How Do You Keep Your Thoughts Organized?

Last updated Feb 13, 2023

• Journal

I’m the type of person who jumps from an idea to an idea in a single conversation. Once I get started I can’t stop myself form talking for hours and hours. Because of this, I always had a small notebook in my pocket to write things down whenever an idea struck me. The challenge came when I tried to access them at later time. I have to flip through my notebooks and decipher my chicken scratch to recall what was on my mind. So how can I improve my methods and solve the information access problem other than learning how to write prettier?

Welcome to Obsidian Markdown.

There are many things you can do on Obsidian and my choice of projects are Journaling, Creative Writing and Table Top Role Playing Games.

I admit I am not the best organizer when it comes to my own notes, the most prolific writing medium I had was stacks of small pocket notebooks. I still use them today because they are muscle powered and works as long as I have something to write with. That being said the major setback is when I am trying to pool that information into something more cohesive, it’s a mess or spend a very long time in finding it.

Now I have been using this system for a year and I am no master of it but at least I am getting better at organizing my own thoughts as a result of using this system. I share this with you because I want to make a record on my procedures of how I log information and hope you don’t have to spend as much time as I did to come to where I am.

If I am to advise myself on how I should use the vault to my past self to save me the trouble of trying to change all the files I have in my vault to sync up nicely for searchability and all? Here’s the list and I will go over them.

What I want to advise to my past self, if I could

1. Just use it, don’t waste time on thinking about the structure at the start.
2. Take a weekend to go over the notes and curate them.
3. Make a template and structure after reviewing your organizing method.
4. Implement the new structure, if you are up for it update the old ones but don’t kill yourself.
5. Talk to people in the community for insights.

I spent quite a bit of my time reading up on different organization methods and plugins. I watched YouTube for organization and notetaking ideas. At the end of the day, those folks on the Internet created all those things because it solves their problem, not mine nor yours. It’s a good guide and tool to keep in mind later once you have something to organize. If you already know your organization method, then go right ahead and start structuring your vault. I didn’t have any of that and/or didn’t know what system or structure I was using till I used it.

The reason why I recommend you this method is because we are not blank slates, the fact that you can read my writing means you probably have experience in organizing your things your way. If you’re like me I never really thought about how I do them, I just did. My old journals and note taking structure varies from book to book as a result of inconsistency or trying a different format. At least at the very start, just use it and record whatever that needs to be recorded. close that note and create another and keep recording. The first step is to use the vault and add some samples into the vault that is actually useful instead of just samples for the same of samples. Your time is precious, don’t waste with Lorem Ipsum.

My friends say I’m scatter brained, I have sudden idea that pops up and I have to say or write them down or read an article title I should read it again. I save them in here and on the weekend I review them.

What I learned from revisiting my notes reinforces my memory and able to refine the information. This also gives me a moment to take a breather to restructure them so I can access the information better in the future. If you think something in the notes should be a new note of itself, do that. I think this is what they call atomic notes?

This also provides better understanding of your own note taking styles and able to improve them while you’re at it. Another good method is creating a note out of a textbook or an article and see how you reorganize it for better access. How would you note notes on this system? would you use comments by using %%as comments?%% or would you put a callout to hide examples as such?

This is how I put examples so I don’t have to read them if I don’t want to because it might break the flow of my reading, or keep it open to make example more visible.

I also put TLDR at the top if it’s an article I want to summarize in my own words

You saw this earlier about what I was going to talk about, well this isn’t much of a summary but here it is. You can create callouts by typing > for tldr. You can check out more about Callouts here.

My old workplace used to drive me nuts with the folders and document naming conventions, they were using DD-MM-YY so whenever you are trying to sort them or access them it was sorting out by days first. Also no, the system was backed up once a while so created date was no use. So I decided to rename all the files to YYYY-MM-DD and wrote a Standard Operating Procedure.

I recently learned that was a ISO 8601 method. I started to use it for my own vault and I added hh-mm so I can create many notes a day. I also automated the file naming by Unique Note Creator from the core modules and pick a template to use.

Speaking of templates I can revisit to change them, mostly I have the metadata to record tags and other information. What goes into the metadata varies from file to file depending on its use case. This is what I have for this post.

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---
date: 2023-02-13
title: How Do You Keep Your Thoughts Organized?
tags:
- journaling
---

If you are still in the early stages of creating your vault, feel free to experiment and see what format works best for you, maybe you’d rathe put the #journal tag here.

Sometimes folder might be your thing. It became a thing for me once I had start having 500 notes. I picked Johnny Decimal System system and created 10 folders without names and randomly picked 50 as Notes and 00 as Admin. I used Admin to store my template and notes related to managing my obsidian vault.

johny decimal folder structure.png

It’s still work in progress. you can see my Notes is quite big.

It get easier to identify what these folders should be as you put more stuff in it because you start to see a pattern of things. If you’re in school then perhaps one folder should be Courses. There are benefits of using folders such as it is pleasing on the eye and if you are using Dataview, there’s less load for the system when search field is set to a folder instead of the entire vault. Folders also enables you to make sub-vaults, a vault within a vault. I can talk about these two for another time. For now examine your notes and see how you can sort and structure them for ease of access.

This is actually my second vault because the first I spent all my time on making folders templates and installing whatever plugin from the community I thought I’ll need it and ended up not using most of them a few weeks later. This vault’s been active for a year and as you can see it’s not all sorted, the tags are all over the place and formatting changed on a weekly basis, drawing closer to the current structure.

If you have an Eureka moment and made a significant changes to how you organize and search your notes and the old notes are not part of the new method? Change the ones you access but don’t worry about the rest. You’ll get to them eventually.

It really helped me to review in a timed intervals like weekly or monthly to improve my workflow after reviewing my notes.

At first, I just lurked around the Discord clicking all the links and reading their posts on the way they decorate their vaults. I don’t know when but I started to post on how to deal with certain organization solutions to the methods I had in mind and the community came at me with suggestions like a blood was dropped in the Amazon river full of piranhas. But this is a good kind of frenzy. Now I’m one of the piranhas who bites onto new comer’s questions.

I’ve used Evernote and Onenote to take notes in the past and the challenge was it had inherent bias in note organization: it couldn’t break away from the pocket notebook I used, just digitized.

Call it a gimmick but I love the graph view, especially the local graph view of the note I am working on. This is the first time I’ve seen a graph view to see all the connections between my notes - including the tags - and see if I can create new connections. also the lack of folder structure initially made it easier for me to not look at my notes like they’re not in a notebook. Also you can essentially save a search result by using query but you could do so much more and pretty with Dataview which I will cover next time.

I am scatterbrained, my friends say so I keep my own notes whenever I have an idea so I can refine them later. physical notebook’s been an amazing tool for me and I still carry them. However Obsidian really enables me to combine my notes together to create something more than its parts.

I hope you can create something wonderful by combining your ideas together.