Properties3
| Type | Practice |
| Note created | Jan 22, 2026 |
| Last updated | Jun 23, 2026 |
After using it for years, Obsidian has become my go-to tool for note-taking, organization, and all sorts of works related to information collection, organization, linking and discovery. The system I use to organize locally all of this is gathered in this note. On the other hand, an important subset of these notes are publicly available as my Digital Garden in garden.diego.codes.
General Organization
I make extensive use of the frontmatter attributes, that I then use to navigate the vault using the Obsidian application and can be fed to other plugins like Bases.
Entities
The most relevant attributes are, no doubt, the Obsidian entities. This top-level taxonomy defines what is the note, and serves for a first filter when searching and processing notes. In the linked note for the entities, it is possible to find a list of all of them. Each note contains a description of what to expect from each entity.
Use Cases
Zettelkasten
Originally, I started using Obsidian as a personal-wiki, storing notes about different things I was learning about. Most of these notes are concepts and practices, and later I discovered the idea approach to add some sort of evergreen notes.
These notes are easy enough since the information is mostly plain text. They are organized mostly via links, and they sit at the root level.
Reference Work
When I discovered I could sync Readwise with Obsidian, I started developing the Reference folder, that contains articles, books, films, etc. The files adhere to the authority control and collect different interesting reference material and their excerpts, highlights, etc. I usually don’t include notes in them and try to preserve the original content they refer to. For that reason, they are usually formed by material that I do not author and I do not claim to do so. For the source material, follow the source URL provided (and please do, since they are automatically captured and may contain errors and missing information at times).
Each of those notes are mostly thought to take notes about them, so different insights can be found in its backlinks. These entities have more strict requirements regarding frontmatter attributes, since I tend to navigate them using Bases. These currently are:
Personal Atlas
I have a personal atlas inside the Digital Garden: a place to store places that I have been to, or that I plan to, or that I want to. It is a substitute for Google Maps, Apple Maps, and all these kind of tools that are great for navigation but poor for archival. I solve that need using Obsidian and the Map view for Bases, and the Obsidian web clipper for data collection. This part is hidden from the public notes because it’s hard to navigate without a map, and it is not compatible with Obsidian Publish (yet).
Journaling
I try to journal daily. To do so, I use the daily notes plugin to generate journal entries to gather my thoughts. Each note also link to today’s check-ins: atomic interactions with one or more entities that are also gathered in the Vault. For obvious reasons, these notes are also hidden from the public notes.
Task
In early 2026 I started using Obsidian Tasks and TaskForge to manage my tasks. I have a dedicated note that explains in detail how I manage tasks with Obsidian. Tasks are written and stored all over the place, so some of them can be, indeed, archived in the public website.