How I Organize My Obsidian Vault 📥 Tags, Topics & Maps of Content

Hi Friends, my name is Callum aka wanderloots. In this video I explain how I use tags, topics, and maps of content (MoC) to enable both structure & emergence in my Obsidian vault 📥 🌱 📍

Organizing Obsidian is often one of the biggest blocks for people trying to build their personal knowledge management system (PKM), especially given the infinite possibilities of Obsidian.

After years of using Obsidian to help me write 100+ articles & 150+ YouTube videos, this video explains, in-depth, my system of using tags, topics & MoC.

One of the greatest powers of Obsidian is the ability to create emergent patterns, which is why I've structured my vault to boost the emergence of ideas & intuition as much as possible.

At the end of the video, I also walk through tips & best practices to help you make the most of your Obsidian vault, so you can focus less on organizing and more on ideating 💡

I hope you enjoy! ✨

P.S. I greatly appreciate any feedback, please let me know what you think 😊 Also, please consider joining my YouTube membership to support me in making more videos 🫡

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:34 Today's Outline
00:57 Structure (Tags) vs Emergence (Topics)
2:55 Overview of Tags v Topics
4:06 Key Differences & Goals
9:23 Setting Up Tags: 3 Main Types
10:54 Tag Type 1
11:30 Tag Type 2
11:58 Tag Type 3
12:35 Searching & Common Tags
14:39 Nested Tags
16:19 Tag Summary
16:53 Setting Up Topics
18:13 Topics = Connections
20:49 Summary of Topics
21:39 Maps of Content (MoC)
23:55 New Topic Example
25:03 MoC = Levelled Up Topic
27:21 Visualizations With Graph View
28:51 Key Characteristics: Tags vs Topic Notes
34:34 One More Example
38:00 My Tips & Best Practices
41:16 Automatic Organization of Obsidian
41:44 AI + Obsidian
41:59 Next: Molecular Zettelkasten in Obsidian

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🎨The Creative Act (Art and Mindfulness) (coming soon)

LINKS (MY WORLD)

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EQUIPMENT USED

[davidvkimball]

The "is a" for tags and "about" for Topic Notes is perfect.

[JeanOfmArc]

I watched a number of videos on how to organize my vault, and this has been the most helpful by far. Thanks so much!

[uzairmehmood_Z]

"The best way to do this is the way it makes sense to you" - Wanderloots. That's going in my vault
I am using your videos about obsidian as a crash course to learn both obsidian and zettalkasten. Its more helpful than the book. Keep up the good work!

[maurolimaok]

Great video
I finally fire out how to differ and relate tags and topics, in a useful form.

[JackErith]

Currently halfway through: this information is beautiful. I’m now considering dumping everything I know into obsidian.

Your videos are phenomenal. 🙏🏻

[joecrumpler]

Unbelievably helpful. Thank you so much.

[rvrgrrl]

This was so clearly explained, and answered the questions I had on tags vs. topics :o) Thank you!

[cho]

Excellent, you are very clear between both! Awesome

[thomasvochten]

I have used Tag Pages in the past (from the Tag Wrangler plugin). Using Topics seems a somewhat similar concept, but I like this one better. Thanks for the inspiration!

[OttomatedDev]

After year of using Obsidian and trying out multiple structures. In the end I went back to folders for organizing.
However I do use linking for most things inside Obsidian, link to parent notes, related notes.
My folder are somewhat like the topics here (folder note plugin), and all notes that fit this folder the best are placed in here.
Links also fix the problem for a note that you want in 2 or more folders.
Add it to the most logical folder, use links in the other places.
My folder are action folders or like a collection folder.
This is very usefull if you want to use these outside of Obsidian.
Images for me where one of the major problems, adding them all to a assets folder became messy very quickly.
Not using tags anymore, mostly links and if i need things like statusses i use properties.

[invictussol]

This is really helpful. Thank you for providing a framework <3

[MorgsBrew]

Howzit
I think your content in this field is very useful and well explained. You add really nice supporting information instead of just pushing a video. When I first found your channel I was not sure you were not a AI Google podcast because you spoke so clearly.

I have been in a deep rabbit hole trying to figure out hierarchical organized folders vs file dump with tags. I am more convinced that good Metadata is critical for any notes so that they are able to act photonic like. Both a wave and a particle or a file and a tag 😂

Lekke

[josephb]

This is a great explanation. I wish I had this when I started using Obsidian rather all the over complicated PKM Zettle Code heavy videos that were dominant before. I will definitely remember to share this to new Obsidian users first.

The other creators are good too, but I think overcomplicate things for beginners, which can lead to unproductive side quests of perfectionism. My wife for example won't touch Obsidian (even though she can code) because the videos she saw me watching made her think Obsidian was a complicated nightmare.

[PawFromTheBroons]

25:57 What are those numbers that appear regularly throughout the video?
The 0 after Zettelkasten and the 22 after Augmented PKM?

[vlmath]

hi. thanks for the video and ideas!
had a question : do you make a conceptual difference between a topic and a "hard link"/reference between notes ? for example, in the book A, you could have a source indicating the book B. in markdown, it would be a link [[book B]]. It would appear the same in the graph.
do you think topics and links are different ? do you use links ? is there a way to show them differently (if it make sense) in the knowledge graph ?

[DavidHurtadoToran]

Great video, thanks. Quick (and quite offtopic) question: what font do you use for the text? it's lovely

[triciaaanderud]

I appreciate you sharing your ideas - very helpful. Also I really like your lamp - so if it goes missing you should NOT come to my house to look for it. It is not here. ;-)

[olivierparlebureau]

I have a problem with tags in Obsidian. I like your approach of top-down and your three types of tags. And as you showed, clicking on a tag only shows results in the same "category" of tags.

YAML tags are not compatible with inline tags. YAML tags have no hashtag in front of them. When you click on books, for example, the search looks for tag:books, not tag:#books !

The opposite is also true, clicking on inline tag #books searches for tag:#books, and not tag:books.

So I'm not sure if, for example, using books, I should only use property tags or inline tags, or both. Or maybe both ? Do you use tags separately ?

[marcof]

Thank you for the great video! May I ask how you added multiple topics under the same "Topics" property in 20:34 of the video? I tried adding multiple topics via the brackets [[Example]] but Obsidian just treats it as a single note (so if I did [[USA]] [[California]] it would just end up creating a note called USA]] [[California. Adding a comma to separate them didn't work either.

[imanotjr]

How would you structure notes act as a guide to do something? For example "How to transform images using Cloudinary" and where would you place this?