My workflow and system -- newbie looking for suggestions

Knowledge management
,
1

Hi everyone,

I have known about obsidian for years through friends, but only recently had a use for it. I do a lot of research/reading on my own, and recently wrote a paper to organize my thoughts for fun. I knew of a lot of quotes to back up my thoughts/showcase ideas, but I didn’t have them at the ready. I decided obsidian would be a good resource to use for quote organization.

The way I do this is by having a quotes folder, with each book as its own subfolder. I have a generic quote template and also create one for each book that has the author and book fields preloaded. I then type up the quote, add the page number, add my own reflections if relevant, and add tags.

I use tags extensively. I want to be able to find quotes easily based on tags and to see relationships between tags and quotes/sources even if they are tenuous. I like this because it provides more opportunities for connections, but I’m wondering if there’s an issue with this that I’m not aware of? It doesn’t seem like many people do this.

I also started daily journaling in Obsidian using daily notes. I also tag these, including hierarchical tags like People/John and things related to how I’m feeling, like tired, anxious, happy, etc.

Lastly, I created a folder for reflections and commentary on Bible lectionary readings, and a miscellaneous zettelkasten folder for random thoughts. These are also tagged. I want this functionality, where if I search something like “tired”, it can show me days where I wrote about being tired, reflections on tiredness from my zettelkasten, quotes about tiredness, etc. If I want to exclude things like the daily journal folder, I assume that type of querying (show me notes tagged “tired” not from this folder) is not complex to do, although I haven’t run into that yet.

In a video I saw on Obsidian workflows, someone showed how they use notes as tags, which allows you to create an index page for that tag. This seems cool to me, so if a topic is really big for me, I can have something like a “theology” note that shows all pages tagged with #theology divided by folder. This seems trivial with Dataview, although I’m experimenting with it still.

That’s basically all I am doing in Obsidian. For me, it is primarily a quote bank and journal. I plan to add more zettelkasten notes, but I don’t want to force it and only want to include functionality I know I will use. My current plan is to write one medium length (20 page) research paper per year, and use Obsidian to organize my research for that. I also think it will primarily serve as a way to organize my references and research, with my own thoughts being a kind of secondary functionality. I mostly read philosophy, theology, patristics, and fiction, but I also write poetry, make music, and study languages, which could all be wrapped in, although I don’t want to force it just because.

I’ll mention that so far, it is working as desired. I provide writing support for seminarians, and a student had an issue with his paper, which he thought contained a point that couldn’t be backed up by a certain source. I knew that I had a quote directly related to this, and was able to give it to him very quickly along with the page number and volume. This already made Obsidian worth it for me.

Thoughts? I don’t want to run into issues later on or make problems for my future self.

1 Like
2

If it works for you, go for it! Don’t let yourself get caught up in organization for organization’s sake. Far too many people do that and end up burning out on it. Instead, just let your process evolve naturally. Start with the basics that you have, and let them go from there.

I can’t speak for others, but for myself, I use tags sparingly. Not because I don’t want things tagged, but because Obsidian treats tags less like tags and more like categories. It was far easier for me to treat them similarly, and then create a separate property, one I call flags, to treat like tags.

That said, it’s not entirely necessary. Obsidian’s default search is pretty robust as it is, so if you’re searching for something via search, you’ll typically have it pretty quickly, even without heavy tagging. If you do ever find the default search is lacking, the Omnisearch plugin will likely cover anything you’re missing.

Far be it from me to recommend other products on a specific product’s forum, but I’ve always believed in purpose-built tools. A wrench isn’t a hammer and a hammer isn’t a prybar, after all.

I’ve done a good amount of research work in the past, and Zotero has always been among the best that I’ve found. It’s more geared towards actual research papers, whereas Obsidian has always felt more geared towards free-form writing and journalling. I use both heavily and I’ve been looking to try a few of the interconnecting plugins to link them together once I have the time to do so.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words to say to not stress how your vault starts out. As the saying goes, no good plan survives an encounter with reality, and however much you try to plan your vault ahead of time, getting yourself too rigid in it too early will just stifle you. Start with what you’re planning and build it out from there. Everything in Obsidian is stored in the primary vault folder, so you can always copy/paste the entire thing and toy around with it to see if something else will work, while being able to simply restore from that copy if you find it doesn’t.

1 Like
3

This is very helpful, thank you! Yeah, I think that the whole “just do what works for your use case” is helpful, and encouraging to hear from people who have been in the program more than I have. I have often online read from people that they use tags sparingly, but I feel like I use folders how others use tags, and tags how others use properties some of the time. I like it that way, and have found it to be useful.

As an example, I have a quote “Virtue is like a thirst. When a man begins to drink of it, he becomes more thirsty and seeks to drink of it all the more. He who begins to exercise the virtue of compassion knows no measure and acknowledges no limit.” tagged with “taste”, because the development of psychological taste is something I enjoy researching, and even though this quote is kind of marginally related to that, I want to be able to find that information.

Similarly, I have a friend who is ill and asked me for quotes/insights from my faith tradition related to dealing with pain. I have a “pain” tag and was able to find all of the quotes related to that and shared some with him. These are going to be my usual use cases – discussions with friends, helping my writing students find sources, and gathering quotes for my own writing. I think for me, using multiple tags in searches is more useful than individual ones. I give a little few word summary of each quote as its title, so even in a huge list I can get some info about the quote in order to know what I’m looking at.

I know Bases are new apparently, but for me that is a huge benefit for organizing my information (vs. randomly exploring through connections). Because my tags/properties are the basis for it all, the material is still searchable in the markdown file, which I like.

I will take a look at Zotero, but I suspect it may be overkill for me. I research for fun, and primarily use .pdf ebooks on a tablet (so not researching in a browser) or physical books, and generating citations isn’t a big hurdle for me.

Anyways, thank you for your comment! It does seem common for new people like me to get overwhelmed/confused, so this contributed to my confidence to just go forward with what seems to work for me :slight_smile:

1 Like