Obsidian Organization
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Obsidian can quickly turn from a clean canvas into an overwhelming tangle of notes if you don’t have a system. After experimenting with countless folder hierarchies, tag schemes, and plugin setups, I’ve landed on an organization method that balances flexibility with structure. In this post, I’ll walk through the principles and patterns I use to keep my vault scalable, searchable, and, most importantly, usable, even as it grows to thousands of notes.
Core Organization Principles
| Rule | Why it matters in Obsidian |
|---|---|
| One home, many doors – every topic gets a single Map-of-Contents (MOC) note that only contains links (no long prose). | You always have one place to start, and graph backlinks keep child notes easy to surface. |
| Folders say “where” Tags say “what” Backlinks say “how things connect” | Avoid duplicating meaning: the folder shows context, tags add facets (status / type / domain), links record relationships. |
| ≤ 5 folders deep and preferably 3. | Keeps paths readable on mobile and prevents “Russian-doll” navigation. |
| MOCs link down, children link up. | Two-way navigation even when you jump into a note from global search. |
| Templates for repeatables (projects, courses, daily, tutorial). | Reduces friction and enforces the pattern. |
Top-Level Spaces
The top level spaces for my main Obsidian vault loosely follow the PARA Method. Each folder has a specific purpose and is named with a two-digit prefix to keep them sorted in the desired order.
| Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 00 MOCs | Organizational hub linking to more in-depth topics |
| 01 Daily-Notes | Auto-created daily pages, quick-capture, fleeting ideas. |
| 02 Areas | Long-term responsibilities (Academic, Professional, Finances, Health…). |
| 03 Projects | Time-boxed outcomes (< 12 months). Each gets its own mini-tree and MOC. |
| 04 Resources | Knowledge collected through experience, research, trial-error, etc. (frameworks, tools, paradigms…). MOC-driven. |
| 05 Collections | Structured content libraries that act as independent databases. For example: A collection of movies watched with an associated rating. |
| 07 Playground | Disposable experiments, plugin tests, canvas doodles. |
| 08 Obsidian | Templates, plugin configurations, and snippets that improve usability of Obsidian. |
| 09 Archive | Finished or obsolete material. |
Here are general rules that I follow to make categorization fast and nearly automatic:
- Areas: I'm responsible for it
- Projects: I'm doing it
- Resources: I'm learning it
- Collections: I'm tracking it
Tag Taxonomy
General Rules: Keep tags lowercase, singular, and 1-2 words (separated by hyphen). Here is a reddit post on the difference between tags and linked pages in Obsidian.
| Tag family | Examples | When to apply |
|---|---|---|
| Status | #idea, #draft, #in-progress, #done | For tasks, blog posts, project docs. |
| Type | #concept (theory), #how-to, #reference, #snippet, #tutorial | Lets Dataview group different note kinds even across folders. |
| Domain | #webdev, #ai, #hardware, #personal | Broad subjects that cut across folders. |
| Temporal (rare) | #2025Q3, #semester-F25 | Only when you need cohort-style aggregation. |
Resources
- Migrating 6,000+ Notes to Obsidian - Reddit
- Difference between tags and linked pages - Reddit
- Obsidian Main Hub Example - Reddit