kepano-obsidian/Readme.md

My personal Obsidian vault structure. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing the things I am interested in.

To learn more about how I use Obsidian, visit my website stephango.com.

Get started

1. Download this vault
2. Unzip the .zip file to a folder of your choosing
3. Open Obsidian and create a new vault pointing to that folder

Vault structure

Theme and related tools

• My theme: Minimal, more at minimal.guide
• My web clipper for saving articles and pages on the web

Plugins

Some of my templates depend on plugins I use:

• Dataview for many database views
• Periodic notes and Calendar for daily notes
• Leaflet for maps

Folders

I use very few folders. My personal notes are primarily in the root, these are my journal entries. Folders are for everything else. The folders I use:

• Attachments for images, PDFs, etc
• Clippings for articles and other pages captured with my web clipper written by other people
• Daily for my daily notes, all named YYYY-MM-DD.md
• References for anything that refers to something that exists outside of my vault, e.g. books, movies, places, people, podcasts, etc.
• Templates for templates. In my personal vault Templates are nested under "Meta" which also contains my personal style guide and other random things that are about the vault. I have moved it to the root for the sake of clarity.

I do not use the file explorer much for navigation. I primarily navigate using the quick switcher (Cmd + O).

Style guide

Templates and metadata

The .obsidian/types.json file shows which properties are assigned to which types.

• Most of my properties attempt to be reusable across categories
• Many properties have short names e.g. start instead of startdate
• I use the list type more than the text type for many properties, because I find it useful to be able to enter multiple links

Categories and tagging

I primarily use the category property, e.g. category: [[Movies]] to organize and navigate my vault. Some rules I personally follow:

• Always pluralize categories and tags
• Use YYYY-MM-DD everywhere
• Use a single vault for everything
• Avoid folders for organization
• Avoid non-standard Markdown

Rating system

Anything with a rating uses an integer from 1 to 7

• 7 — Perfect, must try, life-changing, go out of your way to seek this out
• 6 — Excellent, worth repeating
• 5 — Good, don't go out of your way, but enjoyable
• 4 — Passable, works in a pinch
• 3 — Bad, don't do this if you can
• 2 — Atrocious, actively avoid, repulsive
• 1 — Evil, life-changing in a bad way

Why this scale? I like the 7 scale better than 4 or 5 stars because I need more granularity at the top, for the good experiences, and 10 is too many.