Focus Vaults

PKM systems of linked notes support all your ideas, information, and knowledge together in a single space like an Obsidian vault of Markdown files.

When everything is all contained with a single vault, it very easy to make connections with related ideas and thoughts using internal Markdown links with double-bracket syntax and auto-completion.

Multiple vaults

Sometimes it's worth considering whether multiple vaults might be useful to provide focus on a subset of these notes in a specific context.

There are several common reasons for having several Obsidian vaults such as:

• Digital Garden: Creating a separate vault for linked notes you want to share via Obsidian Publish, like I have for WarrenWeb Notes.
• Seasonal: You might have different goals, theme, or focus for each quarter ("season") in the year.
• Semester: For school, you might want a vault for each semester with related courses, projects, people, etc.
• Course: Sometimes you might event want a vault for a specific course, especially if it's involves a lot of research like a advanced degree.
• Theme: Maybe you want to do a deep dive into some new area of interest, like Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, etc.
• Topic: This might be appropriate if you want to dig into a topic like Swift application development, Software architecture, Diabetes, etc.
• Work: I might be appropriate to have a separate work vault for your job (or client) that's separate from your personal vault.
• Demo: Sometimes you want a simple or custom vault for teaching or presentation.
• Testing: It's a good idea to have a separate space that doesn't impact your existing main vault when you want to test new plugins, themes, scripts, snippets, etc.
• Refactoring: It's helpful to have a separate test vault when you want to do tiny experiments with your folders, notes, maps, metadata, properties, fields, tags, templates, scripts, or views.

Ideaverse Zero

The empty Ideaverse Zero vault option available with Ideaverse Pro is an excellent way to start another vault. It has all the same infrastructure as the complete Ideaverse Pro vault without all the example and tutorial notes so you can just add your own. I create my WarrenWeb Notes digital garden using Ideaverse Zero since my main Ideaverse vault is based on Ideaverse Pro.

Benefits

The primary benefit of a separate vault is increased focus on a subset of your notes to keep your active attention without the distraction of all your other notes.

Often, this can be an effective way for some focused activity on a cluster of notes for a current effort or output. You might bring them into a focus vault, develop and refactor them, publish and/or return to your main vault (after the focus work).

Limitations

The separation also means that internal links will only apply to notes within this separate space since only work within a vault, which prevents you from accessing anything outside your focus area. However, it's still possible if you want to explicitly use external links for web pages or even notes in other vaults using Obsidian URL or Advanced URI links.

Workflow

You also need to think about how you want to manage different or similar versions of those notes that are moved (or copied) to separate vaults. You might want metadata properties with corresponding views to help you manage these notes, such as a property (or field) for version or even a URL link reference.

Summary

It can be beneficial to have focus vaults when they have a specific purpose, scope, and focus. This approach is similar to what I have described in Focus Folders, but in some cases that technique can be extended into a focus vault.

It's easy to create a new vault, try it out with a few notes, decide if that will work, identify any problems you might have, and then either keep going or just return them to your original vault. Think of it as a playground for tiny test.