Some people have asked to see my full folder layout, so here you go, here’s my folder system as of 2021-03-31. Note that my “docs-vault” sits directly in my root for my NAS, and contains functionally all of my files (the only exceptions are my collection of a jillion vacation and baby photos, and the unorganized stuff in my writing folder that I haven’t had a chance to sort through).
Hope this helps someone see one possible implementation of Johnny Decimal:
- 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 (I try to use this folder sparingly, mostly for my Tasking file and scratchpads that link to other apps that depend on a ‘default file’ opening, aka Writemonkey. I guess it’s like an Inbox?)
- 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)
- 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
- 40 Slipbox (as in Zettelkasten)
- 41 Indexes
- 42 Encyclopaedic (this is stuff that isn’t “properly atomic” because it’s more “overview” style but still heavily paraphrased and mashed up from various sources)
- 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 Zotfile puts all of my academic PDFs it downloads from the internet — see this guide for details)
- 43.06 Zotdumps (this is where Zotfile puts all of my raw annotations, as described in the guide linked above)
- 44 Insights
- 45 Questions
- 46 Synthesis
- 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 (I write my weekly research roundup newsletter 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)
- 80 Stories
- 81 Universes (these are the “master” files for Verraine, which has an overview summary and relies on dataview to pull all stories set in this universe)
- 82 Indexes (these are basically the “table of contents” pages for individual novels)
- 83 Pitch materials (queries, blurbs, elevator pitches, etc)
- 84 Prose
- 85 Snippets (deleted scenes, scribbled ideas, snatches of a scene, etc)
- 86 Publication (information about different markets, resources for self-pub, etc)
- 87 Marketing
- 90 Articles
- 91 Images
- 92 Seeds
- 93 Recurring (notes for recurring features like my reading roundups or Thesis Thursday)
- 94 Published
- 95 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)