Organizing Information in Obsidian: A Comprehensive Guide

hey everyone in today's video I'm going to share with you how I organize everything in obsidian this is the end

of a long journey that started almost a year ago when I first published rethinking my PKM one and since then

I've been releasing various videos on the topic and now I'm ready to share how my entire system works so in today's

video we are going to look at the six principles of my PCM and the 14 components of my system and for each of

them each of the components I'm going to try to give you multiple examples from My Vault

also the drawing that I'm going to use in today's video I'm going to include a link in the video description to this

excalator drawing so you can open this and you will find lots of additional information

links to various videos that I've shared and links to blog posts and other materials so you can really dive into

the topic that interests you the most just a quick reminder the visual thinking Workshop cohort for is starting

this Saturday if you're interested to learn more about visual thinking if you want to learn from me about organizing

your information and obsidian this is an awesome opportunity to meet with me and to work together I'd love you to join

cohort for so now let's dive in and let's start with the six principles

so my first principle is to keep it simple each component each of the 14 components

has a clear purpose and a single purpose and I try to keep these separate from one another so I don't get confused

about it second I'm keen on minimizing friction I use two primary tools for this templater

and data view but of course there are some other automations as well but automation is an important part of my

workflow third I live in the Brownfield reality and I

bet most of you also this means that I've had previous PKM systems where I stored information I had my file system

so I've every time I upgrade my PC I store the previous PCS content in a folder called archive so this is archive

in an R Hive in an R Hive in an R Hive going back to the 1990s so there's lots of stuff

also I use multiple tools like the brain Evernote ROM research Etc and I've imported materials from there but this

means that overall my volt is a mess I try to get on top of the categories or tags or the folders but it is really

hard with this Brownfield reality and I decided to accept reality for what it is fourth I'm keen on avoiding moving files

around I make this point because Thiago forte in building a second brain proposes a workflow where you move files

into a folder for the project and when the project completes move your files to somewhere else

I don't like to move files around because then links break even in obsidian where you get some control

around it there are some issues with moving files around so I place the file somewhere and I stick to that location

even if it sometimes means that things don't end up in their correct folders fifth I apply latch latch stands for

location alphabet time category and hierarchy and this was coined by Richard Warman he is the founder of TED talks

and he said that everything in the world can be organized by these five means and by these five means only and the way I

apply latch or the reason I apply latch is to maximize the vase how I can find information so I can find information

based on my calendar I can find the information based on the physical location if it was force some reason

memorable I can find it based on categories and with the other methods as well using latch and applying latch to

each pieces of information in my world helps me maximize findability and finally I always link now this is

something that I've not been always deliberate on I looked at how many orphan files I have in my Vault and I

was surprised to see that it was in the high hundreds meaning five six hundred orphan files and this is because often

I'm using folders in a way that they provide a structure and often I just simply place a document with the topic

in that file but of course that reduces findability so recently I've decided that I'm only going to place files in my

vol if I'm able to link it to somewhere to My Graph so these are my principles and then let's dive into each of the

tools I'm going to start with folders and first of all you can see my folder hierarchy here

it is a relatively lean folder hierarchy so you can see I have these are my folders

there are some folders that I would love to get rid of but because I don't want to move files and because of the

Brownfield reality I cannot so archive the brain is there it has lots and lots of files where you can see there it has

almost 4500 files and the Thousand subfolders so that is a big mess but also Hobbies I

would love to move on their projects but again lots of files here lots of folders and I just decided to leave it there it

is by the way I think of folders not as physical storage locations but as name spaces so let me show you what I mean by

that so when I create a new link to a file that doesn't exist

in My Vault let's imagine I'm adding a new book to My Vault and I want to add the author I don't just write the name

of the author for example Dan Rome but I create the author in the people author's namespace which simply means that I type

in and here in search we can actually take a look at this so I type in a link that starts with people then

slash author and then slash I continue with the name of the author so in this case you can see I have a number of

ghost links so ghost link means that the actual folder for the author has not been created so you can see here Dan

