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by runjake 1506 days ago
Browsing through Linking Your Thinking's YouTube channel[1] might be a good first-start. Despite appearances here, I am not a notes fetishist, so I find his videos rather approachable especially his "Start Here" video[2].

Jamie Rubin's blog series[4] is pretty good, too.

I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes, with tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a folder structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal System[3]. I store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept summaries, cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-MM.markdown file.

I don't have any comment on the blog post in the article, because this system works really well for me. Obsidian is extensible at hell, but I'm not spending all day looking for new tweaks, I'm just writing notes. Also, since notes are just files stored in directories, I have all sorts of shell/Python-scripted automations and shell aliases to quickly do stuff.

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/vid...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88

3. https://johnnydecimal.com/

4. https://jamierubin.net/blog-series/practically-paperless-wit...

1 comments

> I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes, with tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a folder structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal System[3]. I store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept summaries, cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-MM.markdown file.

You must be a very organised person, any sort of Zettelkasten or knowledge-based linking system for me is too complex, I'd rather just take a simple note, maybe with the date in the filename, to each their own I guess.

I rarely write TODO lists.

I’m not organized at all, but this system takes me very little effort.

As a quick example, I used to do daily notes, one markdown note per day but that was too much mental overhead, so I switched to one markdown note per month with an <HR> tag between each day.

But, what works for me won’t work for everyone else.

Zettelkasten seems like inhuman, nightmarish garbage to me.

If simple notes are working for you, then stick with that!

Interesting, so how is this Johnny decimal thing different to Zettelkasten?
With Obsidian you really don't have to have any system, other than linking shared concepts between notes. Optionally, limiting each note file to a single atomic idea is also helpful. Obsidian takes care of the rest, organizing, displaying, linking.