After covering the diary plugin—which uses voice input to lower the barrier and sends accumulated entries to AI for review—this chapter addresses a common stumbling block after installing Obsidian: how to organize your folders.
Why Plan Your Folder Structure
Without a plan, the typical result is: when you start using Obsidian, you casually create folders like “Work”, “Study”, “Reading”, “Temporary”… As you create more and more, you can’t remember where you put things, so you end up searching every time, making the folders useless.
Or you go to the other extreme: spending a lot of time designing hierarchies like “Work/Project A/Meeting Notes/2026/Q1”… It’s meticulously planned, but after two months you find the maintenance cost too high. You don’t know where to put new things, and everything ends up piled in the root directory.
The goal of folder planning is not to make your vault look tidy, but to make both storing and finding smooth.
Overview of Popular Methods
Before presenting my own approach, let’s briefly look at two well-known methods—just so you know they exist.
PARA
PARA is a method by productivity blogger Tiago Forte, with four folders: Projects (ongoing projects), Areas (long-term responsibilities), Resources (reference materials), and Archives.
The logic is clear and it’s quite popular. The problem is that boundaries are fuzzy—you’re often unsure whether something belongs in Areas or Resources. Figuring it out takes time, and over time, it’s easy to give up.
Zettelkasten
Invented by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, the core idea is: each note captures a single idea, identified by a number, and connected through links to form a network. It doesn’t rely on folder classification but on connections between notes.
It’s great for deep knowledge accumulation, but the barrier to entry is high, and maintenance costs are not low. It’s not suitable as the main framework for daily workflow.
My Approach: 5 Folders + 1 Rule
No need for that complexity. Here’s a structure I’ve found sufficient and easy to maintain.
Folder Structure
00-Inbox/
01-Notes/
02-Templates/
04-Output/
07-Diary/
You can also create project folders as needed, like “08-Renovation” or “09-English-Learning”, and archive or delete them when done.
00-Inbox: Everything Comes In First
This is the entry point of the entire system.
Browser clippings, voice-transcribed ideas, random notes, unprocessed materials—throw them all into the inbox first, no matter what.
Don’t spend time categorizing when collecting. Just get it in first. The value of the inbox is to reduce friction in recording: you don’t need to think “where should this go”, just put it in.
But the inbox has a golden rule: things that come in must be processed regularly.
Every few days (or weekly), go through the inbox and sort items to their proper places—notes go to notes, delete what’s unnecessary, and move things to be turned into articles to the output folder.
The inbox is not a warehouse; it cannot accumulate indefinitely. If you have items from three months ago still untouched in your inbox, it means this workflow isn’t working yet.
01-Notes: No Categories, Flat Layout
This is the biggest difference from traditional approaches in this entire system.
In the notes folder, do not create subfolders; all notes are laid flat in a single layer.
Book notes, meeting minutes, learned concepts, extensions of an idea—all together, no topic separation, no time ordering, just one big flat layer.
Why do this?
Because in the AI era, search is more important than classification. Whether you put a note under “Economics/Macro/Monetary Policy” or in the root directory, it makes no difference to AI search. AI finds things by understanding content, not by folder paths.
And the time you spend on manual classification is pure maintenance cost—time spent thinking where to put it, remembering where you put it, and later not finding it.
With flat layout, finding notes relies on search. AI can do full-text search, which is much more reliable than you remembering “I think it’s in some subfolder”.
04-Output: Content for External Audiences
This folder holds content you write for external audiences: WeChat public account articles, blog posts, formal reports, documents organized for others.
The difference from the notes folder is the audience. Notes are for yourself; they don’t need to be complete or pretty, just recorded. Output is for others to see, or complete content you want to preserve.
Separating them has a benefit: when you open the output folder, you see relatively complete content, undisturbed by drafts and fragments.
07-Diary: Separate, Don’t Mix with Notes
Diary goes in a separate folder.
Diary entries are files generated by date, and their number grows linearly over time. As mentioned earlier, it’s recommended to set a storage path in the diary plugin to keep them in one dedicated place.
The reason for separating from notes is simple: the use case for diary is different from notes. Diaries are browsed chronologically, notes are searched by keywords. Mixing them would interfere with each other.
Project Folders: Create as Needed, Archive When Done
Renovation, job change, learning a skill—things with a clear time boundary can have their own folder, putting all related files together for easy centralized viewing.
After the project is completed, archive or delete the folder. Don’t let it occupy space forever and become another clutter pile.
Why Flat Layout is Better in the AI Era
Traditional folder classification logic is based on “manual browsing”—you need the folder structure to remember where things are, so you classify and build hierarchies.
But now it’s different.
Obsidian’s full-text search + AI’s semantic understanding can already cover most “finding things” scenarios. You may not remember a note’s filename, but you remember roughly what it’s about—that’s enough. Search a few keywords, or let AI find it for you.
Under this premise, the marginal benefit of fine-grained classification becomes very small, but the maintenance cost remains.
The more complex the folder structure, the more it means:
- You have to think one more step when putting something in (where does this go?)
- You forget where you put it after a while
- The system becomes inconsistent, with some things floating outside the structure
Conversely, the simpler the structure, the lower the maintenance cost, and the higher the chance of sticking with it. A simple system that runs consistently is far more valuable than a sophisticated one that is abandoned halfway.
Summary
What we covered today:
- Core purpose of folder planning: make both storing and finding smooth, not for looks
- Popular methods to be aware of: PARA and Zettelkasten each have their use cases, but maintenance costs are high for average users
- My approach: 5 folders + 1 rule:
00-Inbox: everything comes in first, process regularly01-Notes: flat layout, no categories04-Output: complete content for external audiences07-Diary: separate, don’t mix with notes- Project folders: create as needed, archive when done
- The golden rule of the inbox: things that come in must be processed regularly, no infinite accumulation
Key takeaways:
- In the AI era, search is more important than classification—lay notes flat and let AI find them, more efficient than manual hierarchy maintenance
- The simpler the system, the easier to stick with it—a simple structure that works beats a sophisticated but abandoned one
- The inbox is an entry point, not a warehouse—regular emptying keeps the whole workflow running