Rome or Eliezer yutkovski you can see here a couple of Hungarian poets as well as some other authors

by doing this then I create the file or when I create the link to the name of the person I can

already give it a type I know it's an author even without creating the file and adding a tag author to me this is

helpful second I like folders because they help me manage what gets synchronized with

obsidian sync so here in obsidian sync settings you can actually specify exclude folders so here on my

Mac I have nothing all my videos are on my desktop PC there I have lots of folders that are in

the exclude because for example I exclude all the folders with the video files and voice files because they are

large and there's no point in synchronizing them however I keep them in obsidian but I can ring fence that

content and not move it around with obsidian sync and then

I try to name YouTube Project files and other files as well or rather folders with a year month date naming this is

something new that I've started so I don't really have many examples of this but here you will see that some of the

folders that are now created recently followed this naming convention what this helps me with is it gives me a

chronological order for my videos because you can see I have whole bunch of files here and sometimes it is a bit

of a difficult thing to find the video however I do remember the time when I created that

video and then in obsidian you can set up the attachments folder and also the new file

so here if I come to settings under files and links there are these additional settings that you can create

so first of all the default location for new notes for me is the same folder as the current file which means that if I'm

working on a topic and I just simply write the name of a new file not using the namespace then that file is going to

be created in the same folder if I want to place it somewhere else then I follow this namespace approach and I type out

the location of the file and second I keep my attachments under the subfolder of the topic for me

attachments and the notes are very closely connected and this is why for me this makes sense so

for example here if I come to input this is where all my inputs are for example articles and assessments and books and

conferences films if here's for example my book notes on deep work and you can see here that I have my attachments

folder which includes all of my illustrations for deep work so that's about folders now moving on to tags I

only use one tag per page there's one exception to this which is more a stylistic thing and I didn't even

include it here but you will see it in the next step when I talk about data View and how I'm

using search so for now the point is I

aim to give a single tag to each document and that will give that document a type so for example if we

open this page and I'm going to navigate here if I open this page you can see that

this is a map of content and you can see I have my tag map of content here and now if I open xcoli Brain for this page

then what you will see here is based on the tag on the page I'm going to give this file a different look and feel in X

call your brain so all my map of contents are with this red color and have this icon of a map there all my

people file so you can see couple of people here Thiago Fort and Nick Milo are they have this person at the

beginning all my books have this book there then I have ex College Road drawings have this painter's palette

there Etc so I use the tag for the page to also Define the look and feel of this

page in X color brain and just to show you how I configure this in excalib brain so here if I come to excalibrane

settings I can scroll down here here are all the different tags listed that I'm using in My Vault with a special purpose

and here if I choose one of the tags so let's look at the Moc that we looked at a second ago you can see that I have my

prefix which is this map emoji and then I have the background color and the text color specified and I can see that this

is how these are going to look and for example if I look at a person then you can see that this is how a person node

looks like in X color brain I need to add these Stacks here and then they appear here in the list and finally on

tags I have this article call and on the link that I'm going to include in the show notes that will take you to

excalator.com with this drawing there you will find this link and you can click on this so back in the time when I

was working in the brain I had this whole color scheme of how I used the different

thought types and these are actually the equivalents of tags or the way I use them in obsidian and I had different

color ranges so read the range were all the media that I consumed the yellow range was for example all the people

friends family colleagues all these purple items were companies or legal entities

Etc so each color had its own purpose and then I looked at my graph then I was able to understand it immediately or

understand it much better so moving on talking about links so we're going to look back to my PKM Moc

and you will see how I'm using links here so or the ontology so the ontology is defined here in the front by this

data view field with double columns after it and then I have the link the way this is going to appear on the graph

in X color brain is here if you take a look you will see that these tags that are here on the left hand side appear

here as related to examples example examples Etc author you have the different type of relationship so I use

ontology in My Vault and I use it to describe the relationship between this file and the

next file to me this helps to think about why I have that link there it what's the purpose of the link actually

coming up with the ontology is sometimes a challenge in ex call it brain there's a feature that I get prompted with these

ontologies so if I type triple double colon then this list comes up and I can just simply type and we'll get all the

different type of ontologies I have defined and each of these has a definition index color brain whether

they're a parent a child or a friend so again here in ex call it brain you can see that these are all the fields that

our parents or children and friends I have some excluded ontologies of HR there for some

other technical reasons and I have also a couple of unregistered ones that I either still

need to register to make it explicit in X color brain or they're just there because over time these were created

anyway so this trigger oh and let me just show you this so you can see here you have the ontology suggestor is

something you can turn on and then using these features these hot combinations the suggestor comes up so if I only want

to see friend relationships then these are all the type of ontologies I can apply here that will create a lateral

