I have been keeping a personal knowledge vault in Obsidian for a few years now. What follows are the principles I have settled on — not a system I designed upfront, but habits that survived contact with reality.
When to write
- In the writing window — the deliberate sessions set aside for it.
- When recognizing connections — while writing other notes, or when a real-life situation triggers an idea that already lives in the vault. This one rests on habits built outside the writing sessions: an intimate mental map of your own vault, and the reflex of spotting links between a fleeting thought and the ideas already living there.
How to write
-
(Still experimental, and a little radical:) write directly and immediately into the vault. If an idea belongs to the vault, don’t park it in an ephemeral note first. Avoid the cost of delayed action — the friction of moving it later is exactly where good ideas quietly die.
-
Write at the quality of being about to show it to someone. Prose does carry a cost — it can be too elaborate for an efficient re-read — but bolding the keywords mitigates that: a future skim recovers the spine of the note without rereading every line.
-
Make connections relentlessly:
- Use all three linkage mechanisms mindfully — wiki links for networked thoughts, topic tags to build indices, and Obsidian Canvas to synthesize perspectives.
- Harvest the parked relations that haven’t yet made it into the main text.
- Visit the orphan and loosely connected notes in graph view.
- And from your own mind, of course.
-
Don’t write things down out of tiredness and fear of loss when they don’t make sense. The cost of maintaining them outweighs the risk of losing a (doubtfully) valuable thought. Don’t turn the vault into a garbage dump.
Vault hygiene
- Lean on small AI commands (I use Raycast) to fix spelling and tighten the writing.
- Use the local graph with adjustable depth to discover sometimes surprising transitive connections.
- Don’t be afraid of deleting. The vault is not an additive collection for dumping notes; it is a palace where ideas get consolidated.
The quiet reward
Writing in the vault is its own reward. The collection of intermediate artifacts grows over time; ideas solidify and become tangible — and the fragmented slowly forms into a whole. (Practices shaped in conversation with a friend’s notes.)