Creation: 2025-03-08 23:02
A lot of people these days tell you to take notes. They want us to continue the most annoying part of school, which you thought you left behind. Why is that?
Why Notes?
Well, let’s start with the obvious, otherwise you’ll probably forget things. Writing things down is a powerful way to remember things, that’s why you were supposed to do so in high school. Whenever you learnt about something new, you wrote down the most important things about it, to someday when you need it read through again.
But notes aren’t just useful for learning new things. What about the things you were supposed to do today? Shopping list. A list of gift ideas for your girlfriend? These are also types of notes, and they are just as, if not even more useful. Or that 1 obscure issue you have had multiple times and you always have to remember how to find it, notes make this so much easier. It’s like writing your own instruction manual.
My experience
How it started
When I got into using Obsidian, I wrote a lot of small user manuals, or things that I didn’t want to look up again. The best example of this is the following article: Apps I use. This is a great use of obsidian. I did the same for obscure issues, this way I’d never have to google the same issue twice. But I also made awkward / unnatural connections between notes, because I wanted my notes to be connected:
Example
Here are some other minecraft related articles:
At the start of the 32.02 Minecraft 15 year anniversary article.
Then I started writing notes like I was writing things for others, this mostly happened because I started hosting my notes, It felt more like I was helping others to do things by talking about things I encountered. I wanted my website to be easy for others, and to always be able to easily navigate, this made me make drastic changes.
I adopted the Johnny Decimal, this was something I saw a tech youtuber cover, and I was immediately hooked. This system made it so that no one would ever loose track of where to find things, just think logically. This meant I had to organize everything I already had. I merged small issue notes together, I removed a lot of my daily and [[weekly notes]], things that weren’t “note worthy” had to go.
Then I started creating articles that were not in my eyes useful for myself, nor fun. I only did it so that I could share it with classmates. This is fine on it’s own, but then I made an AI generated cheat sheet for the test that we were about to have, this was a deep moment in the history of my article writing. Sure, maybe my articles weren’t always useful before like an article about a dumb pingpong song, but at least I wrote it myself, cause I felt it was worth it. I quickly removed this AI generated Slop note, it went against the opinion I have on the dead internet theory.
I also ran into another problem. My Johnny Decimal system didn’t suit all my notes. Where will I place a random plastic figure. I guess I’ll just place it into an folder called unsorted for now to move whenever I have more notes that I can group…
I bet you are not surprised to hear that I never moved them.
Revolution
It is a few days ago that I stumbled upon a Youtube video from a Youtuber that I sometimes watch about taking notes. How Obsidian Fixes Note-Taking’s Biggest Problem
I had already been using Obsidian for a year+ but I still clicked it, cause I wanted to hear this youtubers thoughts on it. Let’s just say: A lot stuck with me.
Most he talks about is note taking in general, but I am here to talk about the Obsidian part. The reasons why Obsidian is such a good choice is the linking of notes, even the ones that aren’t there yet. You don’t have an article on Bananas yet but you know it’s an interesting subject to explore later? Make a link to it. I used to never do this cause this will just leave people confused on the hosted version when a link leads to a 404 page. This way notes will also link in a natural way, unlike what I have done before. With this you’ll get a natural flow of article links. This will make your graph more useful as a navigator as well. So now I have changed that, by the time I write this, there is no article about the Johnny Decimal yet, but I still linked it multiple times.
He also reminded me of the Obsidian Plugins, this is where I found a plugin for a todo list, and a list of recent notes. This has increased my productivity by not having to remember where a note is placed. Cause another problem with the Johnny Decimal system I use: an article might belong to multiple folders, so where is it?
And then I discovered that I could change the things that are in my sidebars. By having the graph in my sidebar, this makes it so much easier to navigate my vault.
This whole flow of change feels natural to me and makes me motivated. I want to write notes for myself, not for someone else. Before this video I would’ve never added an article for gift ideas, but here it is, maybe? Depends on if I have time for it or not. But Martijn you say: “then people can lookup what you might gift them.” And to that I say: yes, but they won’t. And if they do, that’s their problem innit? If you spoil it for yourself, that’s not my fault. But that begs the question: What about personal things, things that the outside world shouldn’t know, will I make a separate vault for that? To that I don’t know the answer yet, I will not have a separate vault, but what I will do is unknown to me. I have used gitignore in the past, but that has also made a few notes vanish 👀 Maybe I’ll someday just remove the hosting?
The future
There is a lot to improve to my vault: adding Aliases to my notes, reworking my hashtags to be uniform, and just reworking articles in general. I also will remove things that are out of place, and that most likely includes the Johnny Decimal system. And notes like [[00.06 InternetArchive Sitemap]] will 100% be removed, cause it’s just filler slop.
This will take a lot of time to do, and I expect that it’ll take a while before it’s complete. But the start is here :3