NOT MINE

This is just a reference/bookmarked article from the internet i found interesting!

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Follow-up: “This is my 4yo vault, AMA

I was absolutely blown away by the response to my spur-of-the-moment post yesterday, so here is a more detailed follow-up! Including a quick annotated vault tour for those curious about the suject matter breakdown of my notes. Hopefully this will answer any lingering questions about how I have organized and maintained my vault to stick with it and enjoy using it for so long. I am slightly obsessed with Obsidian and the whole idea of owning my own content in an evergreen file format like markdown, and fully expect I will still be using it 50 years from now.

Note-taking philosophy

• K.I.S.S.: Although I 100% get it, I am always a bit surprised when new users are intimidated by the supposed “complexity” of Obsidian, because it is actually very very simple and flexible at its core. Write stuff. Copy-paste stuff. Link stuff. That truly gets you 90% of the way there, all the plugins and such are just fluff (unless you find it interesting, then more power to you). When in doubt, just start writing, then add structure on top when you actually NEED structure.
• Everything in one vault, don’t be precious about it: Even when a different software would technically be more useful for a given purpose, I typically dump everything from my life into one place. There are multiple different competing organizational structures based on the type of note I’m taking and that is 100% a benefit of Obsidian. It allows me to make unexpected connections between unrelated domains of life because they aren’t all siloed from one another. Do not make more than one vault, just plop your “other vault” on top of the one you’ve got, maybe in another folder at most.
• Links, links, links: Links are the most important part of Obsidian. Don’t use a lot of folders. Don’t use hardly any tags. Just use links. (YMMV of course I know some people love tags). More links = more connections = more usefulness and more fun. Subject matter links that might otherwise be tags are often empty but have a huge list of backlinks that can be skimmed through as needed.
• Atomic Notes: Been said before a million times, but notes should only contain one idea. If you need a note with more than one idea, make a MOC or topic note and link out or embed sub-notes within it. Make sure the title of each note is a useful pointer to the entire subject matter of the note and helps you remember what’s in it.
• At least one link from the get-go: If a note is worth adding, most of the time it is worth linking to at least one other thing even when you first draft it. If it’s truly a new subject with zero connections, maybe add some links to empty notes you would want to fill in later and you can come back to them when you have more time.
• Links should be substantive: This is specifically for commonplace book-style notes. By this I mean that instead of just saying “This note is related to [[link]],” you should say something about the relationship. Like “This note is partly caused by [[link]]” or “Contrast with [[link]] which takes XYZ perspective instead.” This forces you to actually think for just a moment to form connections between things, which makes the whole vault stronger and helps you actually remember and understand things.
• Capturing thoughts can be the whole point: I got a lot of questions about how much of my vault is “useful.” There are actually quite a few notes where the usefulness is mostly clustered at the first moment I wrote it down. For example, jotting down a quick idea the minute it comes to mind is mostly an exercise in building creativity. I enjoy it and find it useful, but I will never actually act on the vast majority of ideas I come up with because I would have to live 100s of lifetimes to do so. Occasionally ideas do turn into projects and then get linked to the
• Evolving over time: For the most part, I started with less organization and added more as things went on. If my organization changed, for the most part I just left the old stuff alone and just built on top of it. The one exception is when I migrated from tags to exclusively links I did spend quite a few sessions just search-and-replace swapping tags out to get rid of them, which took a while.
• Maintenance: I have “gardening” sessions when I go through and link orphaned notes, add additional connections between notes, etc.. I find this fun and it makes the vault more useful over time.

