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This idea came from using Obsidian. Some of it may carry over to other note-taking tools, but I am assuming features specific to Obsidian: aliases, unlinked mentions, and custom link text that fits the surrounding sentence. For a while, I treated tags as the default tool for organizing notes. I added #investment to anything about investing and #security to anything about security. Tags were short, visible, and convenient: clicking one gathered related notes immediately. ...

When organizing notes, I mostly worried about where to put them. Once the folders were reasonably settled, another question remained. “How long should I keep revising this note?” If I keep refining every note, the record of what happened at the time disappears. If I leave every note untouched after writing it once, new facts and ideas scatter into separate files. Creation and modification dates remain, but dates alone do not tell me what to do next. ...

I spent a long time looking for a way to organize notes. I tried Zettelkasten, PARA, Bullet Journal, and ACE one by one. Each was clearly useful. But when I adopted one as-is, some part of it did not fit my life. ...

As notes accumulate in Obsidian, three things that look similar are tempting to keep together: what an article said, what happened at the time, and my thoughts connecting the two. I used to think I could put everything in one note, add enough tags, and find it later. ...

When I first started using Obsidian, I thought more links meant a better note system. To be fair, the graph view looks ridiculously cool the moment you turn it on. Whenever I saw a related term, I made it a [[link]]. A denser graph looked more convincing too. ...

For a while, I created a lot of Properties in Obsidian. If I recorded the type, status, confidence, and domain of each note, I thought I would be able to filter for anything later. I treated tags in much the same way: if a word looked relevant, I added it. ...

Anyone who keeps notes eventually runs into this question. “Where should this note go?” I changed my folders quite often because of it. I created a development folder, moved notes into project folders, and wondered whether a note belonged to productivity or PKM. Every new structure looked as if it might last. As the number of notes grew, the boundaries blurred again. ...

I recently looked through the folders of the projects I had been working on. There was this blog, a video production tool, a few small web services, and a desktop app. While building them one by one, I thought I was simply choosing whatever each project needed. Put together, though, the choices showed a clear pattern. ...