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here I may post some short, text-only notes, mostly about programming. source code.

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how I organise my notes (project-active-resource-archive) # prev single next top

tags: obsidian, note-taking • 584 'words', 175 secs @ 200wpm

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:

So, as an example, my current:

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).

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