So a lot of my inspiration is from this article I read from Steph Ango. I’ve kinda re-appropriated his repository and made my own templates and shiz. This article is on the updates I have made to Steph’s vault template and my thoughts behind them.
Folders
I don’t like too many files in my vault, especially ones that have auto generated names. Such notes are usually for my journaling requirements. But I also don’t like a ton of folders, specially nested ones. On File Systems they are great (and tbh the only way) to organize files. But here I use tags & categories.
Buuuut, I still have some folders just to keep things a bit neat on the eyes when I open my vault. All in all, I use 9 folders (okay that’s a lot I guess). Briefly,
- 000 Journal1: Holds daily stuff that I write to unload about random things in life.
- AI Conversations: I use a plugin called Copilot for LLM related tasks on my Obsidian Vault. The conversations I have with the LLM are all stored here.
- AI Prompts: Copilot provides a feature where I can highlight text and have it do some quick tasks. The prompts for those quick tasks are stored here.
- Attachments
- Categories: Imagine you have lots of toys – cars, dolls, blocks. Categories are like groups you make for your toys! Like, you might have a “cars” box and a “dolls” box. It helps you keep things organized.
- Clippings: Think of clippings like little pieces of paper folks would cut out from a magazine. If I like an article and I refer that in my thoughts somewhere, I use Obsidian Web Clipper to get a markdown version of that article in my vault. Can never have too much knowledge!
- Daily: Similar to the vault template, this holds just references to days when I’ve added notes.
- References: I’ve kept things that exist outside my physical body in this folder.
- Templates: All the templates (and also bases) that I use for my daily notetaking are here.
Categorization
I add the tags and categories properties to almost every thing I write here. Categories are for broad categorization, think “Games”. Tags are granular categorization. Think “games/board-games”.
A note can have at max 1 category on it, while it can have multiple tags. For example, I can have a note titled “Life in a Metro” with category as Movie, coz it will have all Movie details in it. This will also be a reference so the tag of reference will be added to it. Also movie tag. If I write a review of the movie or anything for example an article on it (lol), that note will have the category as Post and tags as post, movies.
If a note needs to have more categories, I’ll add that category as another property in the frontmatter of the note. For example, meeting notes will be given the category of “Meetings”, but maybe i had an audio call instead of in person. In that event, the meeting note in question will have a type property with a value of Calls. Calls is a separate “sub” category of a meeting2.
Footnotes
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Why
000? So that it shows up in the top of my vault. ↩ -
This may seem complicated, but give it some time. ↩