The Ultimate Folder System: A quixotic journey to ACE

Much better to me.
I find I constantly have to “translate” the ACE words into TIPS.
So thanks for the tip :smile:

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TIPS?:thinking: Let me introduce my MATE framework :wink: MATE stands for:

  • Media (sources: books, articles, internet bookmarks, youtube videos, movies)
  • Atlas
  • Time
  • Efforts

Then I understood I still need Areas (aka Spaces), cos. I want e.g. my personal notes and my job notes to live in separate folders, so it became:

  • Media
  • Areas
    • Atlas - general knowledge, “default” area.
    • Job
    • Musician - my hobby area
    • Personal - household, medical records, etc
  • Time - daily notes here
  • Efforts

Then I understood I no longer need Efforts as separate folder, cos. Efforts are in their areas folders: Areas/Personal, Areas/Job, Areas/Musician (and I don’t want to mix them, it irritates a bit)

So instead I use #effort tag and status property (:fire:on, :recycle:ongoing, …) and I just have this dataview query in HOME note:

table without id status, rows.file.link as ""
from #effort 
group by status

so, MATE folder framework became just MAT after deleting the Efforts folder.

P.S. @nickmilo thank you for making Ideaverse demo vault publicly availabe, I adapted these great ideas for myself:

  • Atlas - great naming for general knowledge Area.
  • Efforts - instead of project without deadline, much better naming as well.
  • Logs (#map/log) - as addition to daily notes was a revelation for me, it’s much more convenient.
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Thanks much for your insight, @Abhuva. I appreciate the idea of loading the entire vault into a vector database as embeddings and using a RAG approach to look up information, including “hidden” relations. Could you elaborate a bit more on your approach? Specifically:

  1. Could you describe the components of your (RAG-inspired) implementation? I.e. what vector database, retriever model for note or passage retrieval, and how did you integrate it all together?
  2. Did you utilize any open-source plugins or write your own implementation?
  3. What were the main challenges you faced, and how did you address them?
  4. For those looking to adopt a similar solution, what advice or best practices would you share?

I believe the technical audience would greatly appreciate learning from your experience. Thanks a ton in advance.

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Hey Hello Milo, Loving the food for thought.
I can believe you’re getting up at 3am thinking about taxonomies and categorization as I’m suffering from the same bane…
Here is some feedback that might make you think from another angle :

  • The LATCH model is wrong in my mind, the STIR model does a great job on some aspects but I feel is still incomplete.

  • Problems with the LATCH model :

Alphabet is a hierarchy, so this one is useless
Location, Time and Category, in essence are the same thing. They are “properties” that can be tied to an entity, I think those concepts lead to an “error” in thinking because they are too broad.

  • What does location mean ? Where i found it ? Where it is now ? Where i want it to be ? The historical map of where it has been ? Is location a “place” in spaceTime ? but then what about abstract objects ? do we define abstract locations ?
  • What does time mean ? Time when it was created ? modified ? changed ? finished ? given ? categorized ?
  • What does category mean ? Let’s take fruits, do I categorize by color ? glycemic index value ? weight ? season of availability ?

I suppose you get the idea.

From the STIR model, I would have the same argument against space and time but I LOVE the ideas of “importance” and “relatedness”.

I try to see the issue from another angle :

  • The only reason to organize it retrieval
  • In the digital era: retrieval is done through search and queries first, then exploration in the result of a search or a query.

When doing a query you want 2 things :

  • Filter results
  • Order results

For me “Importance” is the notion of “Ordering” results and “Relatedness” is the notion of filtering results.

Now what does all that mean ?

“Organizing” things is the act of attributing “Properties” and “Relationships” to those things.
A “good” organization model allow for

  • Easy, intuitive and fast property and relationship attribution
  • Easy, intuitive and fast search and querying, allowing filtering (based on any property or relationship) and ordering (based on any property or relationship)

Now based on that a folder structure is ALWAYS a VERY BAD “organizing tool”. If you think about it its a tool allowing you to assign a unique property (“path”) to an object. And by dissecting that property (Calendar/Month/January 2024/2024-01-05) we’re trying to create an “Explorable query result”. Meaning that we’re trying to cram down a potential infinite amount of Entity properties or relationship into a unique Text String.

