@nickmilo I think you’ve hit on a key issue here:
I’ll put it another way, NOTES ARE LIKE PEOPLE. Just because I was born in the 80’s, it would be crazy if you had to go specifically to the 80’s folder to find me. I have interests. I like football. But just because I like football doesn’t mean I should only be found in a folder on football. Try not to pigeonhole people, and try not to pigeonhole your notes!
I’ve got a fair bit of experience with designing relational databases to store scientific or engineering data, and when I first started using this as a research tool, I had learn to start thinking in terms of data objects. What is the underlying thing I’m trying to capture information about? What is it’s relationship to other things in the system? Does this thing deserve it’s own table, or is it just a property of another thing?
If I think of you as an object — without objectifying, of course! — you are fundamentally a Person. And you have lots of properties: likes, dislikes, hobbies, skills, connections to other Persons, physical characteristics, and a birthdate in the 80s. I agree that filing you in the 80s folder would be the wrong place to start, but filing you in the People folder would be perfectly rational. Linking you to your hobbies and likes/dislikes would be a reasonable choice.
My struggle with all this is that some concepts or notes have an obvious base object — People, Locations, Projects, Events — while many of the notes I want to capture are thoughts about these base objects. I use the base objects to provide some underlying structure, the calendar based buckets to provide my unbiased, but chunked “slip box”, and the linkages to provide the neurons or breadcrumbs that tie it all together.