Note purpose
This note is created as both a brain-dump and a sink for my frustration with figuring out the most useful workflow of notes using Obsidian
I need to collect my thoughts. There is a lot of noise in my brain right now, and I’m feeling frustrated whenever I open my Obsidian vault. The original intent of using this software was to organize knowledge and information I’m acquired from the world, develop something personal and useful out of them to remember for later, and record them in the vault. It was for managing information overload - the burnout experienced when I find that I’m just reading article after article without taking a break. However, I think I’ve gone severely off-course from the original objective. My current workflow is… I don’t think I should even be calling that a workflow
My current workflow
graph LR;
A["Article"]
B["Video"]
C["Social media post"]
D["Someone's words/advice"]
E["Personal thoughts"]
F["Surroundings"]
G["Obsidian"]
A --> G
B --> G
C --> G
D --> G
E --> G
F --> G
When I find an article (news article/blog post), I passively read it and then save the link either in Google Keep temporarily for shifting them to Obsidian shortly or directly in Obsidian itself. After that, I would skimp the article and pick out the important bits and rewrite them here. The only processing I’m doing is identifying important chunks. There”s no actual critical parsing of the text. I’m not distilling the text into personal knowledge. The same process is for all other categories.
I use a plugin called Templater and yet I haven’t taken full advantage of its power. I have two templates - Daily Note and Knowledge Note, out of which I am using only the Knowledge Note template for 99% of my notes. This template has nothing special about it, just two property fields - one for the date of note creation and the other being the tag(s). I have tags based on the topic of the note being taken as my goal was to create a system where I can categorize my notes into subject topics that I can use to either colour the visual graph for purely aesthetic reasons or filter notes by topic. However, apart from aesthetics, I have seen no functional use case out of my current tag system.
As I am writing this, I realize that this approach might not be 100% wrong. After all, everyone has their own unique knowledge management method. However, when I am not seeing fulfilment or joy here, it’s a good reason to think of a different method. After all, this is entirely a passive effort now. With that being the case, what makes Obsidian different from all the time-killing social media apps out there? It’s as good a waste a time as any other.
My vault organization is comprised of the following folders
- Attachments - Any image or PDF attachments I add to any of my notes gets automatically stored in this folder. It’s a method to separate the textual notes from every other form of media because it would be a mess to see images and PDFs scattered along with the rest of the notes in the sidebar
- Databases - I have personal databases here, as the name suggests. A list of all music albums I have listened to, a list of awesome websites, a study later, and other things are all collected here. Databases are different from other notes in function. They are just accumulated lists and tables. There is no personal knowledge here, it’s merely a table of entitiies I saved to keep a record
- Inbox - Originally supposed to be a spot for fleeting/temporary notes, so I could review them all at the end of the day/week, refine them, split them into different notes, and crystallize them into personal knowledge that becomes instrumental to me in the future. Sadly, that was never the case as for more than 2-3 months or so right now, I haven’t moved a single note out of this folder
- Indices - Maps of Content (MOCs) of notes by topic. Wait, isn’t that why I’m using tags in the first place? Why would I actually require this? At the time of creating this, the only reason I had in mind was to link notes and create a fancier visual graph
- Journal - I love journaling despite the unavoidable fact that I don’t journal consistently as I’m supposed to. If I’m writing down a journal for that day or just my personal thoughts, I would write them all down, save them with the date of writing the note and drop them in this folder
- Obsidian - This folder has little purpose right now, as it’s there for test notes to ensure my vault is functioning as I want it to, as well as meta-notes related to Obsidian itself. Based on that, this very note should go into the Obsidian folder
- Random - When I’m writing notes that can’t be put anywhere else, I put them here
- Resources - This should be where articles, videos, resources, books etc. are saved. However, it’s irregular with usage and I don’t know if I should even have this. I took inspiration from the much-spoken-about PARA and Zettelkasten workflows
- Templates - As I mentioned previously, the only two templates i have are saved here
Issues with my workflow
Write down the main issues I am experiencing with my present workflow
New workflow
Think over it deeply and write down about the new workflow I’m going to follow here. After that, this should be converted into a different note and a canvas drawing