[romesc]

I am approaching 3 years with Obsidian!

What I have found works best is to basically forget about putting strong priors on the structure of your notes. Just let everything be flat - or at most, create one level of hierarchy for a specific project.

When you have a new thought, use search. I have a command that pulls up the advanced search tool plugin and fuzzy searches my term. I then quickly scan (visually as cards) the notes I created already. If there is something related to my idea I open that note and continue that thread. If it's new, I create a new note.

This can be improved even more by using tags liberally, but I find that just having a powerful search and taking the time to "check" before creating a new note works very well for my style of note taking!

[hotnfresh]

My “system” in Apple Notes is that I just make sure to include words I know I’m likely to use to search for something later. It’s like tagging, but less work.

Search does the rest of the “organizing”

[runjake]

I’m not sure if it’s iOS 17 only or not but you can add tags to your Apple Notes.

Then, you can create smart folders for a tag or a combination of tags.

It’s a nice way to organize stuff without putting effort into it.

[singhrac]

I'm at roughly 2 years, and I totally agree. If you make the friction to create a note high, you won't write anything down. I find tags sometimes helpful, but the only structure I really stick to is to create a daily note every day and start writing down what I need to do. It replaces a previous habit of creating a YYYYMMDD.txt file in Vim.

I sometimes organize book/paper notes in a specific folder, mostly to keep things separated out from the daily notes.