How I structure my Obsidian vault (Obsidian tour 2023)

when people ask me how I organize my obsidian Vault I hesitate to tell them it seems like a lot of people do things differently from me and my method if you can call it that might leave several of you shuddering in dismay in this video I'm giving you a tour of my obsidian Vault and showing exactly how I structure everything and also how I don't I a few things about my general philosophy on organizing my notes and this is just my personal philosophy I'm not saying that it should be yours the first is that I

try to avoid any sort of binary organization structure meaning it's either there or it's not so like for example if you put a file in a folder it's either in that folder or it's not it can't really be in two folders at the same time I try to avoid structures like that secondly I like to build with scalability in mind at work and also here with my notes I think that a lot of the structure of my notes has evolved organically and now I'm really hesitant to add too much structure or too much organization because

it's just going to be an additional upkeep I have over 8 000 notes in my main Vault and I have several volts at that and so anything that I introduced to my vaults has to be something that I'm going to be able to maintain even when I have 10 000 and twenty thousand a hundred thousand notes the third is that I favor structures that add context I don't just want to be able to put notes in a certain spot I want to be able to say why I put something in that spot and why I

didn't put it in a different spot and what other spots it could be in not all of the structures that I'm going to talk about are capable of adding this extra context and the ones that do are the ones that I favor and the fourth one is don't duplicate if at all possible I like to have things modular and reusable which does mean that I like to have my notes contextual and also abstracted enough that that can be used as a building block for other ideas later on all right let's get into my Vault and

I'll show you what I don't use that often we're starting with what I use the least and that's tags so this is my main obsidian Vault and I'm going to show you my tags here you might be tempted to think that because I have a lot of tags that I use them a lot I don't actually I think that at times I have tried to use a tag based structure I personally don't like it there are a few that I do use I use this TV Zed tag which means to versatile it is just my

way of saying that these things are not processed and yes that is a huge inbox I also use these k6 and nvdh ones k6 is one of the open source projects that I work on and I do track things like feedback for it so that sometimes I will you know go to a conference and I'll want to quickly jot down what people say either to feature request or a bug or a question about it because that helps me understand what to create content on and that is also the same principle I have for the nvdh

stuff I have a feedback tag here and I also try to separate create it based on like a rough categorization so just so you see how that might work I'm going to create a new note and let's say that this is a daily note and I'll say and uh really likes our new test comparison feature okay so I might write something like that and then I'll just put a hashtag and I'll say k6 feedback and then as I'm typing I'm just adding a slash to it to Nest those tags and what that means is that

the feedback and anything else I put on there are going to be nested under k6 they're going to roll up into k6 so let's say that that is analysis I also really like that as I'm typing I can see the categories that I've chosen before so I'm gonna hit enter to that one now here on the tag pane you can go into k6 feedback analysis there's six on there and if I click it it opens up on the left here and here's that note where I said Anna really likes her new test comparison feature so

that is really handy because that means that I don't have to create a separate note I usually put this like within a daily note sometimes I'll put it within a meeting note wherever I happen to hear the feature and then this is a prompt for me that maybe I should talk more about this test comparison feature or create videos or blog posts about that so as you can see I am in a situation where I really should clean these up because they don't really mean anything however I'm not too worried about it I don't use

it but it's not like they do any harm I just kind of pretend for the most part that this tag pain doesn't exist that's because pretty much every other thing I'm going to talk about in this video is better for my use cases for organizing my notes than tags is so in previous videos you may have noticed that I call people who like folders as their primary organizational structure folder heathens that's really tongue-in-cheek okay I don't really think you're a heathen if you like to use folders you use whatever you want to use however I

do think that for my use case folders just don't cut it they go against every single thing that I was talking about in the philosophy before not the least of which is that you can't put a note in more than one folder at the same time but I do think that there is one thing that folders are really good at and that's to establish some sort of namespace a namespace in programming is like a bucket sometimes it's for a an environment or something it's basically a way to collect like items and it also is a

