my notes

I’ve wanted to share with people how my notes are organized for a long time now, because it’s worked so well for me that I feel obligated to evangelize.

So for the core of everything, I use Obsidian. This software is light, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a iPhone and Android app (although I’ve never been able to get it to work on my iPhone).

Now Obsidian has it’s cloud offering for syncing, but I don’t use it. They call a collection of notes, a “vault”, and this vault is a single directory you can chose.

So naturally I used google drive’s desktop app and pointed this directory to it. So everywhere I have a google drive app, I have my files synced automagically. And because they are plaintext (markdown) files, you can even have two open at the same time, granted you don’t actively write in two at the exact same time(?).

For my internal vault’s organization I use a lightly modified version of something called the johnny decimal system. Don’t worry it’s not as annnoying as the dewey decimal system.

That’s mostly it. I have 3 folders in my root, that live outside of the scope of the johnny decimal system, for Work, Media, and Personal. The Media directory is just where I shove pasted images into. I try to be a little conscious of the size of media, mainly because of my second syncing system, which is a git server. Unfortunately, google drive’s application doesn’t exist for Linux flavors, as far as I know, so I will occasionally sync things to a git server when needed.

I haven’t used most of the advanced tools Obsidian offers, like the graphs, templates, canvas, or bases. But the daily note is convenient for work, and all the other built-in features - like supporting mermaid diagrams, split views, bookmarks, search, etc., are really nice.