How I Organize My Obsidian Vault 📥 Tags, Topics & Maps of Content

hello my name is Callum also known as water loots and welcome to today's video on tags versus topics structuring obsidian for emerging insights people tend to be confused at how to organize their obsidian vaults which is completely Fair since obsidian is so customizable but that customization opens the door to structuring a truly personal Knowledge Management System one of the biggest confusions that people have when using obsidian is how to use tags versus Topics in this video I'm going to walk through what tags and topics ICS are and the pros and cons of using them in

different scenarios here's today's outline an overview of tags versus topics setting up tags the three main types setting up topic notes leveling up your topic notes with maps of content the key characteristics of tags versus topic notes and then tips and best practices I'll go through my own personal tips and best practices on how I use tags versus topics at the end of the video once you have a better understanding on the pros and cons of each of them but before we dive into that I just wanted to briefly touch on the concept of structure

versus emergence as I think if you understand these two concepts better you'll be able to much more easily understand the use cases of tags and topics and when you should use one versus the other tags enable structure a predetermined system for organizing your notes you can think of it like a filing cabinet it's something that you can have a different cabinet or a different folder for each type of note and then that completely removes the decision process of organizing your notes because you know exactly where each note is supposed to go talk topics enable emergence

a pattern a structure that emerges and grows over time the goal is not to predetermine anything but to allow the structure to emerge you can think of it kind of like having a trunk of a tree with a bunch of branches that begin to grow off and then leaves that grow off the branches this is how your notes begin to form clusters over time so that you can identify emerging insights in my opinion the best system is to do both to use both tags and topics a Hybrid Theory of organization the structure of topics removes

decision fatigue and organizational paralysis because you don't have to think about how you're organizing your notes and in contrast the emergence of topics allows you to have serendipitous insights that are based on your own intuition where you follow the your notes between different topics and have the structure emerge gradually over time now as I walk through this tutorial I want you to keep one thing in mind each of us is going to have a completely different system each of us is going to organize a system that works best for us there's a reason it's called

personal Knowledge Management because what works for me might not work for you the goal is to allow you to naturally connect to your notes without overthinking without having decision fatigue something where you can go into your second brain and you can follow your own path of intuition based on the unique structure that you've established here this really boosts your ability to generate ideas and find insights and follow trains of thoughts to new areas in your second brain let's dive in okay so now that you have a bit of an idea on the value of using

tag T and topics and how they introduce different types of structure for your second brain or for your obsidian Vault thought I would give a brief overview on what tags and topics are and why you might be interested in using one versus the other before we go into depth on what each of them have to offer so really the goal here is that we're trying to introduce both structure and emergent in our organization systems for obsidian so what do I mean by that well there's two different ways that you can consider organizing your system there's

what's called called a top- down approach and a bottom up approach a top- down approach is effectively a way where you predetermine the type of organization that you want to have in your system so this is where you would come up with a list of tags up front and then each time you create a note you have an idea on what tag you want to use in contrast a bottom up approach is more of an emergent system and that means that you build as you go you don't predetermine what you want in your organization instead

you just allow the structure to emerge organically the way that I think of tags is that there are three main types there's a main note type a status type and an inline note type the main distinguisher between a tag and a topic in my opinion is asking yourself the question is this and is a note and what do I mean by that I mean is this a source is it a book is it a topic is it a daily note or is it something like psychology or Neuroscience is it an about note something that involves

the contents of of the notes itself rather than the type of note so that's where we would use a topic note topic note are an about note topic notes are used to make connections between notes rather than classify them into categories like you would use a tag for and since we're using a note rather than a tag if we go back to tags for a second I can create hashtag Source I can create hashtag book but if I click on this all it does is it pulls up all of the the notes that I have

with the tag hashtag Source you can see here at the top it searches tagon hash source so effectively what a tag is doing is it's operating as a file and CIT it's operating as a folder so a lot of people actually use tags instead of folders now with that means is that the source itself the hashtag Source if I click on it or if I click on hashtag book all it does is it pulls up a list of all of the books that include the tag of hashtag book now in contrast if I go to

topic notes if I wanted to create a new note let's say I wanted to create a note about Neuroscience or psychology you can see that this is listed within my topic folder well because I'm not using a tag that means I can actually click into the note itself and I can start writing down Contents I can take my ideas my thoughts or subtopics and add them into the Neuroscience note that means that topic notes can actually contain information and because of that too if I go to neuroscience and and I go to the side and