Organization

• Folder structure: “0 - Templates,” “1 - Personal,” “2 - Fiction” (Ideas), “3 - Nonfiction” (Research/commonplace book), “4 - Tasks” (Also where I keep MOCs), “5 - Projects,” “6 - People,” “7 - Wins and Compliments,” “8 - Memories & Dreams,” “9 - Images.” I hardly ever use subfolders and more or less wouldn’t recommend them outside very specific use cases.
• MOCs: Other than project and client-specific MOCs, I also have MOCs for groups of useful things (Ideas, Household Management, Meal Ideas, Gift Ideas, Health Observations) and subjects I have researched enough about to need an organizational structure (Storytelling, Interesting Language and Wordplay, Biases/Fallacies/Brain Hacks, Child Care and Brain Development, a few different health topics)
• File naming conventions: I use YYYY-MM-DD a lot so that time-specific things are ordered chronologically when sorted alphabetically. I also use project codes for both personal projects and freelance clients for the same reason, things like NWRPG or FAESIS that mean nothing to anyone else. So an example file name would be “GRIC 2023-07-09 Chip Kick-Off Meeting.” A project code doesn’t necessarily need to be a work project, for example health notes about my son have a code to separate them out from mine, not his name but something like “BRIAN 2026-02-04 diaper rash” would be an example.
• Templates: I don’t use a ton of templates, I actually only have three and one is no longer in use, but I do find them valuable. I have a Character Sheet for fiction writing, a Monthly Life Check-In, and a now unused Daily Intentions template.
• Syncing: I use Obsidian Sync. I find having the vault on my phone useful for quick reference or quick jotting. It is pretty slow nowadays so I do plan on filtering out a lot of the synced content and only keeping a minimal portion on my phone.

Other Sub-Uses of Obsidian

• Family Tree: I use a canvas for my family tree. It is a bit finnicky but I don’t mind it. Each person is a note, and I both connect them in Canvas as well as add links inside each note to close family connections (like the note will start with parents: [[mom]] and [[dad]], siblings: [[sibling]], kids: [[kid]]). I can also then drop general family history info in that person’s note.
• Grocery List: I don’t save each grocery list, I just have one I edit every time. I like this because I can link it to things like a meal ideas note or a costco inventory note to not forget things at the monthly costco run.
• Packing Lists: I do save each packing list. I like having a reference for what I packed before, and I often jot down anything I forgot at the top of the list when we’re on our way home from that trip so I don’t miss it next time.
• Mind mapping: Although I prefer to do pure brainstorm-style mind maps on paper, I do enjoy using canvas for mind-mapping if I already have relevant or deep notes that I want to visualize for whatever reason.
• Editing nonfiction and short fiction: Underrated useful thing to do with a canvas! Each draft is a note. Each note is embedded in the canvas, side by side for easy comparison. Write directly in canvas after the first draft is done. When editing, drop a bunch of cards around the margins of the draft with all your notes. I find this suuuper helpful for a more flexible/visible approach to working on my writing!
• Playing the game Book of Hours: Lol. One of my only uses of subfolders because I do NOT want that cluttering up the rest of my stuff.

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Comments

m4st3rm1m3 · 2026-06-27 · 11 points

how to make it colorful?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 6 points

Graph view > settings button > filters. Personally I group into folders and set a color for each folder. IIRC you have to set it up fresh on every device if you use Obsidian Sync.

m4st3rm1m3 · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

I cannot find “color” in the graph view filter and folder right-click nor setting… interesting

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

You have to add a group— the group can be e.g. a file path, then you assign the group a color

niloproject · 2026-06-28 · 3 points

You can change this in the Obsidian Sync settings, and sync the filters between devices :)

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

Oh thank you! Misread your comment at first, I did not know that

RobinzonKruzoe · 2026-06-27 · 8 points

Bro has an entire living organism in obsidian with a diverse biolife

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 3 points

Legends say there are still undiscovered species buried deep in the vault…

Failed_Alarm · 2026-06-27 · 7 points

Love how thorough you are in answering all questions as well as explaining your structure. That’s dedication!

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 5 points

Thank you! I am a bit of a nerd about systems so this is just fun for me.

Zacheis88 · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

Hey, I am currently looking into system to live by, I was wondering if you could help me and recommend some books or social media that you find helpful.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 3 points

Ooh let’s see! Here are some book recs, let me know if there’s anything more specific you’re interested in from this list or in general and I can take it in a more granular direction.

- Big fan of Atomic Habits by James Clear (and also his newsletter 3-2-1 Thursdays): Focused on making small, incremental changes more sustainable to get long-term benefits without as much short-term stress/effort

- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: About the state of being totally focused/enjoying yourself/time passing in a blur and how to achieve it in day-to-day life

- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: About the ways humans do things that don’t completely make sense, but have real reasons behind them. All of behavioral economics I find quite useful for understanding human behavior, it’s at the intersection between microeconomics and psychology

- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: Maybe a more approachable intro to behavioral economics, this one talks a lot about cognitive fallacies and teaches poker-inspired frameworks for making better decisions

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: Collection of window, introduction to stoicism and separating what you can control vs. what you can’t control

Zacheis88 · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

Thank you very much. Will read the lot and get back to you. 😊

Failed_Alarm · 2026-06-28 · 3 points

If I may suggest, also check Deep Work and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. 

