# Notes Tags: #process #personal I collect more facts than I have room for in my brain, and in the past I would often find myself getting frustrated that I needed information which I'd forgotten. I use Obsidian to prevent this, and while it took me a while to find a workflow that worked for me, I now make extensive use of it. Here's a screenshot of my knowledge graph, including private notes, as of March 2023: ![[knowledge-graph.jpg]] (The big nodes are `#education` and `#person`, and the biggest clusters at the edges are `#management` and `#medicine`. I haven't actually found a use for this view, but it looks cool :)) This note describes the workflow for personal knowledge management which I'm using at the moment. ## Managing Information Inflows ### Daily Notes I use the built-in "Daily Notes" plugin with Obsidian to create a place to keep track of meeting notes, for example: ![[daily-note-example-censored.jpg]] I make heavy use of links in daily notes, which makes it possible to use backlinks to see what I've previously discussed with an individual, or when I've previously had discussions on a subject, e.g.: ![[daily-note-subject-backlinks-censored.jpg]] ### People Every person gets a note in the format of `@[firstname] [lastname]`. I largely only use these so I can find backlinks to past conversations in daily notes (as described in [[#Daily Notes]]), but I also use them to store things like birthdays/etc for people I interact with a lot. ### Dates I tag dates in a few standard format: - Day + month: `d[dd]m[MMM]` (e.g., `d30mMar`) - Month + year: `y[yyyy]m[MMM]` (e.g., `y2023mMar`) - Year: `y[yyyy]` (e.g., `y2023`) I'll often tag dates in multiple formats because I don't know how I'll want to filter things in the future. This lets me ask for e.g., "everything related to March 30" (such as [[#People]] birthdays and what I did last year on March 30) or "everything related to March 2023" (e.g. all my notes written this month). ### Written Notes I use a ReMarkable 2 tablet for notes on books, and for a lot of in-person meetings where typing on a laptop would seem rude. I try to convert my written notes to Obsidian notes once a week, usually on Friday. ### Papers Recently I've been [[@tyler menezes#Publications|authoring research papers]], so it's become more important to keep track of papers I read. Here's my workflow for papers: 1. I track any papers I read in [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/) 2. The [Better BibTeX](https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/) addon live-exports a [CSL-JSON](https://citeproc-js.readthedocs.io/en/latest/csl-json/markup.html) file to my Obsidian vault [^notePin] 3. The [Obsidian Citations Plugin](https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin) converts my Zotero into "literature notes" (which I keep in the `cite/` folder). 4. I can write directly in the literature note, but 99% of the time I'll just cite the Literature Note using footnotes in subject-specific notes. ## Organization I could spend way too much time on the problem of organizing my notes, so I mostly don't organize them. I use subfolders to organize _kinds_ of notes, but not _taxonomy_. ![[folders.jpg]] (I use the icon folder plugin to get these icons.) - All topic notes live in the root folder. It does not matter what type of topic the note covers, or if it's work-related vs personal. Everything from "accreditation of universities" to "woodworking" lives in the root folder. - Attachments live in the `attachments` folder. - Literature notes (see [[#Papers]]) live in the `cite` folder. - [[#Daily Notes]] live in the `daily` folder. - I have a `gpt prompts` folder to track useful GPT prompts, which is also used by the [text generator plugin](https://github.com/nhaouari/obsidian-textgenerator-plugin). - `locations` tracks my notes on specific places. (These notes are useful places to track restaurant recommendations people give me when traveling, and my own favorite places.) All locations start with `~` to make it easier to autocomplete. - `people` tracks my notes on people. All people start with `@` to make it easier to autocomplete. - `rfc` is where I put memos and other long-form content which is intended for other people to read. - I use the `scripts` folder like [Github Gist](https://gist.github.com/). - `templates` is where I store note templates for the [templater](https://silentvoid13.github.io/Templater/) plugin. I use the [auto note mover plugin](https://github.com/farux/obsidian-auto-note-mover) to automatically move these notes, so I rarely have to think about this structure. 99% of the time I just search for notes with `Ctrl+K`, so I don't need any more structure than this. (I used to have literally no structure, but I found the sidebar daunting because of all the daily notes, and I found I did occasionally want to browse specific types of notes -- locations, memos, scripts, prompts.) ## Publishing Notes ### Memos/RFCs I use the [Pandoc plugin](https://github.com/OliverBalfour/obsidian-pandoc) to export memos and other long-form content intended for discussion. Pandoc lets me use a LaTeX template to customize the export format, which I use mostly to add line numbers. Line numbers are helpful for discussions because it makes it easier for people to reference and reply to specific parts of a memo, e.g. -- ![[pandoc-example.jpg]] (I also think this is prettier and easier to read than the built-in Obsidian PDF export.) ### Obsidian Publish I use Obsidian's built-in publish service to push _some_ of my notes to `notes.tyler.vc`. I don't publish: - All notes on people (except [[@tyler menezes]] which is actually the datasource for [tyler.vc](https://tyler.vc/)) - All daily notes - Most memos/RFCs [^notePin]: You need to "pin" the cite key in Better BibTeX in order for this to work correctly. To do this, make sure the title, author, and publication date is set up properly for each paper, then right-click them and go to Better BibTeX -> Pin BibTeX Key. This is also useful for exporting to Overleaf.