Explaining to Myself Yet Again How This Note-Taking Thing Works

Preamble

Man, it's gotta be close to almost 3 years as I've worked inside of Obsidian as my primary organizing mechanism for tasks, journaling, knowledge exploration and management, read it later, references, travel planning, and projects. It's been an adventure honestly. My earliest journal shows 2022-04-14 which sounds about right.

I get asked a lot at work and otherwise to talk to the specifics of how I use this dang thing and stay organized. The glib answer is that in some capacity, I don't, but I've accepted that as a reality that as I change, how I interact with my notes and system is going to change.

Below are going to be a loose set of explanations around rationale, implementation, getting started and frankly other random musings I have on this topic. Maybe this gets posted as one big article, maybe I spread it out, not sure yet, either way, this is mostly for my benefit, but if someone learns something along the way, fantastic.

How to Not Get Overwhelmed

Without a doubt the thing I see people get wrapped around the axel the most on in this space is 'how'. Stop. No 'how'. 'How' bad. Find 'what' and 'why'.

Have you ever heard of 'products in search of a problem?' That's what you're doing if you start with 'how'. Often this shows up when we get excited about a new technology like Obsidian.md. All I'm saying is be mindful of the Gartner hype cycle when you realize Obsidian isn't fixing the things you want it to. That's OK, it's a tool. There are many tools to solve many problems. I've just chosen Obsidian.md again and again for various problems for better or for worse.

Find a Singular Purpose First

Lets make sure we identify a singular problem we're trying to solve, and attempt to solve it first.

Two basic questions should be answered:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• Why are we trying to achieve it?

A daily journal? Cool. Task management? Also cool. Travel planning? Neat. Please pick one thing though to focus on. Do not get distracted with all the things you could potentially solve. If you do this, you are no longer trying to solve the problem in front of you.

Building a process is a fundamentally different problem than working in a process. One may cause you to think about the other by way of 'it would be nice if I could count the number of times I eat spaghetti in a month', which is great, but write it to the side, and keep on task. When you are ready to spend time working on your process.

As an aside I don't make a strong distinction between process and system, read them interchangeably.

Do the Thing

Once you've settled on what you're trying to solve and why, then start to do. Just do the thing. Don't overthink it. Create a journal note. Plan that trip. Save those article snippets. Whatever. Value the outcome first and foremost. As you're working, have a side note to start jotting down anything that comes to mind process wise. Mine is just my daily journal which is where I dump fleeting ideas. I have it on a hotkey so no searching necessary. Mainly focus on what's taking time away from the work you want to accomplish. Look for repetition in your work.

Nice. You did the thing. I can make a prediction. It's ugly. Everything feels bespoke and doesn't feel like a system. You wish it was easier.

The great thing here is that now you have data. You know what did and didn't work for you, and now we can work on the process and system side.

Work on Your Process By Running an Experiment

There really isn't a ton to write here, other than based on your notes earlier during the work you accomplished, set aside time to actually work on the process. Treat the things you wrote down as experiments. Try a few. Then the next time you end up doing your work see if it helped.

This might be researching and installing a plugin. Singular, not plural, remember when I said experiment? Experiments require constants to determine the impact and effect of the change. Leave everything else alone bozo.

What about all those notes you already created that don't have your changes? Up to you honestly. Let's just say I have an inhuman number of notes now, and there are certain experiments where it's worth my time to go back and modify the existing notes, and there are others that are not. That's up to you sport. It helps to have some programming chops, but I'm not going to expect everyone who reads this to have those.

Repeat

That's, basically it. If you're familiar with software development at all, you'll recognize this cycle in a number of the methodologies we leverage to produce value.

• Find a singular purpose
• Do the thing
• Work on your process by running an experiment
• Repeat

But For Real, Get Some Basic Templates

I'm going to try and not be too prescriptive across this set of writings, except for this:

Learn 'Templates' plugin or go big and upgrade to Templater. This is going to multiply your consistency across notes one hundred-fold. Just do it.

I can make my templater templates available, just ask, just recognize they may only work like 60% in total since they have certain expectations to my vault.

You frankly don't even need to learn that much if you're not up for learning programming. Just go ask ChatGPT and that tends to get you there for basic queries. Otherwise hit up the Obsidian.md discord, lots of friendly people there.

How I Discover Notes

Let's say you've developed a number of different types of notes on underwater basket weaving and 20th century battle re-enactments, but now you need to actually find something. For me, it always starts with some nagging feeling that I have something captured about the subject at hand, maybe in a conversation or otherwise, and trying to draw it back up can be difficult. It's not a very good system if you can't find what you're looking for.

