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by afcool83 118 days ago
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.

He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.

His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.

2 comments

Half of my tasks are in my people folder and half my people are in my tasks folder and it all works out fine in Obsidian.
I think this is my favourite thing about obsidian, it feels so unproscriptive. I have a pretty well thought out folder structure because this is how ive always managed my documents, but every new note goes in a junkyard folder to get sorted if I ever come back to it again. I sometimes use backlinks, but this is generally localised within project folders. I enjoy seeing everyone elses equally chaotic way of using it.
I feel like organization it's not as important now with search in computers. Like you can search anything also there is tags.
Search becomes useless if you drown in results. A good organization should assist in shortening paths, but if you start the path manually or through a search doesn't matter much.
But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?

Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.

> But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?

Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.

The basic search one gets out of the box is closer to regex matching than search. IMHO something like omnisearch should be sherlocked next.