Hello, I am new to Obsidian, and a few days ago I had never heard about “knowledge management” or MOC’s.
I wish to describe soft- and hardware architecture of an autonomous robot, as well as keeping personal logs. It is no problem if the setup is incomplete, as long as it can be revisited later on.
Do you have any hints or recommendations for a minimal starting structure?
Should I use two vaults, or avoid linking i.e personal logs from system details? The way I am doing it now, the main system architecture is cluttered by log entries. Nodes are also too tightly coupled.
I could elaborate for days, but I see that the questions should be short and concise. Don’t hesitate to ask for elaborations.
MOC’s are all about “bottom up” emergence, so you don’t need much/any structure to start. I also suggest checking out the Linking Your Thinking YouTube channel. Nick Milo has some great stuff about MOC’s and “idea emergence.” I like to link three topics to each note so I can look at the graph view and see which topics are connecting a lot of other notes. If there’s a note connected to many other notes, I make a MOC about the topic. I highly recommend reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens—it’s a great place to start learning about “knowledge management.”
In the graph view, you can hide certain folders or files, which means you could put personal log entries into a folder and easily exclude them from the graph view using (path: -<folder> in the filter). You would also be able to see them with everything else if you wanted by removing the filter. It could be helpful to link logs and system details together to see what you were thinking about when a certain thing happened with the system details, but if you wanted to completely separate your work and personal lives, making two separate vaults might be the best choice.
You could try tinkering with the forces in the graph view to separate nodes from each other.
For absolute minimal structure, I would recommend at least one folder where new notes are created (set in settings). I call mine “_inbox”.
This is handy for two reasons. First, often new notes are raw and you don’t always have time to “finish” them. Second, because new notes are more likely unfinished and untagged and unorganized and unlinked, it’s easy to lose them.
Start new notes in a folder and move them out ASAP.
I would also recommend one tag to identify notes you know you need to go back and work on. Some people use #todo or #seed. I use #touch to ID notes I know I need to go back to.
This helps with notes that are good enough to move out of your inbox into the growing population of other notes. You don’t have to wait for a note to be perfect before you move it out of the inbox. You can still find it later.