You Write for Recall

The most important thing for notes is recall. You know you can't keep everything in your head, that's why you take notes. If the most important property of a note is its ability to be recalled, then the single most important thing that we can build into a note is its ability to be recalled.

There are a bunch of ways to do this in Obsidian.md:

• Search
• Tags
• Links
• Scrolling Through the Files tab like a barbarian (Folders)

I don't care how you choose to organize for recall, but that should be your goal. When you finish a particular note, your last thoughts should be 'how am I going to find this dang thing again later and what do I need to change to make that happen?'

Building the Context

I personally like to think about this via the LATCH method.

Anchoring your notes with these qualities gives you a much better opportunity of finding it again in the future. Specifically for Hierarchy and Category, I use something close to the Idea Compass.

A Contextualized Example

I primarily use note properties in Obsidian.md to help build my ability to recall and rediscover notes. You're going to see a bunch of properties where you might go 'but Ben, that's going to take forever to fill everything in!'. Yes. It would. I get some help from a few plugins and I use templates to speed this along. Did you learn templates yet?

Example:

Before you ask, yes, I have notes that are specifically about questions I find interesting and would like to get back to and explore some day.

Properties I think that help build context and help recall:

• Create Date
• Modified Dates
• Prompted-By
• Referenced-In
• Related
• Parent
• Tags
• Challenges
• Tags (See Categorizing Notes)

So if I come across another conversation where we're talking about type systems, what they are, how they're used, etc. and I need to go dig out my notes on the subject, it's very possible that the things I remember are specifically my colleague and friend Michael Perry prompting the question for me, or maybe just the subject Type System, or maybe in the context of TypeScript, or maybe it was just earlier this week and I can go dig backwards through the dates and find this note (or the note that explains the answer to the question).

You get the idea. Remember, you're leaving breadcrumbs to find your way back to previous context that you found valuable.

Categorizing Notes

Categorizing notes is in my mind generally a mutually exclusive process. This is generally denoted as a 'note type' and I treat different note types differently. This is another way I contextualize my notes for rediscovery and recall.

How I Categorize

For reference, I think this is still an exhaustive list of my note types. I use emojis in tags and tags represent a note type. I mainly do emojis because there's so much text already, I like the little bit of color.

Sometimes a note ends up with two types on it. It's not preferred, but if I see an old note that seems to be pulling double duty and I don't want to split it out quite yet, it's much easier for me to just mark the note with 2 note types and call it done. "Good enough is good enough", Tim Rayburn.

You can refer to the question example above and see the note type in action.

You don't like this approach? Don't let me stop you from experimenting with something else. You can be as simple or complex in your organizing as you'd like, this has just worked well for me so far.

Jeebus That's a Lot of Note Types

Yeah. Agreed. Maybe there's some way to simplify it. For example, I probably don't need all the different types of reference material tagged independently. Articles, classes, videos, books, and podcasts all serve as an input to my system and probably could all be classified as such.

On the other hand, how I go about processing any of that input could vary from type to type. Plus what else am I going to do with all these emojis?

Really there's just a couple categories:

• Reference Notes
• Temporal Notes
• Literature Notes
• Journal Notes

Reference Notes

These are notes that basically sit around as pointers in my vault.

• Books
• Podcasts
• Articles
• Videos
• Projects
• People

Many of them are generated through a series of different collection processes I use. For example, I use Book Search to add a Book Note to the vault. I'll use the Obsidian Web Clipper to snag articles for "read it later" or videos I want to watch later.

Primarily, once these notes are created, I never touch them again. I want this as reference material. I don't want to go to these things for information about what I think. Likewise, I want to refer to them in notes about what I think (my own personal bibliography).

As I've gotten along in life and my career, there are all these opinions I've synthesized about how I should think about different aspects of both, and for the life of me it gets harder and harder to reference out to where I picked these things up. Nothing is more dissatisfying to me than having to fall back to 'I think it's because...' when attempting to make a persuasive argument.

Hanging onto this reference material, linking to who was responsible for introducing me, etc. makes it easy enough for me to trace back and rebuild the context where that opinion came from.

Temporal Notes

These are notes that I took at the time of something transpiring.

• Talk
• Highlights
• Presentation
• Watching a video (though that's changing I think)
• Reading a physical book like a Philistine, whatever
• "Fleeting" Notes

Technically, meeting notes fall in this category, but I have them broken out as their own note type. If you're looking for absolute consistency in this system you've come to the wrong place.

