The Aspen Grove

The Organization of My Digital Garden

Note Planted:
3 min read

The Big Idea

The overall structure I have developed to help easily identify the purpose and function of various notes.

These are pieces of information I will attach to the beginning of each note that helps give clearer context to how I view the ideas and information contained.

  1. Note Dates: Important dates to help frame the note’s life cycle:
    • Note Planted: date a note was started.
    • updated: date note was last tended.
    • edited_seconds: a rough capture of how much time was spent in a note (the plugin seems kind of inconsistent with its numbers).

Note

Dates are auto added/updated using the “Chronotyper” Obsidian community plugin.

  1. Idea Sentiment: My personal opinion/acceptance of the idea held within a note:
  2. Confidence Level: The Confidence Scale associated with the ideas or concepts contained within the current note:
  3. Special Note Types: Tags that identify notes that function for me in special ways:
    • 📊Project A note focused on completing a goal or building something.
    • 📖Story A personal or interesting story I would like to save for personal memory and possible use in a sermon.
    • 📝Essay A more polished written essay on a particular subject.
    • 📃Epistle A Short form writing that I generally send out once a month to my congregation on a particular thought or idea. Not a full treatment but kind of a devotional reading.
    • 🗣Sermon An oral presentation for a worship service that I have presented. I tend to keep notes in short from so they tend to not be full manuscripts.
    • 📚Definition A note that holds a kind of dictionary style definition of a word or phrase.
    • ✒️Poem A personal or quoted poem.
    • 📓Journal A personal recount of an experience of some sort.
    • 📰Handout A handout made for a meeting or class.
    • 📘BookNotes Notes that I have taken on a particular book.
    • 🍴Recipe A recipe that I like enough to save it.
  4. Mental Loci: Tags the identify a particular loci or “location” in my mind:
  5. No topic tags!!! I find them hard to manage and keep track of as well as unnecessarily condensing the content of a note. Instead I will strive to make connections between notes using internal links.

Example Note Metadata

This is an example of the current metadata I have composed to start each note. For ease of use I have created an Obsidian Template to insert this data pre-formatted. Otherwise I would 100% forget to start notes with it or drift with its style over time.

publish: false
tags:
  - "#🌱Seed"
  - 😐Neutral
  - 🟡Consideration
updated: 2025-11-13T09:30:03.876-08:00
edited_seconds: 15

The Big Idea

A new interesting idea.

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