How to manage progress in processing old notes?

I’ve been in obsidian for over a year now and reasonably comfortable. I’ve got 9000 notes or so, I’ve migrated through from my Palm Pilot days. I ditched Evernote and so glad I did. Obsidian has me doing the daily note thing now, which I’m quite liking.

I’m working on sorting out my life and Obsidian is helping with that. I’m making connections between old and new notes, working my way around based on topics or areas of interest. What I’m finding is I’ll have done a search on some concept (word, tag, whatever) and clean it up. Later I run across something else that should have been found and connected, but wasn’t because of different words describing the similar topic or a typo/inconsistency or just far enough beside that no search would have pulled it up, but I really wish I had collected it at that first moment.

I feel like, probably because I am essentially, I’m just cleaning up a note and plunking it back down among all the other dirty ones. My vault seems like something that I’m never managing to collect ALL the related ideas together on. Digging deeper finds something more.

How do you differentiate between files that you have taken in consideration and processed/cleaned up, and files that you haven’t yet?

I also wish there was a way to better show the history in the patterns of my thought. But, that’s maybe not quite related.

Simple answer, try to add properties to your notes, you can add tags, categories, keywords, dates etc as you revisit your notes. Then, use dataview to get an overview of selected edits.
Another one, use plugins to review notes.

Also, try to relax your notes with images, callouts and line breaks.
Make your content light to read.

1 Like

A friend of mine had a system for photos, where everything started out as no stars, and then he assigned values to each star:

  • 1 star - Checked, but not very interesting
  • 2 star - Could have some potential
  • 3 star - If I work a little with it, it can be useful
  • 4 star - Either good, or just valuable for other reasons
  • 5 star - Just brilliant. A keep in every way

Maybe not the best description of his scale, but the process was for various areas (or photo shoots) to check whether it had photos in the low range, which indirectly meant that he hadn’t gone through that group. He would then assign 0-2 stars as he worked his way through them.

Then after a while, he could shift his query to only look at those having 2-3 stars and look for whether anyone could be bumped up to either 3-5 stars. With the end goal of having a lower amount of notes in that area/group, so that if he looked with a filter of only 4-5 stars he would get the gems.


The reason I’m raving on his idea, is that you could consider building some states for your different notes indicating where in a maturity process the notes are. Are they unprocessed, unedited, low quality - but can be improved, better quality - needs link, … top-notch note.

If you combine a suitable scale with some query you could do searches and focus on the note quality, and if you don’t find any at a high enough level, you might need to open up the search and see if there are some which you can work on to elevate (or remove?) to increase the usefulness of your vault.

One way to do such a process could be a combination of Dataview queries related to folders/topics, connected with a display of the status properties using Meta bind or similar, which could allow for instant updating of the status. Or you could have QuickAdd macros which changed the status when you read through any given note.


All in all, it’s matter of personal preference as to how you want to cultivate your vault. But I do suggest trying to establish some norm related to both some descriptive properties for your notes, and some properties related to showing your work-in-progress status for the notes.

I’m glad I asked this question. I was debating on tags or moving files to a different folder, but the idea of a levelled tag is really interesting. I’m going to ponder that idea some more.