If you chose to use Obsidian as a tool to write your notes, at the beginning there may be several doubts about the most efficient way to organize them. For example, which structure to follow? Is it better to use folders or tags?
Or is it a good idea to rely only on links? In this video, I'll show you some options on how to organize your notes, compare some alternatives and hopefully clarify some of these questions. Hey, guys welcome back to the channel.
If you are new here, I'm Filipe, a software engineer based in the Netherlands. I remember when I first started using Obsidian I was a bit lost for not knowing what structure to follow for my notes. I was afraid of doing everything wrong and having a hard time fixing everything later.
And, from the messages I receive, this seems to be a very common problem for other people as well. Obsidian is an app that doesn't have a single way to structure notes, and that's great because it brings a lot of flexibility but at the same time it can leave some people lost or overwhelmed. In other apps like Evernote for example, you have notebooks that can be grouped into a stack of notebooks of some common subject.
Another example is Google Keep, where each note can have one or more labels, which facilitates the search and keeps everything more organized. Unlike these apps that were developed with a more rigid organizational structure and ready to be followed, in Obsidian this is not so clear. The 3 main ways available to organize the notes are using folders, tags, and links.
But it is up to you to decide when and where to use them, and that is where most doubts begin. Let's look at each of these options to try to clarify when it makes sense to use them or not. Starting with folders.
Folders have long been the primary method for organizing personal information of various forms, ranging from paper and electronic documents to email and notes. They are great for creating separation in your notes, but over time you create more notes and consequently more folders, and in the end, you end up with a collection of things too separated or completely forgotten. Another problem with folders is the mental effort you have to do every time you create a note.
For example, a note can serve for more than one folder, and you have to make this decision frequently to decide which is the best folder to put each note in. And this is a problem that can be solved using tags. Tags are a useful way to group multiple notes to make them easier to search for in the future.
The main advantage is that, unlike folders, you can categorize a note into multiple topics, or keywords. The downside is that visually the notes don't look as organized as folders do, and this may bother some people. Another point is that over time if we abuse tags, search results can become irrelevant due to the large number of existing tags making it difficult to find exactly what we are looking for.
Also, it can be time-consuming to think about which keywords to add to a note, because you may need several of them, and there is the risk of using a tag that may not be remembered in the future. Another option is to use links. Links are also a way to organize notes.
In Obsidian, we can use the graph view to navigate within a cluster of links as if we were navigating on a map of some city. Personally, when creating a new note I always try to look for another note to try to make a connection and avoid having orphan notes. This helps me to have more context when reading these notes in the future and makes me want to keep browsing between these connections because I get curious to understand why I related note A to note B for example.
I believe it helps me to get more ideas and rediscover notes that have been forgotten. Now, the key question is: what is the best way or structure to organize your notes? Well, like almost everything in life, the answer is it depends.
It depends first on what your goal is with these notes and what you actually want to do with them. Are you accumulating reference materials for research? Or do you want to create your Zettelkasten?
Or just thoughts and reminders for your future self? Defining this is an excellent start before you choose how to organize them. And if you are just starting out, I recommend not worrying too much about structure yet.
Focus on writing and after a few hundred notes, you will start to identify some problems like hard-to-find notes, and that's a good time to try to structure them. A good idea in this case is to create structure notes using links. These notes act as a hub or entry point to some area of interest making it easy to discover related notes and other connections.
You can connect two rather distinct fields with an interesting connection and group concepts that apply to multiple areas for example. Folders are still great for grouping attachments or temporary projects that can be archived after they are finished. And tags are nice for example to define the status of a note like in progress or evergreen.
In the end, it will be a combination of folders, tags, and links that will be the best structure for you, and this is an extremely personal thing. The best structure is the one that works and makes sense to you, there is no right or wrong. I will leave somewhere here suggestions of other videos I made about Obsidian with more examples of how to use folders, links, and tags.
Thanks a lot for watching and see you next time. Bye!