WAFFLED_II · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

I wonder this about all but how do you make it so well connected, backlinks or tags or something else?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 5 points

Very link-focused. I really try to prioritize making sure every new note I make is linked to at least one other thing, often there will be multiple connections. Do that enough times and suddenly things are super interlinked!

Dolchang · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

Book of hours really does need a big-ass vault for all the info. How did you sort the lore, crafting recipes, etc?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 3 points

I have mini-MOCs for principles, memories and hours. Otherwise I just dump it in and interlink it. I will probably regret not being more deliberate about noting down crafting recipes if I jump back in later. For now I’m mostly spending my free time building an app though, so no gaming for me these days. Truly the perfect game for someone who Obsidians for fun though, lol

jijidagrape · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

I promise to use Obsidian for digital notes when I study medicine soon or for my licensure exam for pharmacy

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 1 points

Go for it, hope you enjoy!

richie9830 · 2026-06-27 · 4 points

This looks beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Although I do want to ask: where do you see the biggest value of organizing and maintaining your notes with so much effort? this is something i am the most hesitant about starting with my own workflows…

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

The biggest thing for me is I do what I find fun/rewarding and drop or ignore stuff that people say you “should” do if it’s really a chore that doesn’t bring any value to my life. So a lot of it is just a natural extension of enjoying learning new things. On the actual productivity side of things, for work just being able to side-by-side open or tap between meeting notes vs planning notes vs scope outlines. For life, probably just being able to go back through a record of stuff— there’s a lot of random life things that come up every six months or less often that I just know I wrote down and have to reference, like the first time we went camping after my son was born it had been quite a while from pregnancy/postpartum etc but I don’t have to go hunting for the last camping packing list I made, I just know where it is.

richie9830 · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

appreciate it!

flori99da · 2026-06-27 · 3 points

How do you format the jotes them selves like highlighting and coloring text

OAlonso · 2026-06-27 · 2 points

What is the People folder for?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 2 points

A lot of it is family tree stuff. I also use it for source attribution by linking notes to a topic note about the author of a given quote.

homebanber · 2026-06-27 · 2 points

Could you show how your MOC note looks like?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 1 points

They are veeery basic. Basically just headers with bulleted lists of linked notes underneath.

Nashtanir · 2026-06-27 · 2 points

Are the labels in your graph made by some plugin? Seems quite useful to be quickly able to see important clusters.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 2 points

No unfortunately, I marked up a screenshot for illustrative purposes.

nicolaig · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

A thought on links…

I don’t understand links in notes. My notes are all random thoughts and ideas written down to remember as I will forget them otherwise.

Therefore it follows that I will not remember what the other notes are.

So…I can’t possibly expect to make good links when the things I do remember (that I could create links to) will almost certainly not be the best notes to link to.

I will not remember the best, most interesting links until I stumble across them again months or years later when randomly re reading my notes, as I do.

See what I’m getting at?

I have tried to link notes to see if it is useful, but later, as I wander through the links I realise that the links are fairly forced, and any real link to other thoughts will naturally flow anyway and the links I’ve made don’t really add much to the thoughts.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

Hmmmmmm… I will say I tend to do more of that style of interlinking on quotes etc than on my own thoughts, just because of how I use my vault, so that may be a bit of a difference… however I will say that I 100% take some time to search on the topic(s) of the note I’m writing to find candidates for linking. It doesn’t have to be something I happen to remember that way, and plenty of my most interesting connections have come from that. (Omnisearch plugin makes that much easier fwiw).

