However, I'm not very disciplined with it. I don't have a "process". It's just my scratchpad with daily notes that end up being disorganized and gibberish.
Does anyone have a good process they follow with Obsidian? A good template, a good, disciplined strategy to stay organized? I'd love to hear it, please share :)
What I have found works best is to basically forget about putting strong priors on the structure of your notes. Just let everything be flat - or at most, create one level of hierarchy for a specific project.
When you have a new thought, use search. I have a command that pulls up the advanced search tool plugin and fuzzy searches my term. I then quickly scan (visually as cards) the notes I created already. If there is something related to my idea I open that note and continue that thread. If it's new, I create a new note.
This can be improved even more by using tags liberally, but I find that just having a powerful search and taking the time to "check" before creating a new note works very well for my style of note taking!
Search does the rest of the “organizing”
Then, you can create smart folders for a tag or a combination of tags.
It’s a nice way to organize stuff without putting effort into it.
I sometimes organize book/paper notes in a specific folder, mostly to keep things separated out from the daily notes.
While I've only adopted about half of the methods outlined in Tiago Forte's book, Building a Second Brain [1], it's been very effective for me. I prefer hierarchical folder structure for organization, but I do use his overall PARA structure.
I also use an "inbox" or intake folder inspired by Zettelkasten for newly created notes. I really believe significant cognitive overhead of sorting/tagging/organizing gets in the way of getting your thoughts/notes written down. I generally spend ~10-15 minutes after getting the kids to bed to organize any notes created throughout the day. This is part of my wind-down routine, involving quickly journaling an overall summary of the day on my daily notes and migrating any outstanding TODO's to the next day.
IMO though, the most important thing is to use whatever method of structure/routine/organization works for you. Approach it as an iterative process and play with interesting ideas or methodologies.
One thing in Tiago Forte's BASB that I _strongly_ agree with is that regardless of how much organization you put into your digital notes, search is often the fastest way to find something you're looking for, so spending immense time on organization is counter-intuitive to the reason to take notes. Spending some time to organize your thoughts can inspire connections between notes that you hadn't initially thought of, but it is a slippery slope: it is easy to get lost in the process of structuring your notes and end up with that as your sole purpose of your documented thoughts.
Just choose a template immediately that has the creation date, and tags.
Tag your notes, just attempt to be consistent with the tags. Obsidian has some crazy powerful plugins that let you build it to your workflow - but if you start by tagging everything you'll be set moving forward.
I personally like the unique note creator to prepend dates.
Quickadd+Commander lets you make buttons for individual templates. Dataview is also very useful.
It took me two years before I really started personalizing it, I currently have templates for "regular notes", "weekly meeting", and "q/a notes". I'm adding notes to list my #wip as well
I use a single large note (log) with timestamps for each entry. Each entry is default h2 I use tags per entry Sometimes I split out a category in a dedicated log/note or even directory (e.g. math)
Having a better search is great, but the process of organizing notes is for your brain (i.e. structure your knowledge).
2. Don't care about organization.
3. Install the Omnisearch plugin and it's dependencies.
4. Find stuff with Omnisearch.
Create a template for new notes, with an auto-populated frontmatter.
I use the templater plugin with a script that adds tags based on the folders the file is in.
Add this to the top of the template:
```
--- type: note created: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>
updated: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>
collapsed: true
tags:
- <% tp.file.path(true).toLowerCase().split("/").slice(0, -1).join("\n- ")%> ---
```
Also to lighten the decision making process of categorizing the notes, I use daily notes where I would throw all the random / current thoughts / information. The `Rollover Daily Todos` helps with persistence of daily notes. The only catch is that i need to structure the notes as a to-do list
- [ ] but i do it more or less like that anyways.
I will do a daily list cleanup once a month to keep things sane. Delete irrelevant stuff or move things into corresponding folders.
2023-09-13
So, for example:
2023-09-13 Thoughts on HN Post
2023-09-13 Call from F. Lastname
2023-09-12 Scratch
2023-09-11 To Do
Otherwise, just write what you want to remember and don't worry about structure or tagging. That's what search is for. The date is only important so you can sort them by the creation date (which otherwise is lost across file systems).
I've been doing it that way for over 10 years now, starting with nvAlt and similar editors. It works great and it's easy to find things.
Since you are the one writing them, you can make them in a format that is easier for you than a random blog post (that you will not be able to find again).
I would suggest not to worry about organizing too much.