#1

Hi everyone!

I’m looking for examples of high-level categories for the “Home” note. For example, here are “Home” note categories from @nickmilo LYT Kit: (I allow myself to copy/paste from his Obsidian Publish, since he posted the link to it on another forum LYT Kit (now downloadable!))

Inner-led Sense-making
01 - Mindsets
02 - Writings
Things
03 - Concepts
04 - Interests
Outer-led Sense-making
05 - Sources
06 - People
Personal Management
07 - Health
08 - Goals
09 - Projects
10 - PKM

I like Johnny Decimal high-level categories. I like Inner/Outer division. I think “Things” could be under Inner or Outer, depending on what they are, but still there could be “Things” that are not Inner/Outer. Sometimes I see “Personal Management” separated from “Knowledge Management”, I think that would be better. As a side note, I’m an academic with very interconnected personal and professional life. I think I need “Teaching”, “Learning”, “References”, “Ideas” categories. At work I have a huge “Administration” category.

My question: Can others post their high-level categories from the “Home” note? Can you comment about what is a good/bad idea to include/exclude? I’m looking for some inspiration and good examples to start with.

Thank you to the community and thank you to Obsidian developers, both are amazing!

4 Likes
#2

Funnily enough I ran into the exact problem yesterday and am also wondering what others have to say.

I don’t like the LYT Kit categories since they aren’t very close to me. I very rarely work in the Concepts, Writings or Mindsets area (might want to work on that), while I’m programming pretty much on a daily basis and having Programming tucked away under interests doesn’t sit right with me.

1 Like
#3

Here’s my setup (if you haven’t seen it already — :sweat_smile: programming is under my interests, because it’s not my major focus — newsletters and stories are).

