I’m curious how others organize long-form, multi-day notes such as class notes.
I generally keep my content in one of 3 directories - Daily, Pages, and People. I just put everything other than Daily and People into Pages because it’s the least amount of organizational mental friction. I use a combo of Daily Notes, tags, and search for most retrieval so having a complex directory structure doesn’t make sense for me. I do browse the Pages dir frequently to just find random ideas and clean up.
I current have a directory called Notes and create a new file for each day of the class. So I have a file called “Class XYZ - Lecture 1”, “Class XYZ - Lecture 2”, etc. I do cross reference the note in my Daily Journal so I can easily see which days I created content.
I thought about dumping these into the Pages but am thinking it’d be obnoxious to see dozens of files named “Class XYZ - Day X”.
I thought about concat them all into one note but that’d be a huge note.
I thought about creating a subdir but that’d show up at top instead of alpha. I guess that’s no worse than having it be in a totally separate directory.
Anyway, thought I’d see how others deal with class note type content. I imagine standup meeting notes might pose a similar sort of problem.
I don’t know what the right answer is to how you should organize your vault. But I often use an organizing principle that helps me think about how to organize groups of information like meeting notes, working notes, sketches, etc.:
“When I want to use this later, what would be the most useful form it could be in?”
The answer to that question helps me to organize my notes after I take them in such a way to make it as useful to “future me” as possible. A few examples:
When I take meeting notes, I just type more or less stream-of-conversation, noting who said what. I try not to interrupt or slow down my note-taking by worrying about organization at the time. Later, I usually want to know what were the topics spoken of, and what action items there were. So as soon as possible after the meeting, I take a few minutes to reorganize the notes into sections per topic, and to pull any action items out into a separate section. This makes it more useful for people who want copies of my notes too.
When I take reference notes that I plan to consult in the future, I know that I will care most about the most important facts or examples, and only look at other details if necessary. So I ruthlessly organize those pages to keep the “bottom line up front”, with most pertinent information at the top, and supporting information further down the page.
When I use Obsidian to think, say using Canvas or Excalidraw or outlining, I allow the notes to be messy and incomplete. I rarely come back to them except to maybe refresh my memory about what I was considering at the time. So I don’t reorganize those notes at all. Instead I keep a project note about the effort as a whole, and keep a list of links of working notes I took along the way.
I hope this could be a helpful tool in your toolbox to think about how to organize your notes and vault.