Asking for help here. I am not technically new to Obsidian (been using obsidian.nvim Neovim plugin for quite a while). But i’ve realized that i do not really know how to structure the notes. Usually i use them as a sort of storage-for-future-reference thing. This must be wrong.
There are several things i use Obsidian for:
research (book/article links, summaries. etc.)
logging daily stuff
todos
However, what i usually do, is i just dump stuff into an Obsidian file, maybe put a tag on it or connect to some other doc. And when i need to find something, i just search through the vault and then figure out the rest.
What approaches would you recommend? I have to apologize, because it must be a very frequent question.
E.g. when I ‘touch’ a file having found it through some search or exploration, I might add a tag connected to that search, or I might link it to some file it makes me think of. This reinforces traces I leave for my future self. I will find it easier next time with a similar search, bc I added those search terms the first time I used it.
When I’m working on some topic, I may make a note where I add the links to notes I found related to my topic, and how I think they are related. It may serve as an index of sorts from then on.
Daily notes are jumping off points for me, I regularly link in my daily note to other notes I created / collected that day.
Any article, summary or book I make note of, in it I add in my own words why I thought to keep it, why I found it relevant. This makes it possible for me to find those things back later in my own words (as they will be in my ‘motivation’ for keeping something). This also helps when archiving stuff in more than one language.
IMO any structure is ‘earned’ in the sense that it is a product of working with my notes. Everything starts out as miscellaneous, as David Weinberger wrote, and I embrace that.
If it’s working for you, then it’s not wrong. Don’t get caught up in the “knowledge base” and “second brain” and similar stuff. It’s easy to get swept up in it all, but at some point, it’s just organization for organization’s sake and doesn’t add any value to it for you.
Ultimately, Obsidian is a notebook with tags and links. Some people atomize every note they have to the point where some are individual sentences. Others have long chunks of barely-relevant paragraphs in each note. What ultimately matters is that it works for them.
Of course, if you feel it’s not working, then it’s easy enough to play around with. Everything is kept in a single directory (the one where you originally created the vault). Copy that vault to another place and start playing around with it, trying different ways of organizing and taking notes, all with the knowledge that your original version is safe and sound.
If you don’t want to create a second copy, there’s nothing wrong with changing things on new notes without touching your old ones. Once you’re comfortable with a new process, you can work through updating old things (if you still feel it necessary).