It was at the end of 2023 when I really caught the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) bug. I have ALWAYS been an avid notetaker, whether they were handwritten or digital, I wrote things down. But when I learned about the PKM niche and the community around it I was suddenly flooded with these new ideas and concepts, and I dove down the rabbit hole 🐇.

I settled on Obsidian 💜 as my tool of choice (mostly because I'd already been using it in a lackluster way for the past year) and PARA as my methodology. After some tinkering, I settled on a flavor of PARA that seemed like it would work for me. To keep things simple and consistent, I decided to apply the same methodology to both my Work notes and my Personal notes.

General approach in 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣

For both Work and Personal notes, I generally followed this structure:

In addition to the above, I also maintained,

1. Daily Notes. - Auto-created. Each time I opened the note taking app, the home page was always that days note
2. Logs - Each Project note (and sometimes others as well) had a Log section. The Log section was a running list of Date and description of some activity that happened related to that note.

❌ What wasn't working

Well, it turns out, treating my personal life like my work life didn't work at all.

Nearly everything is different in how I approach these, in a good way. But to call out a few examples:

All that is to say, at work I need to be a power user, functioning in a high stress, fast paced environment. My notes system needs to be finely tuned to not only keep up with me, but hopefully outpace me. I practice this process every day.

At home, I am relaxed, with few time sensitive things, generating few artifacts. My explorations are for me and are for fun. I don't want to be hindered by an overly complex system I can't remember or constantly be trying to enhance my personal setup so it supports the exact same workflows as my work setup.

So more specifically, what wasn't working?

1. Work Notes - Mostly working, but could use some polish to really streamline some sticking points
2. Personal Notes - Following the same processes as Work did not feel organic to how I think and operate outside of work

Changes for 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣

Alright, 🥩 and 🥔's time, here's what I'm shaking up for 2025.....

💼Work Notes

1: 🕐 Add in Periodic Notes

In addition to my Daily Notes, I would like to start doing Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly reviews. This is more just a process I am curious about as I've heard many online enjoy it.

At a minimum it should make writing my annual performance review a bit less painful. At a maximum it will help me stay organized and focused on the big picture and more nebulous goals.

2: 📆 Dedicated Meeting Notes

Previously I had been tacking on Meeting Notes to the file they related to in a list. This was ok, but I think I can have more flexibility if I make these distinct notes that link back to the relevant topic note.

I hope this makes it easier for me to keep the most important, distilled information on the parent note, while still having all the details and sandbox notes from the meeting available if needed.

3: 🛸Areas

Delete it and start over. Seriously.

Areas have always been the hardest concept for me to grasp in PARA. And once again, I'm gonna try something new here. Going into this year, I believe I will use Areas to help collect notes about People, Teams, and Codebases.

4: 🤖Automations and Scripting

I have taken a very slow approach to adopting all the tools my note taking applications provide. This is partially because I want to ensure my notes always function as plain text first, and partially because too much fancy bloat can lead to a nightmare of debugging weird issues.

But..... I think I'm at a stage where I generate so many notes at work, and have so many things to keep track of, that a little bit of automation and scripting will go a long way.

🤸 Personal Notes

1: 🏠 Home Page instead of Daily Notes

Instead of having Obsidian always launch into that days Daily Note, I plan to switch over to a static-ish Home Page. This page will have some structure and Dataviews for connecting me to other parts of the vault, but mostly it will be my scratch pad.

I can quick capture notes here and later decide to delete them or refactor them out to their own note. No more need to try and remember what day it was when I jotted that one thing down, it will just be there in my Home Page note.

2: ✍️ Journal More

BUT, Daily notes are not going away. In fact, much like my plan for Work Notes, I would like to add in periodic notes, namely Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly.

I would like to treat this more like a Journal than notes and make a strong attempt to capture a little bit of something consistently over the year.

3: 🛸Areas

Yup, Areas are even a problem in my personal notes, however it might be a little bit more clear to me what direction I should head in here.

I'm completely scrapping my current Areas and planning to lean into my Hobbies as Areas, one folder per Hobby space. Once again, not every note related to that hobby will live here, instead these Areas will server and launch points to the depths of the Vault.

4: 🤖Automations and Scripting

Yep, same thing as Work Notes. While I don't need to leverage as much in the automation and scripting department there are some quality of life improvements that Obsidian plugins like Meta Bind and Dataview can provide that will help me remember how to keep my notes organized.

I aim to still stay lightweight when it comes to automations, but want to let them help me remember what properties to fill out on notes and find related content.

🔌 Plugins

For the sake of documentation (and inspiration), here's a list of Obsidian plugins I'll be bringing with me or adopting in 2025 in my Personal Notes:

🎁And that's a wrap!