I’ve been taking college notes in Obsidian for a year now, and here’s what I’ve learned.
If your notes work for you now, don’t change that. Don’t worry about the way someone else structures their vault, or their notes. There’s no such thing as “not smart enough to use ___”. Some people have great luck using a system like Zettelkasten or PARA. I looked into those when I first got started and quickly became overwhelmed, so I decided to go a different direction with my vault. Not using someone else’s “ideal structure” says nothing about you beyond the fact that you think differently than the person who uses/created the system. Which is never a bad thing.
I honestly have a very folder-centric system myself:
Inbox is the default folder for all new notes just to make it easier as I create. I can either move the note right away if I know where I want it, or leave it in Inbox for as much time as I need to find the “right” place for it. I periodically clean my Inbox, maybe once a month. This is where all of my scribbles of code snippets, things I like that someone said in the Obsidian Discord, or random thoughts go when I first create them and don’t have time or the mental capacity to figure out where they belong.
Data contains Dashboards/MOCs, Templates, Help, and Storage. This is stuff I need to navigate my vault, but not the actual meat of the vault. Each is a good descriptor of what they contain, and within the folder may have several subfolders (ie Storage has folders for images, drawings, etc).
Life contains everything outside of my college instruction. It’s divided into Daily Notes (contains my daily/monthly notes), Habits (a separate folder is required for my habits with the plugin I use), Hobbies, and Knowledge.
My hobby folder contains subfolders for Reading (containing all of my book reviews), Writing (containing all of my personal fiction), and the Bible (study notes, sermon notes, etc).
Knowledge contains articles I’ve clipped from the internet, websites, bookmarks, quotes, random facts… basically everything that doesn’t have a place within a specific other folder goes here. Notes in this folder are always tagged based on the general content or type of note – #quote, #obsidian, #website, #note-taking, etc. Other than just trying to get the general idea down, I don’t tag much for these. The goal for these notes is usually to have descriptive names and content to more easily find them. I do tag articles from the internet with more specific content tags like #artificial-intelligence, #genetics, #neuroscience, etc.
The rest of my folders are {Class Name}. Every note that I create specifically for that class goes in that folder. Not that there isn’t overlap between classes (for my degree there’s actually more overlap than usual), but more for some sort of organizational structure that allows me to quickly just delineate my learning and use Dataview and other plugins to sort and organize. I don’t stress too much about trying to find the right folder, as long as the lecture note the content originated from is in the correct class folder.
My actual note taking process in college follows this process:
- Take lecture notes – these contain all of the information and pictures from the lecture, dated and with Dataview frontmatter for topic, summary, and understanding for organization and quick finding of the topic I need. They are sorted into the appropriate class folder.
- Atomicize lecture notes – I take each idea from the lecture and create a new note with it, leaving all of the information in the lecture note and duplicating it into a new, specific note. I find the chronological progression is valuable to me. A few additional reasons to leave the content atomicized but linked in the lecture note below:
- I’ve already experienced the “I learned x at the same time as y, but I only remember what y was” and been able to find x based on the lecture note containing y.
- In general, I am a very anti-deletion person. Everything you write down has an importance to it, or you wouldn’t use additional energy to record it. Practicing a “permanent” note system, where notes are kept forever (nominally) also enforces a “what is important here and why” thought process.
- I use the lectures as a form of MOC, a guide to information so it isn’t lost or overlooked. It links sibling thoughts and ideas together (especially in a lecture environment) without the painstakingly tedious process of linking a to b to c to d to a. Having a and d in the same MOC may be close enough.
- Link notes – this is semi-automatic. I use the Virtual Linker / Glossary plugin, which reads your text and finds words that already exist as notes in your vault. It will then create a pseudo link where it functions the exact same way as a Markdown link, except that it doesn’t show up in the graph (not really a problem). This allows me to gain 100% of the value of linking with 0% of the work. If you’re struggling to link, I would suggest trying this plugin.
As someone who jumped into Obsidian without doing any reading, watching of videos, or talking to actual users, here is what I would recommend you do/don’t do.
Do
- focus on getting information down
- utilize aliases to give notes additional and/or more descriptive names so you can find them easily
- use the Omnisearch plugin to find notes more readily
Don’t
- focus on making it too pretty (I struggled and still majorly struggle with this) until you have the time to spend without sacrificing your learning
- start using too many plugins – build slowly, and only get the ones you absolutely need if you can. I likely have “too many” by most standards, but I do have solid use cases for most of them
- try to use other people’s organizational structures in your notes unless you can easily incorporate them without changing your own thought process
- over-analyze the use of tags – if you like them, great, if you don’t, don’t use them. There are plugins to help you batch remove/rename tags, so if you want to experiment, it’s fairly easy to change if you don’t like where you went and want to restart. However, this goes back to the first don’t instruction…
I hope this helps, and if you have any questions about my vault or want to see images of my process, please let me know. I would be happy to provide more information!