I open up the back links you can see that there are all of these linked notes linked mentions of Neuroscience inside of all these other notes so not only can I use Neuroscience to contain notes where I can write information or link to other notes perhaps related to Neuroscience like the default mode Network or flow but I can use that to indicate the backlinks of related notes that mention those topics so you can kind of think of topic notes as a form of creating an emerging structure so you can have patterns that naturally appear again

if I go back to neuroscience and I open for example the linked view of the local graph I can see all of the notes that are linked to the topic of Neuroscience and I can expand the depth of that where you can see here if I go from a one note depth to a two note depth it explodes there's a ton of information here and what this is showing me is effectively patterns with clusters you can see all the different notes that have been clustered around certain areas using a topic note allows you to form

an emergent structure where you can begin to identify in patterns over time kind of as if this was like the trunk of a tree and it had all of these branches going off it whereas again in contrast with tags if I click on the Note all it does is pull up the source note like a folder here really the goal here is to establish rules for how you use tags versus topics so that you don't overthink your structure by having a scaffolding or framework of how you categorize your notes notes it becomes a lot easier

to just write notes and follow the flow of your ideas you don't want to sit there and and think every single time you create a note oh is this going to include a tag oh is this going to include a topic what's the topic going to be what's the tag going to be instead you can use a top down approach for tags where you have a predefined list of tags that you're going to use in your system in other words a top down approach where you have that predetermined structure in place that will help you

categorize your notes and then when you get to the topic you can use a new topic or an existing topic based on what you've already included you can just build on what you already have which is why it's a bottom up approach now just as a reminder I want you to remember that there's no right way to do this there's no one siiz fits-all solution to how you want to use tags versus topics it's up to each person to establish a system that works for them what matters is establishing a system of consistency so that

you can stop worrying about the organization and start thinking about your next idea so now I'm going to go through a process of setting up my tags my topics and are called a map of content which I will get into more later but I just want you to remember that this is just what works for me and my system is constantly changing but the goal here again is that you're generating an emergent organization system now just before I dive deeper into tags versus topics you can see that I have this note inside of my digital

Garden at wander loot. XYZ you can go back here and get the gist of what I'm talking about in this video if you need to remind yourself but I'm going to go through some more specific use cases now on how I distinguish between tags or topics tags help you file your notes in a way that you can search for them and find them easily in contrast topics allow you to connect notes in a way that's more intuitive to you so you can begin to have an emerging structure develop over time eventually you can expand them

into maps of content which allow for a further Improvement on the semantic structure of your second brain now let's take a deeper look into setting up a system of tags so the easiest way to set up a tag is literally to just put hashtag whatever you're interested in you can turn any word or series of words into a tag and what happens is by typing in #the word you've now created a list that will show all of the files that contain that tag in a sense tags are effectively just folders now I use both tags

and folders and that's just my personal system I know some people prefer to only use tags or only use folders but I actually have a system where I use Tag to move my notes into a folder so you can see here that this note is in the general Vault and by having the word #t in here if I make a change to this note now that I have included # Source the note will automatically move to the source folder you can see up at the top here it's been moved to Vault sources and the way

