Notes structure

I aspire for all my notes to be in markdown in my primary obsidian vault. I also use my main vault for task management, planning, retros and basically any note taking or personal organisation or knowledge management.

Every time I look back through my notes, I’m reminded how tightly bound to my own thoughts they are. That works out great for me: it allows for sparser, lighter notes that I can produce quicker. It’s not great for anyone else though. Trying to share them forces me to think consciously to ensure they would be coherent to someone who isn’t me. It’s far more challenging than I would have anticipated.

My current note structure is inspired loosely by the PARA methodology so has the following top level folders:

• _year - holds daily, weekly and monthly notes, organised as MM/YYYY-MM-DD , ending with either “WC” or “MC” for Week/Month Commencing for weekly/monthly notes, as well as a top level 2023 markdown for year plans.
• archive - PARA old/irrelevent/outdated/completed etc.
• areas - PARA key important areas of my life, each folder has a file with the same name as a contents for the area, explaining relevance, status and dashboard type things for the area.
• meta - meta things for the vault including templates, scripts, views etc.
• projects - PARA in progress projects, each page or folder is a project with a description and some tasks/progress notes
• resources - PARA information and links to resources that aren’t necessarily active areas of my life, I don’t use this section much..
• public - digital-garden contents, new, includes this file!

The most use folders:

• _year as it has my daily notes which include task management views where I tick stuff off and reviews which happen daily,
• areas this is where I add most of my notes and broader thoughts & plans for different areas.
• projects as this is where I leave a bunch of updates and create tasks and record progress.

Areas §

For the past 2 - 3 years, my notes have been grouped into the following areas:

• 1dom - my online profile and things related to it, such as websites, content ideas, technical notes on setup etc.
• blockchain - I did most of a PhD on cryptocurrencies, cybercrime and security from 2012 - 2016 and worked as a blockchain engineer at a large european exchange for a year until 2023.
• core-infrastructure - info about software, hardware and systems that I use daily and consider necessary to run my life (network, secrets management, backups, desktop hardware, phone).
• finances - notes on mine and my partners personal finances, including goals, processes, spreadsheets, documents, accounts etc.
• health - things related to my physical body, notes on things like food, sleep and mental health.
• house - we bought a big “doer-upper” which we had big renovations done on, and are now responsible for maintaining on our own!
• meta - can’t spell meta without me: notes related to me and the things I want, including personal philosophy, development, conduct, wants and ambitions.
• people - conversations/dates/relatives/draft comms.
• organisation - My working memory can’t hold all the things I want to do, so I look for support from different organisational and knowledge management systems and methods.
• work - things relating to employment and work
• vr - I spend a lot of time in virtual reality, both for entertainment and productivity.

Some of these areas are naturally busier and some lend themselves to sharing more than others.

Projects §

I use projects quite a lot. It’s useful to have one folder of pages of things I’m actively working on, and it’s useful for those pages to be more focused on real world pragmatic things, like tasks, progress and blockers, rather than abstract or tangential things.

Having project pages also forces me to think about completing and finishing work. A project page should have some sort of defined target or end point, and it should always have a Next Up section of actionable tasks. If I want to work on a project, ideally I should be able to go to its project page and grab a task or 2 to do. When I’ve done some work on a project, I should be able to leave an update or tick of some tasks in the project.

In reality, a single project could be something small (like clearing an area in prep for something, with a bunch of tasks for the different things which needs clearing) and might only last a few days. Alternatively, a project might be a nerdy bit of software I’m working on.

For larger projects, theyevolve and the project pages ends up with headings for MVP1, MVP2 etc. Eventually, I create a project folder, with different notes with tasks or planning related to certain areas of the project.

Offline, when a project is complete, I look to extract useful information into a more permanent location and move the project to an archive folder.

Public §

I’m trying to take a copy-on-write approach to move my notes mainly from areas and resources to exist under public. As I’m doing this, I feel the need to update them a bit to represent my current values and what I want to have online. One big change is core-infrastructure and 1dom are probably going to merge under selfhosting and meta. Currently the structure is being developed, currently:

20231208 - hmmm, I’m going to tweak that a little… I’m not going to get rid of core-infrastructure. It will be useful for offline things still: hardware

Areas §

• selfhosting - tinkering creating and setting up fun nerdy tech
• meta
• organisation