The only reason we keep talking about it is because it’s the most “available” tool in our current digital ecosystem. And in some cases it’s the ONLY tool we have to organize things.
Also this tool present the same “constraints” as the physical world, making it easier to understand because people can always “relate” to the physical world. (I’ve put that flashlight in my nighstand >> Flashlight.Object is in World/France/Home/Bedroom/Nighstand).

Now if we just accept that fact that the folder structure is a subpar organizing tool. Then it helps the reflection :

  • We could “think” about what an Ideal organizing tool would look like and dedicate a limited functionality scope to a folder system

Now since I believe that as an Ideal organizing tool “depends” on the type of entity we are managing (because it depends on those entities relevant properties and relationships) then an exercise to reflect on a universal organizing system is actually an Ontological exercise of defining what “properties” and “relationships” are the “most common” and shared by all types of “entities”.

There are multiple attempts in the ontology discipline to do such things.
But for a usable example I like the KR ontology by John F. Sowa (a quick research and the official website contains a lots of interesting concepts). (Note that i’m not an expert in that field, and Sowa model is critiqued by other experts. It’s just a nice example to help me think)

One very interesting concept is the distinction he maked between physical and Abstract

  • Physical is located in some place and occurs at some point in time
  • Abstract has no location in space and does not occur in time

by that sense, the STIR model doesn’t handle Abstract entities properly.

I know we could go down the rabbit hole of saying that we don’t “organise” abstract entities, we organise “notes” wich are “physical entities” talking about “abstract entities” but the issue is the same.

A good example from Sowa’s model is a “Schema”
( A physical continuant is an object, and an abstract continuant is a schema that may be used to characterize some object.).

Where would you “put” a Schema ?

Anyhow I have no definite answer to all those reflections.
Thanks a lot for the work on STIR and ACE, it’s always a blast to at least try those model.

Hope that I could spark some reflection.

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Currenty, I use the following folders:

  • Allgemein - General (includes ONLY my ToDo Canvas, my date planning and my personal hints how to work with Obsidian, as I am relatively new to it.)
  • Ideen - Ideas collecting thoughts about what I would like to do (but am currently not doing).
  • Vorhaben - Efforts containing several subfolders and all the things I am actually working on.
  • Wissen und Archiv - Knowledge and Archive
  • X - A folder where topics go which I considered but are no ideas nor current efforts. A kind of backup.
  • Z - A folder where all the documents (media, jpg, pdf etc.) go. I like my left sidebar clean.

This is based on your ACE concept and adapted to my current language and considerations.

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This is a good idea packaged as a bad idea.

It’s a good idea to separate out notes describing what we learn from the original context where we learned it. This makes it easier to update and use those notes in new contexts! Nick’s videos make a persuasive case for the value of linked notes for thinking and I’m fully on board with the concept! Just… haven’t mastered the implementation! So I would benefit from having a folder structure and templates that reminds me to clarify whether a note is primarily about an idea, a book or other source of information, a project, or a moment in time.

For example:
Knowledge-based: Ontology is a branch of metaphysics dealing with which types of entities exist and how they are related.
Time-based: On June 13, I learned about [ontology] in the Obsidian Forum. Blood pressure reading for today was higher than usual. Is there a connection?
Action-based: Add a chapter to my fantasy novel in which a wicked sorcerer uses the dark arts of [Ontology] to transport our heroes to a realm of abstractions. “Power is the mark of Being” cackled the Ontologist.