I do this is I use a plugin called Auto note mover and I have a system of hashtags that I use a system of tags that will automatically move notes to different folders based on the tag that I'm using and I talk about this a lot more in my YouTube video on automatically organizing my obsidian Vault using inboxes and indexes so I recommend checking that out if you're interested in automatic organization of tags another way that you can use tags is you can include a property there's actually a default one called Tags so you can

add this into the yaml which is the front matter of your note that helps you keep track of your metadata I often would say that for example a note is a source or a note is a book and you can see here by putting in book it automatically moved it from the sources folder into the books folder for the main note type the first type of tag that I like to use I keep my main note type tags in the front matter in the tag section so for example if I were to create a new

note and call this the creative act for a book that I'm interested in and I can add a property so I'm going to go and add a tags property and this would be a book so if I put # book it will automatically move this note into the books folder now if I wanted to click on book and see a list of all the books it would pull them up in the side here so it provides a really easy way for you to search using tags to find the notes that contain the hashtag book the

tag of books now the second way that I use tags is to indicate status so once I have the main category the main note type indicated as this is a book I could go in and I could add another note called hash unread then if I wanted to I could go through and find every book that I've tagged with the unread tag and after I finish the book I can go and create a new tag called red and then I would also be able to go through and find all of the books that I had

read so you can use tags as an easy way to indicate the status of a note and finally the third way that you can use tags is what I call inline note types so the best example that I have of this would be in my daily note so I'll pull up my daily note here and you can see that I have a section called ideas for Solutions so what I do here is if I have a new idea I literally write in hash idea and then I write the idea here so now that I have

this idea here if I click on the idea tag it pulls up a list on the side showing all of my different ideas and you can see here that if I click on this note it takes me to the specific section so the benefit of doing this is that by using an inline tag I'm able to jump not only to all of the sources that are listed but I'm able to jump to a specific section within the note that is related to the tag that I'm using so it's an easy way to use the search

to jump to a specific section in my note the goal of using tags in my particular system in my personal Knowledge Management System is to create a structured system so that I don't have to think about the note organization or classification this is also what I talk more about in my automatic inboxes video but the idea here is that by having a predetermined list of tags that I can use which you can see here I can go and I can scroll through I've got a list of all the tags that I like to use on

a regular basis I don't have to think about how I'm going to categorize or organize my notes I can just give it the tag on what it is by asking myself a question of is this an is a note a type of note this is a book this is a source this is a video and it becomes a very easy way for me to quickly organize my notes by giving it the tag that's relevant and then I can move on to continue taking the note and introduce topics which I'll get into in a moment so

to give you an idea on my most common tags you can see the list on the side here so my most common tag is a daily note tag which I've used regularly every time I create a new daily note I have Source idea digital Garden I use the digital Garden to automatically move notes that are related to my digital Garden into the digital Garden folder which I then publish to my digital Garden at wander. XYZ so that's a really functional one that I tend to use then I have my next three which are atoms molecules

and Alloys these are related to my particular zle cast and system which is called molecular note taking and I'll talk about that in the next video so I'm not going to dive into that at the moment I also use tags to indicate authors if I add a new person for example the creative act I wanted to add an author note I can add Rick Rubin as the author and if I go into Rick Rubin I use the hashtag author to indicate that this note type here is related to an author so that's one of my

commonly used ones and then I also use tags to help organize my digital Garden where I have something like # creativity and knowledge work but if you see this here you can see there's a slash it's not just creativity it's creativity knowledge work so this gets into what are called nested tags I don't personally use nested tags all that much but it's very possible it's easy to do all you have to do is add a slash so for example I could do book slash fiction and that would create a nested tag of all of the

books that I've included that have the subtag or the nested tag of fiction so in this situation I would probably create one called book / fiction and non-fiction so that would create a subcategory within the book but again I use my tags more as a classification system so I don't tend to deal with nested tags instead I prefer to deal with something like a status where I'll use the main category of book and then a subcategory of red or unread and I'll just use that to indicate the status of the book and I'll change it

rather than creating a whole subcategory within a nested tag but again that's just my preference so you can do whatever makes the most sense to you so just as a few more examples here you can see that all of these notes are an is a note this is a source this is a book it is an article it is an atom it is a topic and what's nice about this is you can also use the tags to organize in a different way using something like data view which is a plugin that enables you to query

or pull specific information from your Vault so as an example if I go to my topic of creativity and knowledge work again I'll get into Topics in a moment you can see here that I have a data view query that's pulled in all of my notes related to the tag of creativity knowledge work so I can specifically use data view to pull from # creativity knowledge workor to create a list of all of the notes that are related to that particular hashtag so data view is a really great way to introduce indexes and inboxes again