Link in escalate brain for me so the lateral link just to show you that as well they'll look like this so

everything here the central idea is the document I have open and everything on the left hand side are lateral links

these are parent links and these are children nodes so that's the logic and I use the ontology

to specify where each item gets on my graph linking also includes embedding items into the

excalator storyboard so again let me just show you how this storyboard looks like so the document we are looking at

right now so again I'm going to open excalibrane and now in the center you can see that this is the file we are

looking at so this is mypkm design text links folder ontology Moc zettel custom Etc and you can see that all of these

items that are embedded here are also present here so for example here I have this calendar icon that's embedded I'm

not going to navigate to this because that will take us off on a tangent but you can see already that this icon is

actually used in four other places so it's used in five places so already with this I'm making a connection to

somewhere else where I talk about time and calendaring Etc but so for me when I embed an object

into my X call it raw storyboard for a topic then that already will create a link

and on the ontology we already talked about the ontology bit so we are going to take this topic off as well the

ontology describes the relationship between notes and I differentiate between parent child and lateral

connections I implemented with data view fields and I visualize it with excalibraine here's a video where I talk

about this in more detail then the next important element of my organization system is I'm trying to

work with atomic nodes and use transclusion so for example as just I mentioned with the calendar item and

maybe we can we can actually navigate to that calendar to see where else we are using

the calendar so by reusing or maybe here's the check mark and we're going to navigate to this

by if I click here this will open the check mark and here I can come to the various documents

so for example evaluating evidence this is actually a part of my book on a page for the book rationality so here I'm

using exactly the same check mark and using the same check mark I can navigate to to the topic sometimes these links

are irrelevant oftentimes this comes as an interesting surprise that yeah that that

visual link that I reuse also provides a contextual linking so that's about Atomic notes I also use

this the construction of images there are two videos here I'm not going to go into this because this is a big rabbit

hole that goes down into this hole how I deconstruct excel drawings into sub drawings but this is a very important

part of my whole methodology of reusing components not redrawing and using these components to create links but also

I tried to do this by creating consistent sections in my other notes as well so here are two examples here's an

example of an article and you will see that the article has a summary section and by the way if you look at my book

notes then the book note also has a summary section by way of having this commonality I know that if I'm

referencing a book I can immediately write hashtag summary and just get the summary embedded into the location so if

I transclude this so let's say I open today's daily node and I want to transclude building a second brain

summary so then I would write building a second brain like this and I would immediately write hashtag summary

and with this I'm able to embed this here and I would also probably add a reference here so in this case the

reason I'm putting this here is because this is an example so I would add my ontology like this but by having this

consistent approach of always calling the summary summary this just simplifies my life because with this consistency I

can easily embed items and reference them the same with quotes don't ask me why I ended up with P but every quote

that I have so for example here's the daily quote from today if I look here in markdown then you will see that here I

have this quote from Napoleon Hill and here I have this reference with p and again I know that if there's a quote a

single quote in a file that is worth referencing then it's going to have a block reference p and that just helps me

easily find these items in My Vault this file this example book is a good example for Section headings

so there is a trade-off between embedding files and in reference or or creating larger files so if I look at

building a second brain you can see here that I have couple of notes here and these notes are just simply typed here

so I'm I'm not embedding anything here in this case I made some notes about the book some of my research as I was

reading the book and here under notes I simply added these items and that's all but for example if I would open another

book I'm going to open for example emergence so if I open emergence then here you

will see that I had a bit more content here and in this case I included or transcluded content here

and some of them I only translated the summary in other cases I transcluded the whole material but in these cases the

files actually live in their proper location so this file lives here in its input folder under YouTube so this is

the input YouTube folder that's where the file is and here it's a block reference so you can see this as a block

