I have been taking my notes into obsidian for some time now, but the workflow still isn’t as smooth I thought it will be. Please hear me out and suggest what should I do or not do.
I am mostly studying varied topics for an exam, but do take random reads or videos as well. I keep them all in my vault. I changed my note storing structure quite sometimes.initially I liked the idea of keeping everything in one folder, but once my notes were large, it was hard finding them and remembering them if I even had them. So, I decided to keep an index, which became tiresome as well. At last I ended up with PARA system and it served my needs well, long term. But soon I realised there are problems with it too, since the file links are often not neat. By neat I mean, it needs to have an alias everytime (using relative naming) else it doesn’t look good and breaks flow. Why I need relative naming system is another point altogether. So, currently I have a system with basically 2 main folders – one for my exam and one for my general reads (resonance?) – and a few more like for journal, templates and imports. This system seems okay to me right now.
As far as I learned now, I think using tags is effective for managing files. The only thing that bothers me is when I know I have a topic which is part of a subject A, the topic itself has more and more notes (atomic?), which then have the same tag to the subject.
How to manage the thing? How to study later then? Or how to publish if I want to later on?
Other than this, I have problems involving devices. Since, I don’t have access of my laptop all the time, I use ipad for most of my readings. I keep the documents synced using Google Drive and Documents app on Ipad. Whatever I edit there, will sync when I see the file on laptop. But I can’t actively take notes in ipad. I don’t want to purchase 1writer or Notebook 10 (?) there. Any other option requires a lot of copying and pasting stuff. Plus I don’t know what files I have in my system.
I used tiddlywiki 5 for publishing my notes (so that I can read them even if I am not on laptop) via github pages, it worked fine but with folder system it fails.
Basically I would like to know about:
- As a student with multiple subjects to study, with defined syllabus and a lot of sources (and a lot to cover), how should I manage my vault structure?
- Should I take long notes or short? Since I have the topics aligned. I want to go for short as of now. It feels better.
- How to work cross platform? (free maybe)
- How to publish content? (not obsidian publish as of now). I tried many options like notenote.link, couldn’t really made it to work. Something or the other (obsidian syntaxes). I have my vault on github and Google drive though.
I was actually thinking of a workflow where I can read a pdf, annotate it, take my small notes inside it with Markdown style and then somehow export them as md files (all with a separate file). That way we don’t even need a text editor everywhere. If I am reading a topic, I can keep taking notes in pdf (on any device) and possibly link them as we go in plain text (since we know we are on a topic and we can go on making notes on subtopics). Then, when the reading is over, we can just extract the .md or txt files with file names as the first line of the note?
I tried zotero, exported all the notes, but it’s too clumsy. I mean, say I have a 1500 page document or a 500 page book, how will I manage annotations from it in a single doc? Also, it doesn’t take the context like Google Play Book does (for epubs though, sadly).
I think I wrote a lot here and too many things. I just wanted to discuss what should be done. And seeking suggestion from all of you fellow users.