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 have folders and even tho some individual notes might get forgotten over time the important ones are still reachable.
Also I have some tags which make search very easy.
Having all the notes in a sinlge long list is very annoying, it gets me frustrated trying to look for something, infinite scrolling is the worst.
Yes, but my folders were also long lists, which was very annoying. It doesn’t matter at some point, if you have 10 long lists or only one. You start using the built-in search function and indexing more and more anyway.
Yes, in that case it’d be the same. I still rather have a way to narrow down that search with folders.
For example my programming folder is separated in languages and then in frameworks which might have the same topic from each different perspective. I have a note in each one about useful libraries, if I had one big list I’d need to have another way to name my notes so they won’t clash.
Also, in this way I can quickly type in the search
path:/js my search, this way I have different ways of filtering my results or looking at my notes.For one big list I’d need to have
js libraries,python libraries,java libraries,php libraries, and similar with different kind of notes frameworks, how-to’s, general notes, etc. for each language.When looking at my tree I wouldn’t be able to easily ignore or focus in one or two languages, so I’d be forced to type every time in the search
file:php file:js file:libraries