So, I’m a well known note taker. I’ve talked about it many times on this here blog. I will undoubtedly talk about it many more times. I’m a bit of a note taking junkie. But, I’ve moved between platforms so much over the years, my organization is a bloody mess.

For example, I have multiple folders titled a variation of “ideas”. These all have subfolders and untitled (but dated) notes inside them. And these are just the directories and files on my current machine. I also have years of backlogged notes on Google Keep, Notesnook, and many other platforms that I’ve tried throughout the years.

I have, of course, lost probably way more than I’ve stored, so there’s that too. The point is, my notes are a mess.

The funny thing is, my process for taking notes has been stable for almost a year now. I talked about it here. The only thing that has changed from then was that I’ve replaced Obsidian with Emacs. The workflow is basically the same, just no Obsidian in the picture any longer. So, my organization is poor, but the process is stable. Finally.

Note: I really like taking notes in Emacs. I’m going to make a video on that soon.

I planned on putting a tree of my notes directory here, but it was much too long. Just imagine a long lost of spaghetti directories with no rhyme nor reason to their organizational structure. So, I have to do something about this. The question is how?

I have almost 1400 directories and an untold number of notes. That’s just here, so there are more on other platforms. The way I see it, I can do two things:

  1. I can spend the next year of my life (probably) going through these notes, taking out the ones that can be tossed and then properly organizing them into a directory structure that makes sense.
  2. Or, I can make a old notes directory, shove everything in there, and start the fuck over.

Option One is obviously the right way to go. Option two is the way I’ll probably end up going. At least for now. Maybe what I can do is a combination of the two. Go the old notes directory now, and then over time do the organization. That probably makes the most sense.

The outcome no matter what has to be a clean folder structure that is easy to follow and maintain. Obviously, that should have been done to begin with, but whatever. I’ll do it now, and I’ll be happy enough.

What are your notes organized?