Simplifying my workflow - Any advice or ideas?

[DESLABOI]

Hi everyone,

I’m a new Obsidian user, switching over from Notion. I love the simplicity of Obsidian and hope it will help me move away from my crippling perfectionism.

I’ve been working to simplify my vault by focusing on native linking. I’ve read posts and watched videos about using minimal folders and links instead of tags for organisation. I have a few questions on how others approach managing their thinking and information.

Here’s my current vault structure:

• Daily • Sources (external content) • Projects (templated, structured notes) • Assets (images, etc.) • Root folder (all original notes)

Within the “Sources” folder, I have subfolders for categories like movies, books, podcasts, conferences, shops, recipes, etc. I use these folders to group content by source type. Does this approach make sense to you?

I’d appreciate some advice on these specific points:

Link Hoarding: I save a lot of links and write short notes about them (e.g., personal websites of designers, e-commerce sites, website inspiration). How would you organise these in your own vault? Would you create separate notes for each link, or a single note with a long list of links? If you prefer a single note, how would you use properties (e.g., tags or links) to keep it organised and relevant?

Project Structure: Previously, I used standardised project templates with sections like Overview, Success Metrics, Research, Discovery, Solution, etc. This helped me organise projects in a more consistent, manageable way. For example, if I were designing a new app, I’d complete the note with that template, then do the work elsewhere and link back to it in the main project note. Would you keep all project-related notes (e.g., app copy, user stories, UX benchmarking, ideas, user research, etc.) together with the main project note in a dedicated subfolder, or would you split them into separate, free-floating notes in the root folder? I want to keep it simple but feel like I might be overcomplicating things again. How do you manage projects in Obsidian, especially those involving multiple types of work? I’m really curious!

Daily Notes: My daily notes are minimal, but I’ve experimented with prompts in the past. Do you find structured prompts helpful, or do they get in the way of your workflow?

Any advice, tips, or screenshots would be hugely appreciated! I’ve got a lot to learn and I’d love to see/hear how others are doing things.

[writtenfool]

Overall, the fact that you’re thinking about your vault is a huge factor in the path forward. You’ll get no argument from anybody on what your doing now: kicking the tires of folders, tags, properties, and links.

Different content and your workflow (onboarding new stuff, your writing habits, your way of categorizing) will dictate which features you choose.

What will drive your choices will most likely be: can you find what your looking for, later. If you think in terms of structure and location - folders and tags. If you think spatially, links be magic.

Personally, I only have a few legacy folders - stuff I’ve brought in from other notetaking apps. I use at most two tags per note (as properties - yaml) - a high level tag about the content and another for if the note is an index (moc, …). Further catagorizing I use other properties - I like list type properties as they can contain multiple types of values - text, links…

Re: hoarding. If a topic or phrase is a unit of interest, link it. IMHO, one can never have too many links, even if they’re not instantiated. If a link is something you want to dwell on, create a note of the same name and all those links show up magically down below in linked mentions and the unlinked mentions allow you to quickly create more. The use of aliases in properties can extend the depth and breadth of these ("theme, moc, index) notes. Obsidian has very powerful stuff in and around the use of links.

Personally, I embed alot of links as I think in blocks (atomic things if you will). I do not parse long notes into chunks, just surround keywords of phrases with [[keyword]] or [[phrase this and that]]. In my world, the orignal note has context that gets lost when it is separated into atomic notes.

Re: projects. If I’m working with other folks, I tend towards a PARA like structure. If it’s just me, links and properties work. I be a fan of properties for depths of work type (for me that might be research for copyedit job or new manuscript).

Re: daily notes - I spend a couple hours each morning thinking, researching, and writing. I link alot in those daily notes. From these I spawn and incubate ideas that might turn into new notes.

Mostly, just keep doing what you’re doing. Try new things and determine which of the features works best for you different uses of the great Obsidian tool. TBH, simply use the tool for a while. This “sticktime” is valuable.

[Naranya]

Re Link Hoarding, it depends on what those links represent to you and where it fits into your overall vault structure. If it’s just important to gather them for possible future use, I’d start with a single note, divided by headers into topics. If that grows to large to be easily navigable, I’d separate them into topical notes containing just links and a short comment I made about them, say one for web design links, one for e-commerce, one of random other stuff.

OTOH, if you have a lot of notes about web design (and a lot of related links) and want to make sure you visit a particular designer’s one in the future, you might want to make it a separate note and tag it sth like tocheck/design. Separate note means you get to use any number of properties to make it easier to find and pop up when you need it.