My first 100 days in Obsidian as tool for my PKM system

[ton]

I started using Obsidian early July, and somewhere in late October passed the 100 day mark. I’ve described my use of Obsidian within my PKM system, and how it has replaced my use of the Things task management tool, as well as Evernote. It’s in six parts, so I’m just leaving it here as reference:

Part 1 my PKM system and how Obsidian has become a key tool supporting it over the course of three months

Part2 Hierarchy and Logs
Part 3 Task management
Part 4 Writing connected Notions, Ideas, and Notes
Part 5 Flow w Workspaces
Part 6 Obsidian’s direction of development vs my preferred use

I’d be interested in pointers to descriptions of other people’s systems and routines.

[philipjin]

thanks to share your pkm , ton! great article

[chrisaalid]

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing!

[Nebucatnetzer]

Thank you those have been very interesting to read.
I’m especially curios about your folder setup.
Did you point Obsidian at all your documents?

[ton]

You’re welcome! You mean if the root of Obsidian is the same as my main documents folder in the file system? No, it’s a very interesting suggestion though which I will think about! My Obsidian vault has its own folder, and the folder structure of Areas and Projects, and the others as I described them live within that. That does very much mimick the folder structure of those same Areas and Projects within my main documents folder of the computer’s file system. It isn’t exactly the same though (as my networked notes live in different folders in Obsidian, and as my file system’s Document folder has folders for things not present in my Obsidian folder structure.

Pointing Obsidian to my documents root would be possible I suppose, and then have notes files simply live ‘everywhere’ right alongside the other documents, images, presentations etc on my computer. Not sure how Obsidian would deal with the presence of a majority non-significant files in folders though. I find I use the folder structure also as a way to know how to approach notes through the file system direclty and for scripts etc.

[Nebucatnetzer]

@ton

You mean if the root of Obsidian is the same as my main documents folder in the file system?

Yes that was exactly my thought.
The idea came to me while reading your posts and when I looked at my files afterwards.
I currently have the following structure:

── documents
│   ├── 2018
│   │   ├── PDFs
│   │   │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│   │   └── project_name
│   │       └── some_project_file.docx
│   ├── 2019
│   │   ├── PDFs
│   │   │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│   │   └── project_name
│   │       └── some_project_file.docx
│   └── 2020
│       ├── PDFs
│       │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│       └── project_name
│           └── some_project_file.docx
├── obsidian
│   ├── articles
│   │   └── some_article.md
│   └── journal
│       ├── 2018
│       │   ├── 20XX-XX.md
│       │   └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
│       ├── 2019
│       │   ├── 20XX-XX.md
│       │   └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
│       └── 2020
│           ├── 20XX-XX.md
│           └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
└── pictures
    ├── 2018
    │   └── some_event
    │       └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
    ├── 2019
    │   └── some_event
    │       └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
    └── 2020
        └── some_event
            └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg

But could easily imagine something like this:

── 2018
│   ├── articles
│   │   └── some_article.md
│   ├── journal
│   │   ├── 20XX-XX.md
│   │   └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
│   ├── PDFs
│   │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│   ├── pictures
│   │   └── some_event
│   │       └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
│   └── project_name
│       └── some_project_file.docx
├── 2019
│   ├── articles
│   │   └── some_article.md
│   ├── journal
│   │   ├── 20XX-XX.md
│   │   └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
│   ├── PDFs
│   │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│   ├── pictures
│   │   └── some_event
│   │       └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
│   └── project_name
│       └── some_project_file.docx
├── 2020
│   ├── articles
│   │   └── some_article.md
│   ├── journal
│   │   ├── 20XX-XX.md
│   │   └── 20XX-XX-XX.md
│   ├── PDFs
│   │   └── 20XX_some_letter_scan.pdf
│   ├── pictures
│   │   └── some_event
│   │       └── IMG_20YYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
│   └── project_name
│       └── some_project_file.docx
└── notes
    └── some_timeless_note.md

And as you mentioned correctly, every folder could contain many Markdown files. E.g. project notes. This way everything would live nicely together and would be easily linkable in Obsidian or any Markdown application without the needing a resource folder as we currently have in Obsidian specific directories.
What I’m concerned about is how Obsidian behaves if i for example at work only download the 2020 folder because I don’t need all the old files.