This article discusses having a consistent folder structure between your filesystem, note taking application, and browser bookmarks.

With all the fuzzy finding and searching tools available these days, I’ve seen several people that do away with organizing with folders / directory structures. They argue that they can put stuff into one or two big folders and then just search for what they want.

Applications that support tags can be very powerful in categorizing notes and documents. By using tags, you can apply multiple tags to each document so you can find them in multiple directions.

While I agree with both of those arguments and use tools like fzf for searching, I don’t think that is a good enough reason to abandon structuring your data into folders. In fact, my proposal is to unify your folder structure organization across applications.

File System

Under the Documents folder (this would be “My Documents” on Windows), I have the following folders:

  • Archive: Files that are obsolete, but don’t want to delete. They’re reference files.
  • Entertainment: Entertainment related files (e.g. computer game manuals, Board game rules, game maps, etc.)
  • Faith: Inspirational files, Bible study files, Church related files, Sermon notes, etc.
  • Finance: Budget, Receipts, tax documents, credit reports, mortgage info, insurance policies, etc.
  • Health: Health info for each family member, fitness docs, doctor bills
  • Home: Auto info / insurance, genealogy research, personal docs, recipes
  • Miscellaneous: Files that don’t seem to fit anywhere else
  • Projects: DIY projects, plans
  • Reading: Documents related to reading
  • Technology: Tech related files

Explorer Directories

These folders represent the key areas for roughly organizing documents.

Under my Home directory there are additional specialized directories such as:

  • Documents: detailed above
  • Library: contains ebooks managed by Calibre
  • Obsidian: holds obsidian vaults

Obsidian

In recent years, I’ve been using Obsidian to house my notes. In addition to tagging every note, I also organize the notes into a very similar folder structure:

  • Archive: Obsolete notes kept for reference
  • Assets: Location for attachments and templates
  • Clippings: web clipper notes
  • Entertainment: game notes
  • Faith: Inspirational notes, Bible study notes, lesson plans, sermon notes, organizational notes
  • Finance: All about finances, taxes, insurance, banking etc.
  • Health: All about health and medicine
  • Home: Cars, cooking, people, places
  • Journal: daily and weekly notes
  • Miscellaneous: trivia, odds, and ends
  • Projects: DIY projects
  • Reading: book notes, reading lists
  • Technology: Software notes, cheat sheets, application specific notes, programming notes

Obsidian Folders

I’m considering splitting a Development directory from the Technology. The Development directory would be all about programming languages and projects.

The Home Index note in the screenshot above is a landing page that always comes up when I launch Obsidian. It contains links to important notes throughout the vault.

Web Browser

I recently realized that my bookmarks toolbar folders were very similar to the folder structures from the hard drive and Obsidian. So, I went ahead and organized it to match.

Browser Bookmark Toolbar

  • Entertainment: Streaming services, Music, …
  • Faith: Bible and church related
  • Finance: Banking, online bill pay
  • Health: Medical dashboards, pharmacies
  • Home: Links to businesses in my hometown
  • Miscellaneous: Frequently visited sites
  • Projects: DIY projects, plans
  • Reading: eBook sites, online reading
  • Technology: Software documentation, online training courses, web based tools
  • Self-Hosted: Links to all the software self hosted

My bookmarks toolbar also contains a standalone link named dD which stands for Developer Docs It’s a very cool web tool that aggregates documentation for a lot of different programming languages and tools.

Summary

The goal here is to have multiple systems organized in similar ways. This set up gives a basic directory structure with 10 core folders which can be expanded as desired. Below these main folders, there are additional sub-folders when it makes sense.

One final connection; this website is organized into:

  • Faith: - inspirational posts
  • Family: - equivalent to Home folders above with recipe and family posts
  • Reading: - articles about reading
  • Technology: - software and development posts