The Philosophy of Organizing Our Notes

Pragmatists versus essentialists. Or both.

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

One of the arguments that crops up in work processing, over and over again, is how to organize our notes.

This idea of organizing has several layers:

• What forms of organizing do the tools themselves provide? For example, does a tool provide folders, tags, both, or neither? How many ways does a tool allow references across notes: links, backlinks, block references, or aliases? As a general principle, the more the better, since that puts more approaches to organization into the hands of users.
• What forms of organizing have users developed based on the infrastructure provided by tools? I think of this as the ‘ultrastructure’, conceptually operating above the infrastructure. For example, in my current use of Obsidian, I rely on the Kanban plug-in to manage all my project-related work, while others instead use other plug-ins and core capabilities, seldom or never using Kanbans. (I will revisit this, below.)

Dan Shipper offers a great metaphor, characterizing two opposing mindsets about how knowledge is organized, and by extension, behind opposing approaches to organizing our notes: essentialists versus pragmatists.

• Essentialists have, he writes, ‘a hierarchical view of the world. Each…