Thanks to Obsidian being simple Markdown files on the file system, organising through folders (and the through tags and front-matter) is super easy to implement and change later (this is key as you will always want to reorganise when you find a better way)

In this post I want to go over a quick overview of each of my folders in my personal vault with a bit of an explanation as to what they do and what is included in there

Naming Convention

Before we jump into the folders I wanted to point out the one really important aspect of the folder structure, the naming conventions.

All my folders are prefixed with a number starting with 01 and going the whole way up to 99. Basically, the most important (or most used) goes up at the top, with all the meta folders (templates etc) go towards the end of the file system.

One thing to note here is my folder names used to be 01. Daily Notes with a . however. Android sync really doesn’t like folders with . in them, so I removed them all to go with a simpler (and cleaner looking) 01 Daily Notes

The Folders

01 Daily Notes

This is where all my daily notes go, daily notes are probably the best feature of Obsidian and you can see my [[Obsidian Daily Notes Template]] that i use on a daily basis. All of those go here for quick reference, each file is simply the date in YYYY-MM-DD for simplicity.

02 Education

This is a folder that serves as a kick off point for all the education I’m looking to do. It contains:

  • Blog Posts
  • Free Courses
  • Books I’d like to read
  • Technology to learn
  • Skill sets to broaden

03 Development

My development folder is probably the most used after the Daily Notes folder. It contains all of the projects I’m currently working on.

The folder structure under this (briefly, I think I need to do a post on this one on its own)

  • Current Projects
  • Deprecated
  • Freelance
  • Ideas (Folder DB)
  • Tasks (Folder DB) With some files that explain what I’m doing
  • Development Home (kick off point with links)
  • Notes
  • Process

My development folder is a kind of replacement for Jira and Confluence, there are lots of documents in here as well as tasks that are stored in Folder DB’s as a way of replicating Notions Databases.

04 House

A folder containing notes related to where I live. Todo lists of tasks to do on holidays or just simply notes on what suppliers and contractors to use for related works as well as a history of what I’ve done in the past and a planning Document for what I plan to do in the future (renovations, extensions etc)

05 Personal

My personal folder is a dumping ground for all thing Friends and Family. Containing hobby information (guitar), Holiday information and planning, Draft speeches for weddings and up to date information on family events and anything I need to find quickly.

06 Notes

Currently unused, it used to have Clippings in there, however they are now elsewhere in the vault. This folder was thought out to be as a good little starting point for notes before they get fully thought out.

07 Health

Health is quite empty with the only folder that sits below this being Activities which is my folder for all my fitness activities. You can see in my [[Obsidian Daily Notes Template]] where there is a button to add a new fitness activity. This is the folder they go in, I can then query them using DataView.

08 Learning

The old Education folder. This one just now has little notes for small things I use like tmux and vim. This one is going to be deprecated and replaced as soon as the notes get moved around.

09 Planning

Simply, my yearly planning documents that I do around Christmas every year with some action points to get through in the year upcoming.

10 House and Life

An Extension on the House folder above, including more generic Life Goals and Planning documents. This is the home for a lot of the Holiday Worklists and bigger jobs around the house that also involve learning things.

Included in here is some documentation round my Skills and Targets in life, so what I want to learn (linking back to education), How I’m going to get there and then the products that come out of that.

11 Homelab

My homelab is still int he works. So keeping all the documentation around System, Kube Setup, Networking as well as common commands and obviously issues in one place is pretty key.

The main aim of this folder is going to be getting all the setup documented so one day i can put it all into one post to share with the world, especially around the networking issues that I faced pretty early on.

12 Blog

Home folder for my blog. Contained in here is the following

  • Database folder of all my posts (all posts are done and published in markdown)
  • Ideas Database for all future blog post ideas
  • Quotes Note which has a bunch of interesting quotes that I want to write about

97 Temporary

A folder for anything and everything testing. Here is the place where I test new plugins, features and data strategies. Things in here don’t last too long.

98 Clippings

All the clippings that come through the Obsidian Web Clipper . Things here are articles I want to save or documentation to read later (offline)

Templates

Home for all my templates. I’ll be making posts on these individually at some point. But contained in here is the following

  • Activities Template
  • Daily Note Template
  • Fitness Daily Tracker Template

Files not In Folders

Dashboard (deprecated)

My dashboard is an old file that came across from my days with Notion. It contained links and kickoffs to a bunch of other tasks and folders. I found that it was better to add links like this in my daily note, or simply not at all.

For example, I had a heading which was “Current Projects”. However, when would i ever use it? I knew that project I was working on that day as it was always toward to the top of my to-do list. So the link itself was just redundant. That’s why i decided `that if it needed to be permanent I would put it in the daily notes templates otherwise it was not needed.

Bookmarks

This is a really quick text document that I chuck a few links in before I have a chance to organise where they go or if I am going to need them. At most it has around 10 links.

Conclusion

Hopefully a glimpse into how I organise (or how anyone else organises) their Obsidian vault is useful for you. However, keep in mind that every setup is different and you will find value in how you set things up yourself.

It is so easy to go back and move a bunch of documents, create and remove folders and generally restructure how your vault I laid out that I wouldn’t ever worry about getting it right the first time.

Start from the beginning and just move forward, that’s the best way to go.