How I take notes

I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. I use this approach to mutate laziness and chaos to create structure.

This by no means is dogmatic. Take the parts you like. Create your own system.

Tools and theme

  • Obsidian Bases for seeing related notes in tables, kanbans, or maps.
  • Obsidian Maps for seeing places using Bases.
  • Obsidian Web Clipper to clip, highlight, and populate metadata from the internet using web browser.
  • Minimal theme with Flexoki color scheme.
  • My custom plugin Awan to sync notes across my laptop and mobile device. More on this below.

Style and personal rules

Personal rules I have:

  • Use YYYY-MM-DD format for date and YYYY-MM-DD HHmm for time everywhere.
  • Avoid non-standard Markdown.
  • Always pluralize categories and tags.
  • Use internal links profusely. Non-distracting links can be achieved using only the first mention in the note.
  • Use list instead of text in a property when it is likely containing multiple entries.
  • Use 2 a maximum of levels of hierarchical headings. Chapters (level 2 heading) and A-level heads in text (level 3 heading).

A consistent style helps me to stay organized and collapses many of future decisions into smaller manageable decisions. I try to make it easier for my future self to read, find, and maintain these notes. For example, I write date as YYYY-MM-DD so I don’t have to think about what format of the idate I wrote when I want to look for a specific note from a specific day. Using standard markdown means I can move to other tools if something happen to the current tool I use.

Choose rules that make you comfortable and write them down. Make your own style. You can always change them later.

Organizations and folders

I use very few folders. I avoid using folders because my entries may belong to more than one area of thought. I don’t want the overhead of deciding where something should go. I also do not use nested sub-folders.

I rarely use file explorer for navigation. I mostly use backlinks, links within a note, or the quick switcher.

My notes are primarily organized using the categories or tags property. Categories display a glimpse of related notes, using bases feature in Obsidian.

I write my notes in the root folder of the vault, not a folder. This is where I write about my personal world: thoughts, journals, essays, evergreen notes, and other personal notes. If a note is in the root folder, I know that is something I wrote or relates directly to me.

I still use folders. Two reference folders I use:

  • References where I write about things that exist outside my world. Movies, books, places, video games, people, etc. I always use the title as the note name, e.g. Book title.md or Person name.md. If two distinct entities share the same name, I add the object form inside parentheses after the name, e.g. The Martian (Movie).md and The Martian (Book).md.
  • Clippings where I save things other people wrote, mostly articles, essays, or Tweets.

Four administrative folders I use:

  • Attachments for images, audio, videos, PDFs, etc.
  • Categories for categories notes. These files only to be linked to other notes.
  • Daily stores daily notes, all named YYYY-MM-DD.md. These notes solely exists to be linked from other notes and contains an Obsidian base to index all the notes for that day.
  • Templates for templates and a sub-folder Templates/Bases for Obsidian base files.

Every note in my vault is linked to other notes. I try to always link the first mention of something. These links make my notes atomic and concept-oriented. I use this approach to see the pattern of the things in my world and outside of it.

My journal entries are mostly cataloging recent events that happen in my life, finding connection between things. Often a link is unresolved, meaning that the note for the link is not created yet. Unresolved links are important because they are crumbs of future connection between things.

My journal entry may look like this:

I had a conversation about writing with [[Maudy]] at [[Baca di Tebet]] after reading a book [[Tiny Experiments]]. This reminds me of an essay ...

The place and book entries live under References folder. In these notes I capture properties and my thoughts about that thing. I use Obsidian Web Clipper to populate properties from database like Goodreads. The essay I mention lives under Clippings folder because I did not create it myself.

With this style of profusely linking notes, I can trace how ideas born, and the branching paths these ideas created.

Fractal journaling and random revisit

I use unique note feature within Obsidian throughout the day to write individual thoughts as they come up. This method will automatically create a note prefixed with YYYY-MM-DD HHmm which I may add a title to the note to describe the idea.

Every few days, I review these fragments and compile the thoughts. I then review the thoughts monthly, and review the monthly reviews yearly. This resulting in a fractal web that I can zoom in and out.

Every few months I set aside a time for a random revisit. I use random note feature to open random notes throughout my vault. This helps me revisit old ideas and memories, create unresolved links, and find inspiration from the past thoughts. I also use this opportunity to do vault maintenance, like managing property types, adding missing properties to files, and adjusting the formatting based on rules described above.

I don’t automate this with language models, as I am the one who is responsible in understanding my own pattern. I enjoy this process. It’s the doing that matters, not having it done.

Properties and templates

Almost every note created in a vault is created using a template. Templates allow me to lazily add information that helps me to find the note later. Every note at least try to capture some data, such as:

  • Themes — categories, genres, types, topics, related
  • Dates — created, date, end, published, updated
  • People — author, director, casts, artist, host, guests
  • Locations — coordinates, city, district

I follow my personal rules for properties:

  • Property name and values should be reusable across categories.
  • Templates should be composable, meaning two templates can be used for one thing.
  • Short names are easier to type and remember, e.g. created instead of date_created.
  • Default to list type instead of text if there is any chance of the property may contain more than one values or links in the future.

Syncing between devices

I sync my notes between my devices using a custom Obsidian plugin called Awan. The set up is a bit technical and requires me to set up a few API keys to work, but it minimizes the cost for me and keeping my data my own.

The plugin is not public ready, since it’s not reliable enough and I’m still working to improve and document it. I recommend using the official Obsidian Sync plugin or other sync services for simpler setup.

Publishing to the web

This site is written, edited and publish directly using Obsidian. I have a separate vault for my site, which break one of my rules above. I use a static site generator called Jekyll to automatically compile Markdown notes into HTML pages. This site uses Flexoki color scheme.

For this site, I push notes from Obsidian to a git repo using the Obsidian Git plugin. The notes are then automatically compiled and hosted to Cloudflare Pages. When writing, I also like to see the draft preview using Permalink Opener plugin.

My Jekyll template is not public. You can use many alternatives to Jekyll to compile your site, such as Obsidian Publish, Quartz, Astro, Hugo, and Eleventy.