that I talk about more in my automatic inboxes video as a summary of tags you can use tags to structure and organize your system in a predetermined way in a top down manner where you have decided how each note will be structured within your second brain you can think of it like creating a filing cabinet where you have a different folder for each type of note and you slot each note in using a tag it's kind of like going to the library and seeing that there's a section for books and a section for magazines and

a section for videos you can go to the specific type of resource that you're looking for and you can search within it to find it in a very easy way now let's take a look at topic notes okay so I hope that that gave you a good overview on what tags are and related to the note I just showed you actually creativity and knowledge work this one is a topic so let's get into setting up topic notes so you can see here that I gave this note uh the tag of topic which moves it into

my vault which I have with the topic folder I can pull that up on the side here and all of these files here are actual notes so they're not a tag but they're actually a specific note that has been created to indicate that particular topic for example I can go to Ai and in contrast to a tag I'm actually able to write in here so I could write whatever I want I could put AI equals artificial elligence I can link to other notes perhaps I want to link to machine learning which is a subtopic of

AI I could create a new note maybe something like emerging AI Behavior which is a subtopic of AI now this right here is what's called a ghost note and you can see the difference between machine learning which is a note that's been created and emerging AI Behavior which is a note that hasn't been created yet so this is a cool way that you can start to use topic notes to begin linking notes together without having to actually create the note you can use a ghost note to begin organizing notes that are related to one another

connecting it so again if I go up to the side here and I show the backlinks in the document you can see all of the notes that contain the topic of AI so what's cool about that is I can pull up specific notes that all relate to that topic so topics are a way that you can make connections between notes rather than just trying to categorize them into a particular bucket as if it were a folder structure on the side here you can begin to use topics to connect notes together based on the relationship and

as you can see here when I just added the AI section all of a sudden an entirely new cluster appeared so related to this note of topic notes with these three topics I can see the connections where this topic Note file relates to the different categories here of the different topics that I've included now in this one you can actually see that there's an overlap between the topic of AI and the topic of psychology so that's pretty interesting and this is a note that I might want to focus on because it's related to two topics

that has this connection point so not only are we using topics to make connections between notes but by making those connections between notes you begin to see emergent Behavior you begin to notice clusters of information which give you insights as to the relationship between your notes and that might spark one of those aha moments where you have an idea on how one topic relates to another perhaps how AI relates to psychology and I can look visually at the graph here and see specifically that AI relates to psychology through this note here which you can't see

from the cursor but it's the note blank so if I open that up you can see that this is the genre of psychology and I also included somewhere within this note the reference to AI so by making those connections I'm facilitating emergent behavior that allows me to follow trains of thought that I have and make new connections across different disciplines so this is personally why I prefer using topic notes rather than tags for the concepts themselves and what the notes are actually about in a substantive form rather than the type of note or the type

of information that I'm pulling in so if go back to the AI section you can see here that there's a lot more notes that are all interconnected with AI I could reduce the depth and see everything that's related to This One Singular note or I can expand it and begin seeing the patterns that emerged for example there's another cluster over here and I could follow the train of thought between different notes to try and identify the different connections between the concepts and try to make those insights that cross disciplines if I go back to my

digital Garden explanation of this you can see that there's the properties section at the top here I also have a section in the yaml in the front matter that's called topics I can include multiple topics within a single note and then that'll give me an idea on how these different concepts relate to one another so to give a couple more examples of topics I could include flow I could include epistemology which is the study of knowledge I could include a location like Canada you see that's a ghost note topics allow for an emergent structure they

allow for semantic organization within your second brain using specific topic notes to help you identify pockets of insight where you can Bridge Concepts across different mediums it's like connecting a book to a video to a magazine to a podcast and using a structure that enables you to move between them seamlessly it's a great way for you to follow intuition between different types of notes as you're probably starting to notice there's a lot of similarities between tags and topics both can be used in most situations I could have a tag for psychology and Link notes using

