Saved by Lucas Kohorst and
Obsidian Vault Template
I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. This is my bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. It embraces chaos and laziness to create emergent structure.
Steph Ango • Obsidian Vault Template
From How I Use Obsidian by Steph Ango, CEO.
Fractal journaling and random revisit
Steph Ango • Obsidian Vault Template
Ohhhh. Okay.
Fractal journaling and randomization are how I tame the wilderness that a knowledge base can grow into.
Throughout the day I use Obsidian’s unique note hotkey to write individual thoughts as they come up. This shortcut automatically creates a note with the prefix YYYY-MM-DD HHmm to which I may add a title that describes the idea.
Every few days I review these journal fragments and compile the salient thoughts. I then review those reviews monthly, and review the monthly reviews yearly (using this template). The result is a fractal web of my life that I can zoom in and out of at varying degrees of detail. I can trace back where individual thoughts came from, and how they bubbled up into bigger themes.
Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, and find inspiration in past thoughts. It’s also an opportunity to do maintenance, like fix formatting based on new rules in my personal style guide.
People have asked me if this could be automated with language models but I do not care to do so. I enjoy this process. Doing this maintenance helps me understand my own patterns. Don’t delegate understanding.