how I organise my notes (project-active-resource-archive) # prev single next top
I make a lot of notes¹. Currently, I use Obsidian on my computer, laptop, and phone, and I use Syncthing to synchronise all the notes between my devices. I like making notes because if I write something down, I don't have to worry about forgetting it, and (maybe backwardsly) I can forget it with ease... because I know where I can go to remember it. It frees up my brain a lot. No thoughts. Head empty.
¹ At time of writing I have 1018 notes (result of find . -type f -name "*.md" | wc -l
) (the Notion -> Obsidian export makes all database items into notes, so this is quite inflated by a bunch of empty "database" notes).
I used to use Notion but I realised: I would prefer to be making plaintext notes; I didn't like what they were doing with AI; the app was quite slow to use; and I had to be online (a lot of the time) to use it. With Obsidian, I can write notes offline, and they are only ever stored on my own devices, and synced between them.
I have four folders in the root folder of my obsidian, these are
1-Project
2-Active
3-Resource
4-Archive
This layout is called "PARA" (Project Active Resource Archive). I found out about it several years ago; I don't remember where.
The theory (or how I use it) is that you organise notes like:
- project: things you are doing that can be completed
- active: things that you are doing that are ongoing
- resource: notes with information
- archive: put anything from the above three categories here when completed
So, as an example, my current:
- project notes are:
BarCamp 13
,bereal video
,blummit
,Chaos Computer Congress
,clubcards
,De-Googlification
,Discourse Forum
,Incomings & outgoings on website
,lipu tenpo issue sending
,local archive of websites
,Mum's watch
,personal website edits
,polarising lens
,RSS random picker
,sublet
,welcome to sheffield events
,xmas gifts
, each of which I will either complete or abandon and move it to the archive - active notes are:
Active
(a special note I use to keep daily to-do lists),Backup Day
,Craft Night
,freelancing
,hackspace month notes
,linux problems
,lipu tenpo zine printing
,news servers
,OpenTechCalendar
,Weeknotes
, which are all things I do semi-regularly (e.g., monthly) - resource notes are:
Copy about myself
,Hitchhiking
,Keys
,My Bike
,places I have a profile picture
,random things to fill a few hours or day
,Raspberry Pi
,Things wot I done
,To Attend
,To Borrow
,To Celebrate
,To Consume
,To Create
,To Purchase
,To Treasure
,What's the best country
, which are mostly where I put stuff so that I can forget it from my brain and have no thoughts - archive notes are (a subset because this contains a lot of notes, mostly old project notes):
air quality monitor
,repair cafe
,gspread
,tiny games
,RingGram
,To Eat
,Github random repo picker
,Layout with LaTeX
,CSS Naked Day
,website night
,river walk
,GMTK gamejam 2
,Fireside housing cooperative
,Volunteering at BHF
,hackspace font workshop
, and many more...
There are many ways to organise notes, but I like this way because I can always pretty obviously fit a note into one of the three categories, so I don't have to constantly move notes around, or think too much about where they belong. Also, every few years it feels pretty great to empty out the project
notes folder (an impossible task).