that tag or I could use a topic note for psychology and Link notes with that topic note the main reason that I prefer to use topics for about notes and tags for types of notes is because topic notes can contain information they can be leveled up into what's called a map of content where the more information related to a particular topic or subtopics the easier it becomes for me to structure that topic note in a map that helps me surface more insights and saves me a lot of time and energy as I'm working through my

second brain let's take a look at maps of content over time a topic itself might SE to get a little bit crowded you can create what's called a map of content this is where you take a note such as a topic note like Ai and you can actually convert a topic into a map now you can see on the side here that I have all of these topics all of these are Concepts that I've created notes that involve an about property they're related to something substantive something about the note contents themselves rather than the type

of note but for example with AI I might have a ton of different related sub subtopics maps of content help with creating subtopics and keeping track of those subtopics over time so if I go back to AI again one of the benefits here of using AI as a topic rather than a tag is that I can write in this note so I can expand on my thoughts that are related to the topic of artificial intelligence as my thoughts emerge over time as more and more Concepts come in here for example like automation augmenting maybe an

AI personal assistant Maybe agentic AI a lot of related topics that begin to get complicated over time as you can see on the side here because I can write in this note I Can Begin organizing so perhaps maybe I want to have something like AI training and within AI training that includes machine learning and then maybe I instead of having emergent AI Behavior here I want to add it under a personal assistant and maybe a gentic AI also fits under personal assistant and so does automation I'm working through and creating subcategories subtopics within the AI

system each of these subtopics creates a jumping off point and that's the the real purpose of using a map of content if I wanted to come into for example AI because I know that I'm going to be writing a paper or creating a YouTube video rather than just having the tag of hashtag AI which doesn't really provide a jumping off point for me to continue my research I can instead go into my AI map of content and I can think oh maybe I want to write on machine learning or maybe I want to write about

emergent AI Behavior because as this is coming into my head I've got this topic here so I can go and I can add a property add file property and I can give it the tag of topic and I can then move this file to another folder and move it to my topic folder which you can see just modified the graph over here and perhaps with this emergent AI behavior I'm reminded of the Hinton lectures which is a lecture series that I just went to and it was talking a lot about emerging AI Behavior which is

something that I'm interested in because I think that emergence has a lot of value because it's very hard to predict but provides a ton of value when it happens if we can let it happen so now if I go back to my AI note and I'm reminded that I wanted to write something about emergent Behavior I can click into emergent Behavior which takes me to The Hinton lectures and if I zoom in I can see now that there's a link between the Hinton lectures emergent behavior and artificial intelligence so I begin to follow a train

of thought a Chain of Thought as you can see here is actually linked to The Hinton lectures and it allows me to come up with ideas and expand on those ideas as I follow my train of thought literally through my second brain in a way you can think of a map of content oroc as a leveled up topic note it's a place that helps organize my topics and subtopics so that I have a jumping off point I have an entry point to research so that whenever I want to continue thinking or looking into a particular

topic I can go back and I can see what most interested me in the past in a sense it's kind of like an index or a table of contents for that particular topic as another example let's look up epistemology so you can see here epistemology the study of knowledge so I've got a definition at top and then I also have the subtopic of epistemology called personal Knowledge Management and within personal Knowledge Management I have concepts of second brain and smart note taking and each of these point me to a specific Source a particular reference that

I can go to to continue that train of thought if I wanted to go into the expression of knowledge through digital Gardens I have my public personal Knowledge Management System so I can go through and be like oh yeah this is what I was interested in researching more right I wanted to explain zle Casten in my next YouTube video so I can continue going through and I can follow my trains of thought from topic to topic using the map of content as that entry point into my second brain and as a piece of advice it's

best as with most things in obsidian and with personal Knowledge Management to let maps of content emerge over time it's not something that you can just create off the bat because when you first create a topic note like AI you're not going to have any subtopics because it might be your first note that you've included in your obsidian Vault but over time as you start to notice how one topic relates to another then you can start to create maps of content of your favorite types and if I wanted to for example I could go through

