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I've been doing this too in Obsidian and really like it.

Notes can be as short or long as feels right. If they need to grow they can grow, sometimes they get split into sub notes.

I have notes with titles like "Cardboard furniture", "Staging patch changes in VSCode", and "Hilbert Transform".

Some are one or two sentences, some are more like essays with subheadings.

Small notes tend to have one or two links to other notes. Longer notes have more links and tend towards centralization (eg all booking info about an upcoming work trip).

Search makes it easy to find the notes that don't have links.



Yep, Obsidian is the best! Two patterns I use a lot to help with this small brain buffer problem are collections & streams.

Collections (sometimes called 'Maps of Content') are sets of internal & external links or resources around a particular topic, e.g. 'Self Deception', 'Creativity', 'Air Quality', etc. The page names represent the topic so they're easy to name, and if I can't find a page I go to these first before search.

Streams are pages with date headers that contain small notes around a broad topic. For instance, 'Passing Thoughts' are random ideas, 'Story Prompts' are ideas for stories, and 'Inbox' are links to read and any notes I have on them. Streams do three things for me:

1. I don't know how big an idea is until I write it, and this stream pattern lets me optionally break ideas off into their own pages if they get to a certain level of size/complexity.

2. I can quickly capture without having to create a new page, since I'm at ~2000 now and each subsequent page makes search less effective.

3. I can avoid the challenge of naming pages, which is often harder than it seems. For instance, I've taken to naming certain pages like Andy M's evergreen notes style of declarative claims/statements, like 'Recognizing our influences empowers our creativity', 'The curiosity driving information addiction may be due to a sense of deprivation', and 'Good ideas deserve good stewards'. To do this clearly, concisely, and scoped correctly is its own challenge and worth the time investment because it really lets me build on strong foundations, and it prevents similar pages from proliferating in search by being easy to find.


I like this technique. Thanks.


It's been a game changer for me. I always did this anyway in other Notes apps, but Obsidian just does a great job of making it feel like it almost prefers you to write notes like that.


How are you aggregating in Obsidian? I feel like I haven't cracked the code on this one


Do you mean other than MoCs (Maps of Content)?

I use the Waypoint plugin with folders to create auto-generated maps of content within folder hierarchies. Works nicely to give me an index to use as a first port of call in a subject and works well with graph view.




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