With Joplin, I would start simple and expand. No need to have the "perfect" structure. You can always rename or bulk change notes later. Your Joplin notes are likely to grow and change as time goes on.
I use a combination of notebooks and tags. Notebooks are great for keeping like a filing cabinet but it can be too rigid at times. This is where the tags come in to save the day. I tend to look at notebooks as active "drawers" that I will want to be able to physically look in and find what I want quickly. Usually related to a current task or project. Tags are for the wider more open support.
As your notes grow, you will want to become more familiar with searching since that is where you will be able to find those obscure notes that you remember from years ago but you don't know what you called it exactly. See Search.
Notebooks
I usually keep notebooks like different filing cabinets.
You have smaller "drawers" where you keep the things that you want to access quickly/often. This could be current projects or just reference material that you want to be able to open a notebook and not have an endless list of notes to scroll through every time.
You have your bigger "drawers" that you may organize with sub-notebooks but they may have 100s or 1000s of notes within them. Simply searching by a note title would be inefficient and that is when tags come in to help.
Tags
For tags, I try to keep tags structures so that they follow a pattern. This allows me to "zoom in" with tags while also keeping them in a predictable order when viewing them/searching for them.
projectproject.2025project.2025.example1project.2026project.2026.example2
I could then assign an example1 related note the following project, project.2025, and project.2025.example1.
Plugins
Templates
I'd recommend keeping it simple to start but an extremely useful one is the Templates plugin.
I prefer to configure the plugin to look inside the "Templates" notebook (I still tag them with template just because it's the alternative way for them to be registered).
I have a very basic Ephemeral note that I can then use for creating a temporary notes that may get deleted or sorted later. With the Templates plugin, you can specify the destination notebook of the note.
I also have many other templates for specific projects. It's useful to be able to call up a template and have the structure of a note ready to go quickly. It's useful for scheduled meetings or an impromptu thought and you want something that is already structured quickly to get it down.
Template Example
You can name the actual note whatever you want. I just name it "Ephemeral" to keep it short and simple. When you create a new note from template, you can select the desired template, in this case "Ephemeral", and it will create the new note with the specified template_title and with a tag of ephemeral and place it in the designated notebook.
---
template_title: {{#custom_datetime}}YYYYMMDDHHMMss{{/custom_datetime}} - Ephemeral
template_notebook: 660f5ffd27964d438e21c138dd28fac5
template_tags: ephemeral
---
The above will create a new note in my "Ephemeral" notebook with the name "20260711063012 - Ephemeral". You can customize the note even more to basically ask you questions and then change the structure of the note based on those answers but that's getting slightly more advanced.
To get the template_notebook you can right-click (or Mac equivalent) on the destination notebook and "Copy notebook ID". Then paste that for the template_notebook value.