reference so that's the trade-off if I have lots of files or lots of notes that I want to include then I start to break

them out into their relevant files and I make them embeds that have a link if I don't have that many I typically start

by typing these topics here and then break them out later if I feel that that is required so moving on let's

move up to the top here so file names I have a couple of file name conventions which I find pretty

helpful All My Mocs start with an underscore like you can see here so let's just to show you some of the other

mocs if I come to call it brain and I think with that we can also cover mlc so here these are the various map of

contents in My Vault you can see these right here and you can see that each of them have

the same file name but similarly I have naming conventions so for example book cover

will bring up all the book covers I have in my Vault or if I type in logo then this will bring all the logo

images if I type icon then it will show all the icons in My Vault I also use this I have some

automations around it I'm going to include that link here as well so here if I open the image Library so it's here

I also have a local library so maybe let's open the local library then this will

show me all the logos in My Vault so all of these files will start with the word logo so there's my you can see my Apple

logo here if I press Ctrl o and type logo Apple logo then you can see that indeed

that Apple logo is right there also in my naming convention you can see that at the end in this case and in most of the

cases my file name has three parts it specifies the type of file so is it the book cover a logo an illustration a

photo an icon a whatever then there's the actual keywords that Define the file so in this case it's Apple logo but for

example if I open my image library then you will see that I have longer file names in my image Library so these are

all the icons in My Vault and here you can see that you see the headache frustration anger are the

keywords and then the final part of the naming convention you will see here as well is the source of the file so in

this case it's a flat icon but if the source is something else then it's going to be that other source so these are the

various naming so you can see here book cover illustration thumbnail book on the page starts with a bob literature note

starts with Ln Etc and the date format I use is year year months month and day day because

that consistent naming helps me find stuff easier then I use templates and I have lots of

templates so here if I open my template folder template or templates so you can see I

have a whole bunch of templates I actually follow again the naming convention here as well so I have

templates that create a new line so it just creates a single line in the document and I have templates that

create new pages and I have some other templates as well for many of the things I do I use these

templates and then some of my templates actually automate the process of creating folders and multiple files so

if there's a more complex activity then I use that so for example the YouTube workflow video that I explain here will

show you a case study where I have a template that creates files and folders and places stuff all the

places and the excalator templates shows you different ways how you can create graphical templates

maybe pre-filled templates for various tasks so templates are an important part of my setup

they already talked about ontology and frankly we already looked at the maps of content as well here's another map of

content just as an example so this is my map of content about sketchnoting again you can see here all the different

ontologies and links you can see lots of material here so this is my map of content for sketchnoting and I have a

good number of map of contents to summarize various topics that I'm working on and some of these so for

example here this map of content also has some visual summaries as well so for example this is a summary about some

sketchnoting listing some sketch noters some YouTube channels some books and some stuff about visual vocabulary

Etc then moving on the way I use daily notes is I use daily notes to create the time hierarchy based

on latch so this is the time aspect and then we're going to talk about geotags and that's going to be the location

aspect of organizing information so if we look at this holiday last year June we went to Rome with my wife

what I want to show you here is here if I click to first I need to open here the right hand side so we have the map here

with all sorts of different locations and here if I open this to show this on the map then you can see that this has

actually a location here and you can also see the other components of our visit the tickets to Vatican City and to

the Colosseum and then just going further on here here's earlier this year we went to Sicily and we visited the

Valley of the temples and the Turkish stairs as well as moved around here we've had to Aetna as well so here's the

family on Aetna and and so this is I think a very useful way to organize information I'm using the map view

plugin so this is the map view plugin right here this is the settings for that I find this very practical you can add