It’s a bad idea to lean too heavily on the charming metaphor of Maps of Content in an Atlas. Spatial memory can help me retrieve a book on a shelf in the public library, or papers in a messy office. If I had notes organized by city, state, country, or other geographic features, a map view might be helpful. Obsidian isn’t set up to leverage spatial memory. There’s a graph view, but the linkages correspond to the R in STIR. Pretending that space is a good metaphor for category and that those categories have something in common has led you to lump together folders that could just as easily have been their own top level folders, or filed under Efforts. I’m sorry to say this, but as far as I can tell, the A in ACE stands for Arbitrary!

@a2jc4life Rachel’s TIPS is clearer!

But really, what’s with all the acronyms in this thread? If you forget how you set up your top level folders, you can just click the “Collapse All” button in the Files sidebar to get a reminder. A longer list of less ambiguous categories might be better!

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Thanks for the counterpoints, I truly appreciate them, and this is a good zinger lol:

It’s funny, some of our needs for acronyms. I’m a repeat offender. I chalk it up to its own form of sensemaking.


TIP is an excellent variation @a2jc4life , thanks for sharing.


I enjoy your thoughts on LATCH and STIR @Will-A-A, and for pushing my understanding of ontology-related matters, which is a field where I’m still lacking the academic vernacular. There are a few things I’d challenge you on (re the value of folders, etc), but the one I’d like to focus on is about the nature of organizing:

I would strongly suggest that organizing is about so much more than retrieval. It’s meaning making at every step. We make meaning from the act of organizing (or at least we can, and it’s quite an effective way to do so). Organizing, which covers a lot of ground, can be a wildly powerful and ongoing part of the creative process.


Really like hearing this @MostlyVirtual…having more folders and paradoxically thinking about them less.

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Hi Nick,

A newbie in PKM here but trying to help with my limited capacity.

With PARA, I found a great relief when I understood:

  • Projects, as something (in my case things like creating training materials, translations, planning an event…) with a finish line after which you are sure it is completed, finished, done and dusted, and ready to be moved to Archive, in case it could be helpful/inspiring in the future.
  • Areas (of responsibility) for everything related you are permanently accountable (creating rosters, one to one´s, etc)
  • Folders are toolboxes: I attached the idea of “Toolbox” to the folder. So, in each project or area folder, I know it is there where I should find everything needed to work on that project/area (manuals, templates, forms…). As I want to avoid duplication of files by copying and pasting, I prefer to use shortcuts/links to items in Resources and have files completely specific to that project/area.
  • Resources: it is here where I deviate a little from the original meaning and probably similar to Atlas. I used Resources for everything which is not exclusive of a particular project or area.
  • Archive is a great place for items you do not want to kill but you do not want to encounter regularly.

But in PARA I miss the Calendar. And also Resources can become huge in size and difficult to manage. I am trying to solve this using a convention to name files using prefixes, followed by short description, and then the file date as YYYY.MM.DD . This way, if you are consistent with the convention and the short descriptions, all files are alphabetically categorized and sorted chronologically making it quite satisfaying :smiley: . As an example: “121.SUM - NM - 2024.08.04” would be the name for a file with info for the “one to one” for the summer for colleague with initials NM on 08AUG2024.

Also it has been a huge relief at work to use this approach in Microsoft Planner.

Tags: I only use them to mark stakeholders involved, so it is useful to prepare meetings.

I hope this can be of help.

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For anyone who likes this system but doesn’t like the name “Calendar” because it feels like it misrepresents what it’s defining, I renamed it “Chronicle” because it’s effectively a collection of logs over time which, even if seperated into sub-folders, have an objective temporal arrangement. All my workout logs, therapy logs, daily notes, etc., go here. (Specifically, I start always in my daily note, and then if I have some kind of log to make which I have an explicit folder for, I link it from the daily note. I ALWAYS create notes by linking from another note which all link back to my root “home” note so no notes get “lost”).

Then, because I like a consistent theme, I renamed “Efforts” to “Praxis”.

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Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I too wasn’t a huge fan of Calendar but I ended up going with Time for these area of my PKM. It just makes more sense to me that way. I do like the idea of Chronicle though.