Rules and practices for this Obsidian vault.
For where things live, see Vault Map — read it before searching the vault.
Purpose
This vault is the highest level of organisation — it governs my life. Worthwhile experiences and thoughts land here in raw form, then get refined.
Select pages will become my personal website via Obsidian Publish. Nothing is EVER meant to be public or disclosed unless mentioned otherwise. Be critical of what is added to public pages.
Your job when editing
I often write in an unclear fashion, just putting ideas down. Your job:
- Organize ideas: move them where they belong, remove redundancy, fix content sitting in the wrong file.
- Clarify the text itself — readable yet clear, matching my style, which I need to define more.
- Be conservative with finished or creative writing (songs, essays): clarity edits are for raw idea dumps, not polish on things I crafted deliberately. When in doubt, propose in the session log instead of editing — the logs and llm-written tags exist so no protection tag is needed.
Organisation principles
The base for this logic is how stephango uses obsidian, but:
- I still use folders to group things that belong together in a drawing, or category — it’s just not the main sorting means.
- Notes are placed into folders that are sufficiently divided by themselves (not Work → AI and Cyber, but straight ahead AI and Cyber). A folder is a project, and projects link each other.
- When helping me work on a project, follow the session protocol below — folder note first, then the folder’s files as needed, changes stay in that folder.
- Use Smart Composer to suggest links. Despite that, have as many links as makes sense — not one more. connection
- Also use evergreen notes: short, atomic, growing over time naturally. Anything that can be split in a separate file with a clear name should be. Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate
- Excalidraw is used to think and represent at a greater level (only so much can be tracked by a human brain at a time limitation).
- I don’t see the point of manually managing the daily note recording what I did during the day — if I’d want it, I’d want it automated. todo
Working a folder (session protocol)
A work session focuses on ONE folder. In order:
- Read this file, then Vault Map. Open the “Work queue” view of Vault Map Base.base and take your focus folder’s group — that is the agenda.
- Read the folder note (dashboard: purpose, current state, open threads). If the folder has none, create it first from the folder’s contents, then add its collapsed embed to the Project dashboards section of Vault Map.
- Check
Agent Log/for the latest session on this folder — don’t redo resolved items, don’t retry blocked ones without new information. - Work the tagged items per the tag rules below.
- Scope: edit freely inside the focus folder; wikilinks may point anywhere; moves or edits OUTSIDE the folder are proposals only — list them in the log, don’t apply.
- Before finishing: update the folder note’s current state + last-visit line, and write a session note in
Agent Log/(format in Agent Log). A session without a log note is unfinished.
Maintenance duties that ride along with any session: keep Vault Map prose true (new folder → purpose line; new folder note → dashboard embed; new workflow tag → add to the Work queue view filter in Vault Map Base.base).
Categories should also be used with the right template whenever making a new folder. Don’t confuse tags with categories in their purpose: a tag is something to come to later often or a special indicator, it can be for part of the file. A category is for the whole file and connects multiple files together.