Johnny's Knowledge

Obsidian Rules - Reference Folders

Properties1
tagsknowledge-management, productivity, tools

Reference Folders

  • References — where I write about things that exist outside my world: books, videos, concepts, and other sources. The body is my synthesis or response.
  • Clippings — externally authored articles saved substantially intact. Every clipping keeps its original url in frontmatter when known.

Admin Folder

  • Attachments- for images, audio, videos, PDFs, etc.
  • Meta - Templates, Latex Snippets
  • Categories - contains top-level overviews of notes per category (e.g. Books, Movies, Podcasts, etc).

Properties and Templates

Almost every note I create starts from a template. I use templates heavily because they allow me to lazily add information that will help me find the note later. I have a template for every category with properties at the top, to capture data such as:

  • Property names and values should aim to be reusable across categories. This allows me to find things across categories,e.g. genre is shared across all media types, which means I can see an archive of Sci-fi books, movies and shows in one place.
    • lowercase
  • Templates should aim to be composable, e.g. Person and Author are two different templates that can be added to the same note.
  • Short property names are faster to type, e.g. start instead of start‑date.
  • Default to list type properties instead of text if there is any chance it might contain more than one link or value in the future.

What This Vault Actually Carries

Measured across 201 categorised notes — 15 properties, none dead.

  • Dates — created, finished (book), week range (journal). There is no updated: — it was removed on 29 Aug 2026 and mtime is the source of truth for recency.
  • People — author (book), attendees (meeting, interview)
  • Themes — category, tags, and last week / next week as related-note links on journals
  • Locations — none yet. Nothing in the vault is filed by place.
  • Ratings — rating on article, podcast, video, book, restaurant
  • Sources — url on clippings, videos, and imported papers
  • State — reviewed, on journal weeks only. Every other category dropped it on 29 Aug 2026: reviewing a note in place was a step I never actually took, while reviewing a week is a habit I keep.
  • Display — title where the heading should differ from the filename, cover on book

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