A curious Redditor asked me to explain my vault structure to him and I obliged, such is the nature of most people in the Obsidian community. There’s info on plugins I use for certain workflows and links to a couple of tutorials I’ve written on how some elements are structured and used. I put enough effort into it that I thought I’d let it serve a double purpose as blog entry and here we are. Feel free to hit me up with any questions or comments. Contact info is in links at the bottom of the post.

  • -Inbox - The default folder for all new notes added to the system through plugins, scripts and shortcuts, named that way to move it to the top my my folder list. I could have used a numbering system on my folders like all the cool kids do, but I stuck with old habits carried over from 16 years of Evernote use. This is subject to change.

  • Lounotes - My folder for personal reference material like 2FA codes, insurance info and all the other detritus of a life in the 21st century

  • Blogging - Research material, rough and final drafts of posts to this blog (in a subfolder)

  • Classes- A folder used by the Metadata Menu Plugin

  • Contacts - Notes created via a shortcut built with Actions for Obsidian that imported my iOS address book into Obsidian so I could have notes for all the people in my life (outside of work)

  • Journal - My daily notes divided into subfolders for months and years

  • Work - Reference notes for my job. I’m semi-retired, supporting computer end users at a small private university

  • Select Email - I have a workflow that allows me to send email to my Obsidian vault - Details.

  • Pocket - Pockets is a free read-it-later service. I use a plugin to automatically get the articles into my Obsidian vault. I triage what’s there in the evenings and add tags, links and highlights for stuff I am going to keep.

  • People - I use a template that includes a space to track meetings and phone calls with different folks at work. I also use this folder for notes on my favorite content creators, whose pages include a dataview query based on the Author: field in properties to make a MOC of all their work I’ve quoted in my vault.

  • Web Clips - These are entire web pages I download using either the Obsidian Webclipper.

  • Quotes - I have a collection of over 500 notes of nothing but quotes. Each note is named for a speaker/writer and the properties contain info on the source and topic of the quote. I used a python script I found on Github to import my previous collection from a CSV file into Obsidian as markdown files.

  • Bookmarks - I use an IFTTT applet to automatically route my bookmarks From Raindrop.io through Dropbox via Hazel into my Obsidian vault. Any page I bookmark goes into this folder, where I can add links and MOCs..

  • Serials - I have a lot of software. A lot. I’m a sucker for those sales at Bundlehunt and App Sumo. I have serial numbers and registration info for all that I own.

  • Tech Notes - These are heavily cross-referenced notes on all things IT related (outside of work) that I’m interested. It’s a mix of info from the web and my own notes.

  • Templates - I have a few heavily customized templates with Templater snippets and custom metadata (including tags) for my Inbox, People, Quotes and Bookmark folders

  • Weekly Notes - Named so that they’ll appear chronologically, these are created via the Periodic Notes Plugin

  • zz-attachments - This is the folder where all the attachments (images, PDFs, audio and video) live. They are arranged and renamed automatically by the Attachment Management Plugin

  • zz-meta - These are notes about notes, similar to the MOC concept where I have custom dataview queries for different categories of quotes, notes on certain topics and notes from select periods of time.

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