I was really hooked by Obsidian right from the start. It’s one of these things, where you feel the potential electrifying your fingertips. My first few notes were clumsy, as expected, but I also expected it to get better over time. I read something about Evergreen Notes and tried to apply those principles. I still sorted everything into neat folders though, some of which had sub-folders and it felt structured, but it felt like I wasn’t getting the most out of Obsidian, not even a fraction. The process of sorting my notes into folders and searching for notes within those folders also became a tedium and I started forgetting about notes, just because I couldn’t find where I put them.
Once I watched Nicole’s video on the LATCH method, something clicked. I copied her format and adapted it for my use. I established parent-child-links between my notes, created index notes listing child notes via Dataview and today… today I finally got rid of all folders (except one diary folder). They didn’t give my vault good structure, but actually obfuscated information, and once I used LATCH they were obsolete.
What are your thoughts on and experiences with folders and linkage?
Do you have a method of organizing, that you want to share?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
I did try to not use folders, but could not. Somehow, my mental structure works that way. Still, I think it depends on how you use them. I just have a handful of very high level folders for the big parts of my life I usually compartimentalize anyway, but it is flat otherwise, no subcategories,etc. Semantic connections across those folders, when the need arises, are done with links and tags. I use dataview sparingly. To me, the most attractive feature of Obsidian is the fact that, at the end of the day, all the notes are plain markdown files. Having used different note taking apps for decades now (I have notes from the late 90s still around, which I kept migrating from tool to tool), to be stuck in a proprietary format (or requiring special rendering, as is the case) would be a showstopper.
Still, the most beautiful thing about Obsidian, I think, is it’s ability to support a myriad organization styles, matching different people’s cognitive styles!