Setting up properties for my Obsidian notes (Part 2)
How many properties do you really need?
I have to make an admission: When Obsidian first introduced its properties feature, I got a bit carried away with the possibilities. I had always wanted to keep track of certain types of metadata, and this was the right moment to put everything in a clean and structured manner in the front matter of my notes. I wrote this post about choosing properties for my vault: Setting up file properties for my Obsidian notes.
At the time a few experienced PKM users warned against becoming a prisoner of your properties. Too many properties, and you run the risk of spending a lot of time maintaining them instead of doing your thought work. And guess what? After using the properties feature for a while, I discovered a lot of truth in that warning!
I started off with a set of properties that seemed to make practical sense for my vault. But after using them for about six months, I have reached the conclusion that I had too many properties for my use case.
I also made the mistake of incoporating all properties in my note templates. But there is no point in having properties that are not relevant for a particular note, or that cannot be used for filtering, tracking or workflow automation.