and now that this is not just AI a topic though I do have the topic tag it's also a map of content so I can give it a map of content tag then I can pull up the side here and I can find all of the topics that have been converted into maps of content the notes that have more information to them again information that I was able to add because I'm not using a tag I'm using a topic to sort the information itself and when you're first starting out it might seem like a lot

of this thinking is overkill and it might be but if your graph looks like this it's not that big of a deal to go through and sort through your information but if we take a look at my full second brain there are thousands of notes in here it starts to become really difficult to notice the patterns in these notes over time this is the global graph view but if instead I want to limit by a specific topic for example like AI I can search Ai and I can find all of the notes that relate to

Ai and related to this graph view you can also pull up tags specifically which are these green ones here so you can use tags as a way to indicate where these files are organized how they're related to one another with all of these tags in the middle like this one here is my daily note tag that shows how this tag relates to all of the other noes which is the same as if I went into and searched on the side here tag daily note it would pull up all of the notes related to the tag

of daily note so you can do this visually or you can do this through search on the side but again this is not a very helpful view aside from showing a somewhat pretty view of all of my thoughts and ideas my second brain which is why I tend to find the local view more powerful and the local view is really augmented by using something like topics specifically because I can go through and I can finesse that massive Vault the massive Knowledge Graph that you just saw into the topics that are specifically related to what I'm

trying to research in the moment so I personally find that a lot more valuable you you can see now why I would be interested in using topic notes for about Concepts rather than tags because tags cannot contain information whereas topic notes can you can level up your topic notes into a map of content where you can introduce a hierarchy of topics and subtopics and provide jumping off points or entry points into your second brain based on the paths that you tend to walk through most often okay so now that I've gone through and explained how

you can set up tags topics and maps of content thought I would give a quick summary on the characteristics of tags and topic notes to hopefully help you figure out how you want to use them the biggest one to me is the structure and with tags you've predetermined the structure what that means is you've gone through and you've selected for example I want hashtag Source hasht book # country and you've gone through and you've selected how you would like to have some form of structured organization of your digital mind or your second brain you don't

want to have too many tags predetermined because that removes moves the ability to have the emergent nature exist and that's where topic notes come in the structure of topic notes is that as you add new sources as you add new information you come up with topic notes that best relate to that particular piece of information that you're adding to your knowledge graph to your second brain as an analogy the organization of tags is like a folder where you've taken the time to specifically sort a note that is a book into the book folder now that's

different than a topic note because for example with tags if you had # book you're not going to give it the tag # video or # article because it's not that it's a book so you can kind of think of this like being at the library where you've filed all the books in the bookshelves but you keep the videos and you keep the magazines in separate sections so you don't really have a lot of overlap between the different types of notes of where you're getting your information with tags it's like putting it into a filing

cabinet in contrast with topic notes you can have a particular note bridged between different typ of notes for example I could have a book that's related to psychology I could have a YouTube video or a movie related to psychology and I could use the topic note of psychology to bridge between the different note types and produce a cluster of information that all center around that concept of psychology effectively what this is doing is that with the growth in tags you've predetermined that top- down structure you've selected how you want to have the information get slotted

through the system in a way that's somewhat rigid in contrast with topic notes you add new topic notes as you go so if you come across psychology or Neuroscience or creativity whatever the concept is that you've decided that you want to write a note about and that you want to slot into your topics you just add a new one and over time it grows from the ground up so when I'm deciding if I want to use a tag or a topic I first ask myself is this a note type is this a status is this

a folder type structure and if it is then it's something that I will probably give a tag to however if instead it's not a type of something but is a about something it's about a concept I'll give it a topic note and especially if it's something that I know is going to become a bigger part of my research over time eventually I may turn a topic note into a map of content so if it's something that I think I want to provide some form of organization for myself something to go back through like an index

then I will use a topic node instead because I can always convert that into a map of content later in terms of how I want to actually use these tags versus topics the locating method is important with tags I tend to search I want to take a look and find all of the books so I will search for # book whereas with a topic instead I'm trying to make connections between notes again I want to bridge those different mediums I want to go from a book to a video to an article to a podcast and