I will justify meeting notes as a separate entity, as I actually do put a few other constraints on them, I don't for general temporal notes. I'll get into those later when I get down to task and project management .

Either way, these notes usually follow along in time to the content I'm consuming. Reading top to bottom, you can understand generally the order that the event I was recording was being presented in.

I consider these notes as generally disposable. What I want to be able to do is refer back to them for a short period of time, and then either archive them away or delete them entirely. It's possible these end up informing Literature Notes, if they do, I'll need to figure out how to reference that material because sometimes I like to have quotes in the lit notes. In fact, highlights of books technically fall in here also, and I definitely want to reference those long term.

Whatever, giant gaping hole in my current process, sue me.

Atomic Notes (Zettelkasten)

• Idea Notes
• Question Notes
• Literature Notes
• Maps of Content (Maybe?)

One note represents one idea. Some smart guy came up with it. I think it's mostly from How to Take Smart Notes. I never read it, but I watched and listened to a bunch of other smart people talk about it.

Honestly, it's a nice process. This is where I can interlink a bunch of note ideas using my context building process above on a given subject. This allows for a place for other interesting things to be sorted into as well.

For example, I've deep dived into the Apache Kafka world and a lot of the notes you find in there are literature notes about the content. Since I'm also studying at the time of the writing to get certified, there's a ton of 'flashcards' under each of those notes which worked out well.

Some other supporting notes that technically aren't literature notes in the Sönke Ahrens definition are idea notes which represent my own personal musings, question notes which represent a linkage I'd like to explore at some point but is tangential to the content I'm covering right now, and Maps of Content, which honestly just provide a way to view the 'tree' of note relationships for all the literature notes. Just see the Apache Kafka or The Empowerment Dynamic Maps of Content to understand what I'm saying.

Example Literature Note:

Journal Notes

These notes are exactly what they sound like. I tend to keep my habit tracking in these notes. It's also where I dump just random things to come back to. Technically I have weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes as well. I think I originally intended to have these as 'roll ups' of the vault over time and my life.

Frankly, I'm just not there yet. I'm not sure what to track at anything above weekly. The weekly view is nice however for balancing my tasks throughout the week so I don't have 20 things rain down on me when I could've spread them out more.

Example Daily Note:

Aaaand Weekly

Task Management

Task management is relatively easy. Luckily the Tasks Plugin exists and I use some very basic functionality for it. I used to have a much more complicated setup, but now, I have a singular note that just happens my current list of tasks available. I actually have some work to do in this area. I want a way to remind myself of open projects, and I use a recurring task for this but what ends up actually happening is I just see a flood of... well... this:

It's not great. I'll solve it. One day.

If you end up getting the Task plugin installed, here's the query I use:

not done
path does not include templates OR archive
((due before today) OR (due on today)) OR ((scheduled before today) OR (scheduled on today))
short mode

The great thing about contextualizing your notes, is you can actually drop tasks into the notes in which they arose. I find this super helpful if I need to link from the task view back to where that task originated from for additional context. If I do it write, I don't need that context, but it's there if I do. These often come from meetings or maybe a problem I'm working on at work in a fleeting note I'm capturing over the life of that problem I'm solving.

You might also notice that all my tasks have an associated project. This is on purpose. 99% of the time a task is never done in isolation of other related work. Does it happen? Occasionally, that's why I said 99%.

Project Management

Projects took me forever to figure out how I wanted to manage. What the hell is a project anyways? I ended up stealing from Getting Things Done and The PARA Method from Building a Second Brain, or at least from Tiago Forte, I never read the second brain book. Long and short of it;

• Does it take more than one task to accomplish? Project
• Did someone make a meeting about it? Project
• Are you producing and hanging onto reference material related to a subject? Project

Reading a book is a project. Planning a trip is a project. Do you have a 'why' and 'what' you're trying to accomplish that requires a 'how'? Congrats, you have a project. Yes, that does mean 'Developing My Note-Taking System' is a project. So make sure you're working on the right thing at the right time.

Projects are like, one of 3 folders in my vault that actually have folders in them on purpose (I hate folders). I didn't full embrace the PARA method, but you bet I stole the idea of using a project folder to group together all related content necessary to complete that project. Once a project is done, I sort through the leftover notes and decide if it's reference material, material that needs to be further broken down, written about, etc., or just archived.

Most stuff goes to archive.

Here's my Apache Kafka Folder:

Loooooooots of notes in there currently. Eventually I will release it all back into 'genpop' but since I'm actively working on it, it's easier to leave here.

References