Atlas Folder (Knowledge)

The Atlas folder contains my notes about ideas, knowledge, and information. There are just a few subfolders for major types of knowledge.

Sources

Information captured from other people, articles, books, videos, courses, AI prompts, etc. I keep these notes separate from my own ideas and thoughts.

Dots

All my notes go here as dots in my Ideaverse web of ideas, information, concepts, things, and statements. I like Dots (rather than Notes) like Nick uses as a generic collection of connected atomic notes (or "dots"); it also includes concepts, things, statements, quotes, etc.

Maps

Maps provide organization, structure, context, navigation, and links for related notes about a topic or app. Although each note has direct links to related notes at a local micro-level, the maps provide meaningful clusters of notes with additional context at a higher level.

And these maps are also connected to related maps forming an infrastructure at a macro-level within the linked note system. The provide guided pathways through a web of notes, and always return back to the home note with intermediate hub maps where appropriate.

Views

Views are special notes with Dataview queries that provide dynamic lists and tables from metadata across the notes in my vault; these are key elements in workflow processing as notes evolve and mature over time through various stages from spark to output.

Visuals

I use a Visuals folder to keep visual notes such as Obsidian canvas files, Excalidraw drawings, Mermaid diagrams, MindNode mind maps, Kanban boards, and Freeform screenshots.

Works

My outputs, packages, downloads, components, information packets, and resources are contained in the Works folder to provide a repository of my creative efforts and reusable assets.

Apps

Since I have knowledge about many apps in my environment, as well as interest in development technologies, I have many notes about apps so it helps to organize them in app folders. This also helps with major efforts like Obsidian Integration that focuses on integrating many apps with Obsidian.

In my existing Ideaverse vault, I originally had apps under Technology/App within my Efforts/Notes folder hierarchy. I was attempting to use folders to organize by category, topic, and group. However, I found this became unwieldy and inflexible over time.

After watching Nick Milo's recent video on folders, and rethinking my own folders, I decided these really belong under Atlas rather than Efforts since they are notes about knowledge (not action).

Prefixed folders

Like Nick mentioned when describing his personal vault in his Folders video, I'm also considering possibly surfacing some of these major subfolders at the root level so they might be something like Atlas Apps, Atlas Dots, Atlas Maps, Atlas Views, and Atlas Visuals.

This would still group all these Atlas folders together with the common Atlas prefix, and might simplify views so they don't have to worry about nested folders in queries. Right now, I'm just thinking about this, and will see how the nested structure works first.