Geo tags so this is here a Geo tag if I click here then you will see that this is a geotag based actually in this case

a lat long coordinates but this can also be an address depending on the type of Link we are talking about you can also

see that I'm using the check-in checkout inline ontology here so the way this looks in excalib brain and that's where

we come back to the Daily note linkage so if now again I open xcoli Brain then you will see that our vacation in Rome

is linked to these days so this is when we were in Rome you can also see we were in Vatican City and the colossum and you

can see some other information here as well but the point is by adding check-in and checkout I can know when we arrived

and when we left and by linking all of these events to the Daily note

through the daily note I can navigate my history and I can look at what happened on that day I'm not going to open the

daily note because that typically contains some personal information as well that I don't want to share but the

idea is these daily notes you can see here are linked to one another with the tomorrow link and so this creates this

chain of days and each day I'm linking what is happening on that day maybe to show you just one more example if we

come to this page right here then this page is linked to today's date right there and this is when I'm working

on it you can also see that this is linked to a couple of days ago as well and I also worked on this so I know on

what which days I worked on this specific material so that actually covers daily notes as my time hierarchy

and geotags now I like to see tasks in the context where I need to talk about them in my normal work I have many

projects happening in my organization and I deal with lots of people so in each situation I want to be reminded of

the actions that we discussed with that person or with that vendor or with that project at the last time we met

and I talk about this and how I do this in it's about time so you can look at this video

but I want to show you how this looks in my demo of all so this is going to be an example just to show you very quickly

how this works so for example this is my note about Bob the Builder and the video I'm referencing goes into more details

about this and walks you through how this works but you can see here that when I am on

the page for Bob the Builder I'm immediately cognizant that there is a topic where I'm waiting for Bob actually

it is related to project K and this right here is a data view query it's an extremely simple data view query I

explain everything about it in the video the point I want to show you here is I'm placing this information

on the page of the person and whenever I'm meeting with someone or talking about the project or whatever other

topic I always open the page for that person or project or topic and most of my templates or pretty much all of my

templates include the task section therefore I always get the context relevant tasks in the context when I

need it at the time that I needed so for example you can see here there's an action for Bob on a meeting to discuss

something with Mock and if I look at Mock's page of course I'm going to see all of these actions that are now for

mock the dump truck and you will see that there's an action from the page about the Builder and then there's

another action that was somehow discussed on rolly or vid Rowley the steamroller and then something from

Project B one quick side note that this is the other way I'm using tags and I only use

it in this specific instance so I have three tags I have the they think four discus with and promised too so these

are three tags I use frankly I don't really search on them I could actually categorize the data view query

here based on promise to discuss with waiting for and I had a period of time when I did that I recognized that it

didn't really matter that much right now this is more for just stylistic reasons for me it is important to know that I

noted something down because I need to talk about that with the person or that person has promised me something and I

need to wait for that and follow it up or maybe I promise something to that person and I need to be cognizant of

that when we meet so I can either share the results with the person or be proactive in apologizing that I haven't

yet done it but the point is that I want to be reminded so in this case I'm also using tags but here I'm not using it to

define the type of the page but I'm using it just as a stylistic component to remind me of the type of action that

I'm talking about this is also then covering the dynamic list so tasks are in the context then

where I need them and I use data view fields and then I'm using various Dynamic lists I'm using not only data

view but I also have embedded obsidian queries as well and finally I have this Diagnostics and maintenance page and

here I'm looking at stuff like orphan notes which right now are the absolute orphans are files that are just there no

one is pointing at them and it is not pointing to anyone so they are completely alone in the dark so I have

109 at the moment of these and then for example I have this list of pasted images so I like to name the images

either illustration or photo or whatever wherever they came from so sometimes I come here and clean up some of the

pasted images that I didn't name so I have the properly named images so that summarizes how I organize

information in obsidian it may be a lot but to me this structure helps put everything in place the key component

here is latch making sure that I have multiple ways to find information either by location or alphabet time category or

hierarchy and then you could see the different tools and components that I'm using to achieve this

so that's all I wanted to share with you again just a quick reminder if you want to learn more if you're interested in

exploring visual thinking and exploring the use of obsidian with me sign up to cohort for you still have a couple of

days to do that I'm going to close registrations in a few days so if you're interested to check out this page and

again this whole mind map or visual summary that's here I'll include in the show notes you'll

have a link and you can open this on xcollegra.com and from there you can either copy this into your own obsidian

or you can follow these links so all around the page you will see these YouTube links that take you to various

videos that are relevant in the subject as well here you see this link to the article so that's all I wanted to share

with you today thank you for watching until the end and I hope to see you next time