Obsidian: Stop Wasting Time With Directories and Filenames

Freeing Your Thinking, Part 1

This is the first part of three articles. This part covers recording and retrieving information. The second will cover information analysis and synthesis. The last part explains, for those interested, what NoSQL Database is and why this is useful in working with Obsidian. The original can be read here.

The Problem

Because we’ve all used computers, when we think of organizing our stuff we naturally think in terms of files and directories, and are aware of the value of descriptive file names. Personally, if I even need to scroll down to see all the files in a single directory, it’s probably time for a subdirectory. And I’m equally unsettled when I see files with meaningless or unclear names. Many people like me explore various systems like PARA, ACCESS, LATCH, etc. to organize our stuff.

To be explicit, the stuff referred to here is files. But we use Obsidian for information management, not file management.

Obsidian stores information, but it’s not a database, at least not an SQL database. It is essentially a NoSQL database (more on that in Part 2 and 3). It stores information in text files, but it doesn’t care where the files are nor what they are called. So why should we care?