It could also be you don’t have enough notes around a given subject to have a lot of connections yet and it may emerge with time? It’s okay to leave stuff orphaned if you don’t have anything to connect it to.

nicolaig · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

Ah yes, I can certainly see them being very useful if I was writing research notes or topical subject matter. I will look into Omnisearch, sounds interesting. Thanks for the thoughts.

zxcvber · 2026-06-29 · 2 points

How do you keep your notes atomic? I’ve used Obsidian for 3 years, but I only have 1k notes. Whenever I write stuff, separating notes and linking them seem to scatter information all over the place, so a note becomes sort of monolithic. For example, I don’t have a daily note, I use a monthly note.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

I am not a daily note person so I can’t speak to that specifically, but I would say there are a couple things that help. A) making sure the title is veeery descriptive and can serve as a pointer/replacement for the note’s content. Oftentimes the title is the entire note or most of it, which takes some getting used to. B) Creating notes where you can access all the related notes easily, like a source note for a book that you can see all the backlinks from, or a study guide with an outline of all the relevant notes.

zxcvber · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

Hmm… I see. I have B, but not A. Maybe I group stuff too much? When I start writing about some concept (usually Math/CS), there is so much to write about, and it gets large with multiple headings. Maybe I should split them into different notes?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

Yeah, do what works for you, but it sounds like you could do a topic note for the subject, then each heading or even subheading is a link out to a different note. So you still have the outline/overview and you can actually skim it easier without the content getting in the way. Oh and if you didn’t already know, you can embed a note if you want to be able to see its contents from a different note without opening a new tab

sehlhorst · 2026-06-29 · 2 points

Thank you for writing all of this up. Can you share more about how you do your draft editing in canvas? Can you share a screenshot showing the side-by-sides or the notes? When I edit my writing I tend to just fix it in situ, although I will use callouts as placeholders in the body of the text (because notes in the margins aren’t a thing). How do you keep the margin notes aligned with the body text in the canvas? Don’t edits to the main body cause things to shift too much?

Thanks again!

Oh, given your list of books, you may like Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. Felt like a natural progression from Duke’s Thinking in Bets.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

Ooh thanks for the rec, I will check it out!

Here’s an old example, although this one is a bit messier than some. https://imgur.com/a/URv1LAm

Typically I would not edit the draft after starting to include editing comments on the canvas, I would just duplicate the note to make a v2 and edit that, so things moving around doesn’t become an issue. Also it preserves old versions such that I could revert something easily if needed.

Vir_Modestus · 2026-06-29 · 2 points

That is truly impressive. I’m at the beginning stages of moving from Evernote to Obsidian and how I’m going to organize (re-organize?) what I’m bringing over is taking up a lot of brainspace. I appreciate the information!

One thing about templates: I used a template for packing in Evernote and plan on doing the same in Obsidian. Then I’m not starting over again and, if I forget anything, I revise the template. Those old packing lists are NOT coming over from Evernote, but they don’t really need to: I have the template.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

Yeah that makes sense, I typically just copy over the last list so I don’t have to keep going back and editing a template if things change, if that makes sense

Imaginary_Lychee_144 · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

How do you get such large obsidian bases with a huge number of notes and connections?

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

It’s really just a matter of time and picking it back up if I drop off. And I enjoy it so it doesn’t feel like a chore.

Imaginary_Lychee_144 · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

I have a very small number of notes, although I have been running the base for 4 years. There are almost no connections in the database. Principle: 1. A lot of knowledge has accumulated - you communicate, combine and write instructions or guide; 2. You remove the unnecessary, thoughts and so on only increase the quantity, but not the quality; 3. Clean the base once a month. And recently, I adapted P.A.R.A. for my needs.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

Sounds like we have pretty different approaches, then. I do very little pruning/removal afterward, and kind of let what I naturally link to or reference more rise to the top, letting less useful notes sit untouched.

Imaginary_Lychee_144 · 2026-06-29 · 1 points

Unfortunately, if I do not control the storage, then it grows and I cannot control it. I get lost even in tags and in search. Yes, and it is more difficult to follow the structure. It takes too much time to “think” rather than use

Flashy-Bandicoot889 · 2026-06-27 · -8 points

AI-generated post. Please stop.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-27 · 6 points

Nope, this is 100% human-written. A bit stream-of-consciousness too because I didn’t do any editing, so I’m surprised to see this, but I get it because I also hate so much of reddit is AI slop and how much gets engagement.

LittleLordFuckleroy1 · 2026-06-28 · -3 points

Thanks for the AI slop summary dude.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

No, this is 100% human-written. Not even that polished there are definitely some typos in there. I get it because I also hate so much of reddit is AI slop and how much gets engagement.

LittleLordFuckleroy1 · 2026-06-28 · 2 points

Interesting. I guess folks like you are what AI is ripping off, so I apologize and thank you for actually contributing novel writing.

Magical_cat_girl · 2026-06-28 · 1 points

No worries, always appreciate when someone is willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence