Huy Le
How I Write Notes
How I Write Notes

I've been maintaining a personal knowledge vault in Obsidian for a few years now. These are the principles I've settled on — not a system I planned upfront, but habits that survived contact with reality.

Write when

  • In the writing window time.
  • Recognizing connections — while writing other notes, or when a real-life situation triggers an idea that lives in the vault.
    • This comes from habits built outside of writing sessions: an intimate mental mapping of your vault, and the ability to recognize links between fleeting thoughts and the ideas already living there.

Write with

  1. (Quite radical and (still in) experimental): write directly and immediately in your vault. That means if an idea belongs to the Vault, do not dump it down to the interim ephemeral notes. Avoid The cost of delayed action.

  2. Write with the quality as if I am about to show it to someone. Writing in prose potentially (I don’t know for sure) comes with the cost of being too elaborated for efficient reread. This can be mitigated by bolding the keywords.

  3. Make connections relentlessly:

    • Be mindful of three linkage mechanisms: wiki links for network thoughts; topic/ tags to build up topic indices; and Obsidian Canvas to synthesize perspectives
    • From the parked relations that haven’t yet been incorporated into the main text.
    • From the orphan and loosely connected notes in Obsidian graph view.
    • From your mind, of course.

  4. Don't write the words down out of tiredness and fear of loss if they don't make sense. The cost of maintaining them outweighs the risk of losing valuable (which is a doubt in this case) thoughts. Don't turn your Vault into a garbage dump.

Vault hygiene

  • Leverage Raycast AI Commands to fix spelling and improve writing.
  • Use Obsidian Local Graph (with adjustable depth) to discover (sometimes surprising) transitive connections.
  • Don't be afraid of deleting bullshits. Remember that the Vault is not an additive collection for dumping notes, but a palace for ideas to be consolidated.

The enjoyment of writing

Writing in the vault is its own reward. The collection of intermediate artifacts grows over time. Ideas solidify, become tangible — and the fragmented starts forming into a holistic whole.