reference documents, and more. However, as my digital library grew, I noticed significant slowdowns in startup times and occasional freezing. This experience led me to rethink my approach to vault management.
The primary reasons I now use multiple vaults are twofold. First, I needed to separate my own thoughts from external content . This aligns perfectly with the Zettelkasten method’s recommendation to distinguish between your ideas and reference materials. Second, I wanted to optimize the performance of my main vault that contains my most important personal notes. By distributing content across purpose-specific vaults, I’ve achieved faster startup times, eliminated freezing issues, and significantly improved my note-taking and editing experience.
This distinction between personal and external content is an important one. In my note-taking system, I categorize notes as:
- Fleeting Notes : Quick, temporary notes that might be my own thoughts or content from external sources
- Permanent Notes : My personal insights, written in my own words and fully processed
- Literature Notes : My summaries and reflections on other people’s content, but written in my own words
The key insight here is that when we process external content through our own understanding (like with Literature Notes), it deepens our comprehension—similar to the Feynman learning technique where explaining a concept to someone else strengthens your grasp of it.
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