  • 00 Meta
    • 01 Attachments (sometimes attachments wind up in other places, this isn’t a hard-and-fast “attachments only go here” thing)
    • 02 Pending (for stuff I still need to process)
      • 02.01 Personal (stuff I created on my eink tablet and need to type up, mostly)
      • 02.02 PDFs TBR (this is where zotfile automatically sorts all of my PDFs to as soon as I download them while researching)
      • 02.03 PDFs Underway (this is articles I’ve started reading but didn’t have time to finish for whatever reason).
      • 02.04 Readwise (this is where the Readwise plugin dumps all of my highlights and stuff from Readwise, for processing)
      • 02.05 Zotdumps (this is where the mdnotes-zotero workflow dumps my highlights from academic PDFs.
    • 03 Structure (these are my meta-notes about how my vault is structured, and where I put my “example notes” for things like the Palatinate snippets)
    • 04 Templates
    • 05 Tools (I keep “index notes” about external tools for different workflows here, for example my “research tools” has Zotero and Unpaywall and such on it. I also have one for useful Obsidian plugins that get asked about a lot)
    • 06 Tasking (todo lists)
    • 07 Process (meta notes about notetaking, which I mostly try to avoid)
    • 08 Platform (notes about marketing / branding / finding an agent / etc)
  • 10 Dated
    • 11 Daily Roundups (this is where my daily notes — see link for template — go)
    • 12 Feedback (this is where my edit letters, fiction critique obligations, etc go).
    • 13 Monthly Roundups (this is where the raw data dumps for monthly spaced repetition / reflection stuff go)
  • 20 Personal
    • 21 Parenting
    • 22 School (mostly papers I wrote in college)
    • 23 Teaching (I know JD is all about the “no more than 2 levels deep” but let’s be real, that’s a guideline, not a rule, and I could have a whole JD-style vault for JUST teaching materials, so be gentle)
      • global-studies (this is the class I’ve taught most often. I used to have subfolders for every year, but I wound up re-using stuff often enough that I just use the numerical numbering system my curriculum gives to pre-pend filenames and it works fine)
      • hiring-materials (resumes, cover letters, particularly showcase-y things, etc)
      • psych
      • us-gov
      • us-history
    • 24 Taxes
      • 2017
      • 2018
      • 2019
      • 2020
    • 25 Legal (wills, copies of my ID cards, contracts, etc)
    • 26 Medical
    • 27 House
    • 28 Events (Mostly stuff like this Thanksgiving reflection so I can keep track of how much food was useful to have for next year, lol)
    • 29 Activism (records of letters I’ve written to congressmen, reference notes for charities I’m involved with, etc)
  • 30 Interests
    • 31 Programming
    • 32 Games
    • 33 Gardening
    • 34 Writing
    • 35 Cooking
  • 40 Slipbox (as in Zettelkasten)
    • 41 Indexes
    • 42 Zettels – atomic notes
    • 43 References (yeah yeah yeah it’s three layers deep, but you can surely see why)
      • 43.01 Books (literature notes, long but processed, with lots of direct quotations and annotations)
      • 43.02 Journals (literature notes but on journal articles)
      • 43.03 Discussions (honestly these are mostly raw dumps of conversations from Discord that I want to refer back to later)
      • 43.04 Audiovisual (notes on youtube videos and podcasts)
      • 43.05 PDFs (this is where I put all of the PDFs I’ve finished reading and annotating)
  • 50 Worldbuilding
    • 51 Verraine (notes for my epic fantasy universe — could easily be a wiki by itself)
    • 52 GeneE (my science fiction universe)
    • 53 Neith (my urban fantasy universe)
  • 60 Characters
    • 61 Character Ideas (this is where I keep useful references like “a list of verbal tics I brainstormed” and "different ways to describe a person’s nose)
    • 62 Character References
    • b. ATA 100-199 (ATA indicates that these are characters from Verraine who were born during that timeframe. Since I write a lot of flash fiction and characters might appear in multiple stories, it’s easier to keep track of this way).
    • b. ATA 200-299 (“ATA” stands for “After the Archivist” aka after the invention of written records)
    • b. CE 1900-2099 (I can tell at a glance that this is my urban fantasy universe)
    • b. AGA 2250 (AG stands for “After Globalization Achieved”)
  • 70 Newsletters
    • 70.01 The Iceberg (I write my personal newsletter, The Iceberg in markdown in Obsidian. They’re organized by date. I separate them from my daily&weekly notes by using a 2021.03.21 format instead of dashes or W03 for example, so my navigation searches stay clean). This is also where I mostly use the folgezettel concept, which unlike the folks over at zettelkasten.de, I do find useful. It helps me keep different marketing or supporting materials sorted next to the relevant mailer.
    • 70.02 Obsidian Roundup
  • 80 Stories
    • 81 Primordial (deleted scenes, scribbled ideas, snatches of a scene, etc)
    • 82 Indexes (these are basically the “table of contents” pages for individual novels & universes)
    • 83 Longform (novel chapters, mostly)
    • 84 Complete (micro & flash fiction mostly)
    • 85 Fic Markets (where I summarize what different markets are looking for and any behind the scenes info I know about them, along with useful links)
    • 86 Shipped (where I keep stories that are “out of rotation” because they’re out on submission or have been published")
  • 90 Articles
    • 91 AskHistorians Answers (which I often try to turn into more comprehensive articles down the line)
    • 92 WIP
    • 93 Nonfic Markets (mostly indexes that leverage dataview and formatting guides. My “seeds” folder has like eleven billion things in it so I really rely on dataview and these index pages to see what I’ve got going on)
    • 94 Done
8 Likes
#4

@EleanorKonik Thank you, that’s incredibly useful and informative for me. Your videos on Linking Your Thinking are still on my to watch list. :slight_smile: Also, thank you for showing 3-level Johnny Decimal, I already imagine I will need it, too! But in my case, I already pre-decided “Teaching” will be a top-level category.

@KuSi833 It is clearly use-case dependent, I’m just looking for some ideas what other users do. For example, I know I won’t have top-level “Writings” and “Mindset” category. “Writing” is already a part of my job, I don’t need a separate category for that. For me, it is integral part of “Projects” and “Ideas” and “Concepts” and “Interests” and “Personal” and “Publications” and probably others. I’m mixing work and personal life here, but that’s OK, that’s what I want form Obsidian. As far as “Mindsets”, I won’t include it on purpose, because I have other top-level categories that are more important for me. That’s why I think it is valuable to see a few examples, and decide yourself what’s important and relevant for you. I’m sure you can see from @EleanorKonik example, some categories are not relevant to you. Same with LYT Kit.

2 Likes
#5

These are fun conversations to have with ourselves; excited to see where you take it Tomas!