way of restricting scope so that if you are in one namespace then you're not touching the other namespaces and for that I use folders so I do use folders more than I use tags but you might still be shocked at how few folders I have I have an assets folder and this is just like good practice I think anything that is not a markdown file or a script I put here so mostly these are Graphics but sometimes they're PDFs and I put them all in this one folder so that I don't have to worry about

having assets in different folders and I know everything else that's not in the assets folder is a markdown file I have a databases folder here and then I have two different kind of databases that I track in obsidian one is Kickstarter or crowdfunding projects I'll show you that a little bit later I also have this video database where I'm trying to keep track of all of the videos that I create for this channel but also for work it's kind of weird because I realized not too long ago that I never take notes on my own

stuff and I'm trying to make all of that searchable through my notes as well so I have those two in databases I do have a bunch of notes on obsidian now I kind of put them in an obsidian Playbook with the goal of maybe packaging it up into something later on I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna handle that for now it is its own folder and this section is more heavily structured because the intention is for other people to go through this structure and that is something that folders are good at they are better

for when you're sharing it with somebody else it is much more recognizable because people are familiar with this concept then I have plugins here there are a few plugins I have that generate kind of their own notes so this is from initiative tracker I have lots of different combats from for my tabletop role-playing game sessions and I put them here I have some canvas stuff some text generator templates and Excalibur draw stuff in there as well I have private I'm not going to show that to you but basically I have anything that I definitely don't

want published SO meetings notes on people and that kind of thing read wise is its own separate bucket for now just because there are a lot of them actually I'm going to turn on a plug-in so that you can better see how things are organized so this novel word count plug-in shows how many words and how many notes are in each bucket I just thought it might be a good way for you all to see how I kind of break it up I have scripts however they are all JavaScript files and so although I have

them as a separate folder and obsidian they don't actually show up in obsidian but I think I have like 10 or something like that then I have sources these are for the most part from people other than me so me going to a conference or reading a book or reading an article this is one of those things where this is the structure that I started with and I haven't yet quite migrated it because in many ways this is also reiterated in read wise so lots of things that I have to fix there I also have

a system folder now I do have a data model for all of the front matter that I use just to help me with consistency and this is separated based on different templates that I use and then I have a project file and those are both kanban boards actually one for grafana labs and one for my own personal stuff and I have things that are related to like keeping this system maintained and running so reviews and projects cards are mainly like video ideas or content ideas so blog posts would go into this as well and then

templates I'll probably go over in a separate video because that's its own thing and then I have a ttrpg folder and this is a good example of namespaces these are all of the campaigns or one shots or separate worlds that I play or have played in and some of them are actually in the same world like when it's been a published world and having folders helps me distinguish between this world's version of one place and that world's version of the same place and this might still seem like a lot of folders I never said that

I don't use folders at all however it might be interesting to note that Within These folders when I click on it there are actually no subfolders here everything goes in here whether they're session notes or NPCs or places or factions they're just kind of all in there and when you look at my folders it's the ttrpgs that have the most notes at 2700 out of the 8620 notes that I've got so if you add all these up you'll see that about 6 000 of the 8 000 files that I have in this Vault are actually

within one of these folders and the rest of them are kind of just all in the root directory now this is the part that people are surprised by I use some other methods of organization that make more sense to me the first is links one of the things that I said earlier in my general philosophy about organization is that I prefer to be able to add contacts to whatever organizational structure I use you can't really do that with folders because you just put them in there and that's it and tweak endlessly so instead I use

something that you might have heard being referred to as a map of content I think it could also be like a parent note or some something when you go to my obsidian publish site this is the starting page for it it's called Fork my brain and I try to keep this fairly updated I look at the topics that I write a lot about and I try to make sure that they're represented here so just to show you the outline I've got Tekken software taking notes and making stuff ttrpgs and then within each kind of subsection