I want to relate all of those together by creating backlinks connections between the notes then it's probably something that I will use a topic for in my opinion tags are far less versatile they're more of a rigid structure where I've gone through and I've predetermined the main note types I want to have the main structure that I want to introduce to my system then I let the topic nodes grow over time and emerge and they're much more flexible because I can create many subtopics and I can create maps of content that connect topics and it's

just a far better way for allowing emergent structure of ideas to form inside your second brain whereas tags help remove a lot of the thinking I know that if I'm taking notes and it's a source I give it the tag hashtag Source if that source is a book I give it the tag hashtag book so I don't have to think about how I'm going to be classifying these these notes because I already have a predetermined system so it's it's rigid but that rigidity that constraint actually opens up the flexibility for topic notes so these two

work really well together to augment my second brain and finally as I mentioned a couple times tags can't contain information in and of themselves whereas topic notes can this is how you turn topic notes into maps of content so if it's something that you think you're going to want to add information to in the long run then you probably want to use a topic note rather than a tag but there's nothing say that you can't have both I could have a topic note that's related to books and then I could create an index that show

all the books in My Vault based on the tag # book which I've actually done in my digital Garden here if I go to Source books and articles this is a note in obsidian and I've created a data view table that pulls in everything that has the tag hashtag book so this is a way where I can effectively have the topic of books in articles and I can use the tag book to pull all of the data from my obsidian Vault that show the notes that have the hashtag book that's just a way that you

can create an index inside of a topic note that's related to a tag that you've created so again I hope that you're starting to realize that there is no right or wrong way to do this what matters is that it works for you there's a reason that this is called personal Knowledge Management because you want it to be personal if you find that there's some hybrid connection some way that you like to operate in a Best of Both World scenario which is how I operate I like to have both tags and topics then go for

it follow your intuition because you're trying to build build a system here that will establish your ability to follow your own intuition in the future so you should use your intuition when setting it up okay so let's create a new example here okay so let's take a look at the Canada note I'm working on a video with Taylor my partner where we are creating travel videos about Canada so for myself yes I could use hasht Canada and I could flag every note that I write about that has the tag Canada but to me I know

that I'm going to be wanting to include things like the province in Canada and I know that I'm going to create sub categories subtopics related to Canada and if I just had the Canada tag well that just pulls up a list of notes that contain the tag of Canada it doesn't necessarily allow me to structure and create a map a literal map of content of Canada so you could think of this in the same way for the United States I could put # USA but that's not going to be as helpful to me because I

know that I'm going to want to talk about Hawaii or California and I'm not going to want to create a new hashtag that I can go through here and then have to fill filter through the tags instead I'm probably going to have notes that relate to each of these different concepts for example like when I went to New York last year for NF NYC I have journals related to New York so I know that New York is going to be a note that's filled with other entries so instead what I might do is introduce the

tag and then introduce country because I might want to go through and find all of the notes that are related to a specific country and you can see here as I add more tags more countries appear on the side so this just becomes a really easy way for me to sort all of my my notes that have the particular tag of country and then once I found the note that's related to the main topic Canada that has the country tag I can go into that note and start adding the subtopics or the subn notes related

to that topic so now if we go back to my Neuroscience example a tags well this is a topic note and this is a concept it's not an is a relationship because if I'm reading a book or watching a YouTube video on Neuroscience it is a video it is a book it isn't a neuroscience so I would use neuroscience as an example of a topic because I know that I'm going to want to go through and write information and over time I'll create something that has a whole map of content related to all of these

