[Redster]

Two angles to answering your 2nd question: One, how do you ensure what you write down is useful to your future self? Two, how do you make sure you find it when and where you need it?

To ensure your future notes are useful to you, read what you have already written weeks or months (or more!) ago. Initially, I found my writing was too sparse. Too much context stayed in my head and my notes were almost useless. I reviewed them just before I completely forgot the context and updated them. The feedback loop of reading my own writing has helped me improve a lot at writing well for future me. I have to write to myself as if I will be an amnesiac in the future.

As for finding my writing when and where I need it, I try to give every file a unique and memorable title so I can refer to it in other notes and writings I access more frequently. For me, this means linking to notes and thoughts in Obsidian and creating aliases. If I know I wrote something down, but think the title is "Note B", but the title is "Note A", when I find Note A, I will add an alias with an additional title or keyword so that in the future, searching for Note B will surface Note A (and Note B, if it exists). Or, I will add a link to Note from the 1 or more of the most topically relevant note.

P.S. This maintenance doesn't take me much time. I only do it if I notice that a note was harder to find than it should have been and it usually only takes a few seconds to make sure it's easier next time.

(I used to use OneNote and Evernote, but bi-directional links with auto-suggest and a file quickswitcher are such gamechangers.

I was there when Obsidian and Roam Research felt like the first two options doing this seriously. The ecosystem has grown up around me and I love it. But you can do this with loads of other tools now.)

My filenames generally follow a "YYYY_MM_DD_HHmm Descriptive Title, perhaps a thesis statement - Source, if applicable" format.

[mcsgroi]

This is a really thoughtful breakdown. Thank you for taking the time to write it up.

The idea of writing for your future self as if they will be an amnesiac fits closely with my experience as well. Ironically, I've found that the more I record, the less I find or can surface later.

What stood out to me is how you treat usefulness as a learned skill rather than something you try to get right up front. It seems like you are only investing more effort when a note actually comes back into play, and the feedback loop of rereading seems to shape how you write over time.

I am curious about a few aspects of how this works for you in practice:

1. How often do you intentionally reread or revisit older notes versus only encountering them when you are searching for something specific?

2. How do you deal with clutter over time? Eventually the note pool becomes large enough that maintenance becomes challenging in my experience.

3. With linking and aliases, do you find that maintenance effort scales reasonably as your notes grow, or does it require more discipline over time?

4. Related to that, do you find linking and aliasing less tedious than the concept of relying on a strong search experience? Most note systems I have used seem to depend heavily on exact string matching or tags, which works up to a point but often feels less supportive to the experience than it could be in my opinion.

[Redster]

A good future-proof titling system is really helpful. Other than that, yes, the structure of everything is pretty organic.

I left out that for almost every note, I try to link to or from another relevant note. If it's not relevant, don't force it. That just adds clutter.

But knowing future me won't remember {$relevant-note} unless I link to it helps me decide whether to link or not. If there's a note that know is obscure, but very important, I will sometimes link to it more than necessary.

1. It depends. I almost never reread for the sake of rereading. But there are notes that I keep coming back to over the past decade because I find the thoughts there worth revisiting or worth further development.

2. Like anything, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. I don't find clutter generally to be a problem. I keep a couple of Junk Drawer or Scratch Pad notes for thoughts that might not deserve a note. If I create too many notes titled "Untitled 1", "Untitled 2", etc, I purge them or give them real titles. But clutter isn't a problem for me.

My biggest clutter problem has been including too many notes titled "{$DATE} - Meeting" or some other short, repetitive title ("Phone call with" or "Conversation with" are similar offenders). But I spend almost no maintenance on my notes unless I either can envision some specific usefulness or feel some specific pain point. And I rarely feel clutter in my thousands of notes.

3. I don't find that burden growing, no. I only alias or link if I see specific usefulness to future me. If I plan to write/think about a topic I might create a $TOPIC_NOTE and then I'll link all my relevant files to it, but again, those are often already linked to each other, so they're not hard to find and the effort remains small.

I don't have to maintain hardly anything. I spend almost zero time maintaining things and still use and can find notes going back to 2016 when I started taking notes in earnest and before I started using Obsidian.

4. I find full text search much more tedious than searching via filenames and links. Full text search is useful and necessary for very specific citations or numbers or names, if I'm not sure what note it is in. But for 95% of my usage, if search functionality disappeared from Obsidian, I would barely notice in my personal notes. I rely on search when I'm wading through other people's writing. I rarely need it for my own.

[mcsgroi]

That's really insightful. Thanks for sharing!