I have specific notes that are also like maps of content in themselves for example if I click on performance testing here there it defines performance testing but it might also have a video that I created and it links to other Pages a map of content is basically a list of these pages and other notes so you might think that I could have had just like a performance testing folder and then I could have had all of these links within it and while that's true I wouldn't be able to add some new Nuance to it so

let's look at for example this page Ops tools on this page I have a bunch of notes linked and I'm not only linking them I'm also adding the site because I know that when I'm looking for different tools to use for software operations and devops I'm going to probably want to check out their site and in some cases I also say like oh this one's deprecated but I'm just still putting it here for completeness and I'm able to separate different kinds of operations tools I can embed other maps of content like in this case monitoring

tools is a separate page and I'm embedding it within the Ops tools page as well so here I'm adding more context like I'm saying that grafana Loki works well with Prometheus or that open Telemetry is the merger between open tracing and open senses those are things that you can't really add with with folders so that's links the other thing that I use heavily for organization are data view queries for example I showed you the kickstarters database earlier in the folders however that's really just to keep everything in one place and Mark it as a database

rather than like ideas on their own so this is more for tracking purposes that's how I use the folders but this page is about actually bringing together those notes this is kind of like a way of creating a map of content without actually doing it manually because everything else was manual and honestly I still prefer the manual approach for most of the time because I think when you're just pulling in queries a lot of times you don't really think about whether that needs to be on this page however in this particular case this isn't really

about what's connected to what it's just a tracking database and so I find it really useful to have a table of pending projects so this is the data view query this is basically looking through that folder to see what projects I have backed that I'm still expecting and then there are also handy links and some other metadata about it I use data view queries in tabletop role-playing games too this is one of my campaigns my most active one is the world of the temporary white circle and this is a data view query for PCs actually

including the ones that have retired and I also do this for sessions I'm using the minimal card CSS snippet by Stefan Ango or capano who's also the CEO of obsidian now and this is the way that I am able to keep track of all of the sessions and also kind of have a fun AI mid-journey generated photo to remember the session by as well as like a quick one sentence or one phrase summary of the session I do something very similar for meetings and people I obviously can't show you that here with a real meeting

or a real person but in the person template I do have a data view query that shows every meeting I've ever had with them and the summary of that meeting so I can tell at a glance what we talked about the last time that we spoke the other organizational structure that I've been using and this one's fairly new because it was only released in a few versions ago and that is bookmarks so I have bookmarks here and I really like to have my core principles first so these ones are kind of like my review notes

so I start with my core principles and then my year ahead which is like a snapshot of where I'm going to be in the year and the main Milestones or events that are happening within each month and then I go through the year quarter month and weekly notes for that and as we take over to the new week month quarter or year then I update these bookmarks and that way they're always front of mind for me so that I can make sure that everything that I'm doing is going towards the goals that I set for

myself and then I have some other things here there's nvdh stuff that's like YouTube and I have some stuff on making things and then those tags that I told you about and I have business stuff here like money and other company information I have ddrpgs these are the three games that I most often play and this is the one that I'm running and I have a bunch of other ttrpg related things and then I have some graphs here actually some of these other ones have graphs as well I think the way that I organize notes

in this hyper connected kind of way really reflects how I think better and it also reflects how I see the world as things that don't always fit nice nicely into segregated little boxes I also mentioned this earlier but there's something about folders that makes my brain itch to look at them because I always think I didn't organize it the right way and maybe I should re-jig it I went down this bath with notion and I didn't find myself very productive with that tool because that is a tool that really encourages hierarchical thinking which I found

out is not the way that I think so for me a hyper connected node structure is actually more future proof because it has lasted more than any sort of hierarchical folder type structure has I like to structure my notes with a little bit of organization and a lot of what others might see as chaos but what I see as opportunities to spark Serendipity continually challenge the way that I think and prompt me to apply ideas in different contexts but what I've just shown is how I structure my notes not the way that you should in

the end your notes are about you and your organizational structure should reflect the way that you think the way that you process information and the way that you make sense of the world if you'd like to see more about the differences between metadata links folders and tags then check out this video where I go into that thanks for watching and by the way do you listen to the girl in red