Steph Ango’s post on his Obsidian vault has been incredibly influential in how I use Obsidian.[1]

When I first read his post, I realized I’d already been circling a proto-category system via Maps of Content (MoCs), but MoCs depend on you already having enough content to map. They don’t really drive the creation of more content.

Categories (especially the ones anchored in the world: movies, books, places, people) do. They invite a response in the moment, and those responses naturally link outward to other things.

For me, this has worked better than PARA, Linking Your Thinking, or the “highly opinionated vault” style setups.[2][3][4]

The other “click” was composable templates, and the realization that properties merge.

That lens changed how I evaluate my own setup. I’ve reconfigured my vault more times than I can count, but the beautiful thing about plain Markdown is that it has tolerated that evolution.

A few things I learned or reinforced in 2025:

  1. KISS: Change only a few things at a time.
  2. Plain text: To quote Derek Sivers, “They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option.”[7]
  3. Plugins: I try to keep community plugins to a minimum, but Calendar is useful if you do daily notes. Dataview and Charts are great for visualizing data. Periodic Notes and Templater are good if you want weekly/quarterly/yearly notes with more elaborate templates. I almost replaced my Dataview use with Bases,[6] but I like my charts.
  4. I wholesale borrowed Kepano’s categories/bases/templates from his GitHub, but don’t do this until you understand the mental model.[5] At a basic level, a category template defines a schema (properties), and a base is just a query returning notes whose properties align with that schema.
  5. Content exists in three meta buckets:
    • Clippings: things you want to save and refer to.
    • References: metadata receptacles for things outside your vault; you can refer to them, or store your responses to them, linking out to other notes and references.
    • Everything else: just you — usually time series journals or evergreen notes.
  6. You could use tags instead of bases for categories, but bases let you expose other properties in the views, which is nice.
  7. I still wonder about tags vs a categories property as the primary filter in Bases. Judging by the alternating approaches in Kepano’s repo, I’m guessing he had the same internal debate.

[1]: Steph Ango — Vault [2]: Tiago Forte — The PARA Method [3]: Linking Your Thinking [4]: Bramses Highly Opinionated Vault (2023) [5]: Kepano on GitHub [6]: Obsidian Help — Bases [7]: Derek Sivers — Write plain text files