When I was first looking to run a free workshop on personal knowledge management, I sent out a poll asking what topics my audience would like to see covered.

One of the first responses that I received was from someone looking for advice on how to better organise their files in Obsidian.

I’ve got my own method of doing this, which you can investigate if you check out PARAZETTEL, but it’s not for everyone (although I’ve done my best to make it adaptable).

So I thought it would be useful to go over all the ways that you can organise your knowledge in Obsidian. I’ll give the advantages and disadvantages of each so that you can better figure out how to organise your knowledge in the future.

We’ll go over folders, backlinks, properties and tags, which are best for certain use cases. Enjoy!

1. Folders

This is the classic method of storing digital information, and the one upon which the file system that Obsidian uses is based.

This means it’s the most straightforward and obvious of all the options available. Perfect for beginners, or those with simple enough use cases to require only a basic form of organisation.

More complex ways of organising information are also based upon folders, as this is where the file structure in the app Obsidian stems from, so they’re a good place to start when you’re building your system.

My own method of organisation, although incorporating other methods of organisation (which we’ll get to later), starts with folders. Specifically, folders for each part of the PARA structure from Tiago Forte’s Second Brain methodology.

So what are the disadvantages of folders?

You’re limited to categorising your information in a single way. Folders are binary — information is either in a folder, therefore in a category, or it is not. In-between does not exist; there’s no being part of two different folders (although subfolders can be used in a similar way), therefore limited scope to categorise notes in multiple ways.

This is why people often include one of the following methods too for the deeper organisation of their information in Obsidian…

2. Backlinks

Where folders are very regimented, backlinks can be quite intimidating because there’s very little constraint on how they can be used.

Backlinks essentially connect any note in your Obsidian vault to any other note. No matter what format or what folder they’re in. At any point within the note.

This opens up unlimited possibilities for organising your information. Most people effectively use backlinks to link together related notes across folders though, to get past the trouble of only organising your notes by one category (a limitation of folders).

One disadvantage of backlinks though is also its freedom. How do you keep track of where and when to make a backlink? It’s necessary to create some rules for their effective usage otherwise you’ll have inconsistencies across your information and its organisation in your vault.

Some ways I limit my use of backlinks are:

• I only backlink content in certain folders
• I only backlink either in the References property (more on this later) or inline, in the sentences I write in the note (so there’s context)

With sensible limitations placed on your backlink implementation, they remain a useful way of managing your knowledge in a less strict way than folders. You can combine the two, however, as well as include any of the other methods of organisation I’m going to explore next…

3. Properties

What used to be YAML metadata in Obsidian is now Properties. The new(ish) feature is still based upon YAML metadata but is now a lot easier to work with, and includes powerful sidebar views allowing you to organise your information better.

You can create property fields for almost anything, including authors, dates, true/false values and a lot more.

And because all notes in Obsidian can have properties, this method of organisation can again be used as a layer of further structure over the top of folders. You can search by property, bringing up the fitting notes in the search pane of the app and also query them using plugins such as Dataview.

I use properties for storing reference information about the notes in my vault. Examples include what author has written the highlights stored in the note, what platform I intend to publish the content of the note upon, and the status of the content in said note (whether ‘published’ — yes or no).

They’re a very free method of organisation — what properties you use are determined best by your use case. Have a look at what information related to the note you are accessing the most, and consider turning it into a property.

There’s not really a system-based disadvantage to using properties in your notes either.

The disadvantage to properties comes when people don’t use them correctly…

I preach minimal note-taking, which is the methodology and set of principles guiding how I manage my knowledge, in Obsidian and elsewhere.

As the name suggests, it’s based on being as minimal as possible when you take notes. No fluff. But it’s very easy to get caught up in unnecessary properties that don’t provide value but still add maintenance time to your vault.

Only create a property if you really need to use it regularly. If possible, automate its creation using templates or snippets, so you don’t have to spend unnecessary time updating values and entries in the metadata.

Stay away from them altogether if it’s simplicity that you value, and you don’t have a particularly complex use case for your knowledge in Obsidian.

4. Tags

The final method of organisation that I’m going to cover in this piece is tagging. Tags are a category of property in Obsidian that has a few specialist features. You can create subtags underneath tags, allowing one more layer of organisation. They have their own pane in the sidebar from which you can manage and organise them more easily.

You can actually neglect almost all types of property and organise information in your vault on tags and nested tags alone. I’d recommend this if you don’t need the alternative forms that properties can take — think checkboxes, lists and dates.

I’ve written about organising your work using tags in the past, influenced heavily by Tiago Forte’s secret Chapter 11 of Building a Second Brain, but in this piece, I’m going to talk more about my tag use…

First, the advantages — tags are easy to add and organise.

With the sidebar pane that I mentioned you can easily rename and search for tags across your entire vault. When you hit the hashtag and start typing, tags are automatically suggested for you.

I use tags similar to properties in the previous section, in that I have another layer of categorisation of notes outside of PARA. Because you can’t have two methods of organisation in folders, I use tags for this second layer of categorisation. This way I can mark a note as ‘book, video, note, etc.’ for resource notes, and ‘twitter, fundamentalised, medium, etc.’ for pieces of content that I have to publish.

I can query these tags using Dataview and folder notes, creating indexes of my notes that are great overviews of most of the content in my vault. I talk more about this in PARAZETTEL, but it’s one of the axiomatic features of how I currently work with knowledge in Obsidian.

So tags, the disadvantages. Again, like, properties, tags are an additional layer of complexity that you might not need. And they’re easy to get wrong. Before I read Tiago Forte’s secret chapter and wrote the piece mentioned in the above paragraphs, I had way too many different tags.

This put me off of using them regularly, which was the only reason to implement such a feature in the first place. After spending a little time cleaning them up, though, I now use them effectively again and they’re a great feature of my vault.

Seeing as you can use any combination of the above four to organise your Obsidian vault (yes, I have seen vaults where people don’t use folders, so they’re not compulsory), there are a lot of unique ways you can store knowledge.

If you’re someone who wants quite a simple method of organisation, you can stick with folders and perhaps links.

I’d recommend some combination of all of the above if you’re more of a power user like I am, with a more complicated use case for your knowledge management. You can automate the addition of most of the layers of organisation, through plugins such as Templater, and they add useful functionality such as Dataview querying.

However, bear in mind minimal note-taking and only add each level of organisation if you truly believe it’s going to add a useful feature to your Obsidian vault. For more details on the principles, you can check out this piece or investigate PARAZETTEL.

I hope you’ve learned something from this piece, and as always, thanks for spending time with me today!