Documenting my vault

This note started out from How I use Obsidian by Steph Ango.

Work in progress - TOC

• Note types
• Folders
• Properties and templates
• Rating system

Note types

icon	type	sub-category	explanation
	evergreen note		part of ZK
🛠️		1. undeveloped
🌱		2. seedling
🌱		3. growin
🌲		4. evergreen
💡	concept note		private wikipedia
	literature note		note based on other peoples work
📚		book
🗞️		paper
📰		web
🤖		AI
🧑		person
	moc		evergreen + concept
📅	daily note
	weekly note
^table

Folders

Not a fan of folders

Two reference folders I use:

• References where I write about things that exist outside my world. Books, movies, places, people, podcasts, etc. Always named using the title e.g. Book title.md or Movie title.md.
• Clippings where I save things other people wrote, mostly essays and articles.

Three admin folders exist so that their contents don’t show up in the file navigation:

• Assets for images, audio, videos, PDFs, etc.
• Journal for my daily notes, all named YYYY-MM-DD.md. I do not write anything in daily notes, they exist solely to be linked to from other entries.
• Templates for templates.

Two folders are present in the downloadable version of my vault for the sake of clarity. In my personal vault, these notes would be in the root, not a folder.

• Private self-explanetary
• Notes contains all other notes.

Properties and templates

Almost every note I create starts from a template. I use templates heavily because they allow me to lazily add information that will help me find the note later.

• Dates — created, start, end, published
• People — author, director, artist, cast, host, guests
• Themes — grouping by genre, type, topic, related notes
• Locations — neighborhood, city, coordinates
• Ratings — more on this below

A few rules I follow for properties:

• Property names and values should aim to be reusable across categories. This allows me to find things across categories, e.g. genre is shared across all media types, which means I can see an archive of Sci-fi books, movies and shows in one place.
• Templates should aim to be composable, e.g. Person and Author are two different templates that can be added to the same note.
• Short property names are faster to type, e.g. start instead of start‑date.
• Default to list type properties instead of text if there is any chance it might contain more than one link or value in the future.

Rating system

Anything with a rating uses an integer from 1 to 7:

• 7 — Perfect, must try, life-changing, go out of your way to seek this out
• 6 — Excellent, worth repeating
• 5 — Good, don’t go out of your way, but enjoyable
• 4 — Passable, works in a pinch
• 3 — Bad, don’t do this if you can
• 2 — Atrocious, actively avoid, repulsive
• 1 — Evil, life-changing in a bad way

Why this scale? I like rating out of 7 better than 4 or 5 because I need more granularity at the top, for the good experiences, and 10 is too granular.

• turn into excal image