Since I started at Atomic, I’ve used Obsidian as my primary note-taking tool. For a long time, I tried to use it to its full potential. I kept notes for everything — every stray thought, person, concept, or tool that crossed my path. I added metadata properties to make things easier to find, crafted detailed templates, and even wrote meta-notes about how I write notes. My vault was a network of detailed, interconnected, meticulously tagged entries.
At some point, though, the system I had tirelessly built got in the way. Every new note felt like a process: pick the right template, add the right tags, update similar notes if I changed a property somewhere, link it to any related files. It became too much overhead.
So I started a fresh vault. I brought over a handful of notes I still used, and rethought the whole approach. Here’s what I’m doing differently now, and why it’s helped.
1. Only make notes that are useful.
This seems obvious, but it wasn’t how I used to operate. I’d add a note just to link other notes together or to prepare for the possibility I might need it someday. Most of those never got touched again.
Now, I only take notes I know I’ll use. It’s a small mindset shift, but it keeps me from cluttering things up with half-finished placeholders.
2. Just use folders.
For a while, I went all-in with categorization: every note had tags, properties, and was linked into some kind of MOC (map of content). The idea was to make everything easier to find and more structured.
In practice, I never actually used those tools — I didn’t search by property, I didn’t browse by tag, I didn’t open my MOCs. They became maintenance overhead — stuff I kept up just to feel organized.
Now I just use folders. That’s it. No tags, no properties, no manually curated indexes. I put the note where it makes sense and move on. It’s almost laughably simple, but it works.
3. Templates aren’t schemas.
I still use templates, but I no longer treat them like required formats. They’re a convenience, not a rule. If a template helps me get started, great. If not, I skip it.
There’s no pressure to conform to a structure or maintain consistency across similar notes.
4. Get things out of the vault.
If I take notes about a work project or team meeting, I still jot them down in Obsidian, but I move them out of my vault as soon as it makes sense. They go into whatever shared space the team uses (which might be a different Obsidian vault!).
My vault is for personal thinking and reference, not a storage locker for team documentation.
5. It’s notes, not a database.
One of the traps I fell into was thinking of my note system like a database. If I could just define the right schema, everything would be connected and queryable. I could use plugins like Dataview (or the newly added Bases) to make nice visualizations of my data based on all the properties I set.
But Obsidian is a notes app at its core. I’ve stopped trying to optimize it like a database system and started treating it like a scratchpad again.
6. Automate links.
While I ditched manually maintained MOCs, I do use the Zoottelkeeper plugin to auto-generate basic ones for each folder. It’s just enough structure to let the graph view cluster things in a semi-useful way without me having to lift a finger.
I still look at the graph view now and then because it’s fun. But I don’t build my whole system around it.
Minimalist Obsidian Note-taking
This isn’t some dramatic reinvention of productivity; it’s just note-taking. But making it simpler brought me back to using Obsidian again, and that’s all I was really aiming for. No perfect system, no second brain. Just a place to write things down when I might need them later.