Concepts so I can go through and add the topics that I find most interesting and drop them in here and then I can begin organizing them over time creating a map there's a lot of similarity between using tags or topics that's why there is no right way to do this the best way to do this is in a way that makes sense to you perhaps my with my example with the countries on the side here you would have preferred to have the United States as a tag and then you would rather have Hawaii have the

tag of USA as an indication for country rather than using the country tag that would be completely fine it's totally up to you but again for myself I like having that rigid structure up front I like using the tag note as a is a relationship and for the topic notes it's an about relationship for me that allows me to have this clear rule established upfront so that I don't have to overthink my structure I always create notes for anything related to topics and I always use the same few tags to automatically organize my system with

that top down approach by having a mix of a top down approach by creating the scaffolding the framework of how I use tags along with the emerging structure of using topic notes that appear as needed I have this nice balance between rigidity and flexibility that really helps me use my system in a much more effortless way now that you have a better understanding on tags versus topics of structure versus emergence I thought that I would walk through some tips and best practices that I personally find helpful for deciding when to use tags versus topics in

my obsidian Vault my first tip is that you want to keep things as simple as possible it can be really easy upfront to start trying to organize absolutely everything inside of your obsidian Vault inside of your second brain but that just leads to decision fatigue and Analysis paralysis or organizational paralysis and you end up spending more time on the organization of your Vault than you do actually surfacing insights and generating ideas the second tip is to create a very simple decision tree for deciding when you want to use a tag and when you want to

use a topic for example my decision tree is for tags I have a is a note type this is a book this is a video this is a source and that makes it very easy for me to identify which notes should involve a tag in contrast if the note is about something if it's about psychology it's about Neuroscience it's about personal Knowledge Management then I'll use a topic note tip number three is to experiment with your Vault to recalibrate your system as you go by keeping it simple at the start you'll start to realize where

you need to add more complexity to help solve the problems as they arise you can begin to introduce maps of contents when your topics start to get too complicated these maps of content can then provide an Ever emerging system that helps you organize your topics so that you have that jumping off point the entry point into your digital Garden or your second brain rather than changing your entire system every single time you make an up dat introduce changes gradually let the change emerge as you come across notes that need that update this will end up

saving you a ton of time and energy because if you go back and try and change your entire system from the ground up you'll probably be spending attention changing notes that you might never have touch again in the future by making the change as you go then you can have your system emerge and grow and recalibrate over time tip number four is to leverage visuals obsidian has a really powerful graph view feature that helps you to visualize clusters and emerging insights in your second brain by using local graphs or filter graphs you can begin to

identify those insights which is one of the main powers of using an emergent structure like this and finally the fifth tip is to have fun the whole point of using a second brain like obsidian is that you're able to generate these emerging insights over time you can begin to follow your own trains of thought as you introduce more information and convert it to knowledge within your second brain the goal here is to actually use the notes that you're taking to actively take smart notes rather than just copying information into a dumb system that you're never

going to look at Again by working with your knowledge and your information and making those connections with topic notes you can really begin to get an exponential increase in value with your own note taking and your own knowledge I hope that this video helps you understand how you can organize obsidian in a way that lets you leverage both structure and emergence through tags and topics if you found this video helpful I would love if you would please consider subscribing and sharing with a friend Word of Mouth is by far the best way for me to

grow my channel so I appreciate it a lot I've also recently turned on YouTube memberships which is a lowcost way that you can support me on a monthly basis if you're getting value out of these videos and would like to show that support the more people that join my membership the more time I can spend making these videos so I really appreciate it a lot if you found this video interesting you might also find some of my other videos interesting I have a video that goes specifically in much more depth on automatic inboxes and indexes

in obsidian which is a great way to augment use of tags to generate automatic organization if you'd like to learn more about the different features that obsidian has to offer I also have a video here that goes into depth on all of the major features throughout obsidian and a lot of people have told me that it's by far the best obsidian tutorial they've ever seen so I recommend checking it out if you'd like to learn more I also have a video that walks through notebook LM Google's AI system that allows you to work seamlessly with

your obsidian notes to add an AI element to your personal Knowledge Management System augmenting your personal Knowledge Management Google Google themselves actually found it helpful so that was pretty cool my next video is going to involve what's called molecular zetel casting which is a notetaking system that a lot of people find kind of confusing so I'm going to walk through my entire process on how I use my zle Casten system to take notes inside of obsidian so if you're interested in that I recommend subscribing to be notified when this video is ready thanks again for

watching and I will see you in the next video