How do you organize your notes, notebooks, tags in Joplin?

That's a general question to exchange common practices in organizing notes in Joplin. So What kind of notes are you keeping? How do structure your notes? Do you have common practicing in organizing your notes?

Enthusiastic to have fruitful discussion :slight_smile:

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Hello Rami,

I use Joplin mainly for personal knowledge database. Thus I create a notebook for History, another one for Art, Economy and so on. In History notebook, I then create sub notebooks as Prehistory, Egypt, Medieval, Modern society.
Obviously I also create a personal notebook for keeping my own relative notes (identity card, bank account and so on

What I really would like would be a graphical interface in Joplin (might be a addon) which is capable to draw some graphical links between your thoughts. For exemple, if I enter keyword in the research bar, it begins to draw some graphical links between notes which are related in.
Do you think Joplin could bring graphical part with links between notes ?

Have a nice day

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I think there is mermaid support which is a graphical thing, you can make your own through that. Link all the notes, Joplin supports internal links.

Folders for different topics. Folders for each of my businesses.

I also write. A lot.

For writingā€”in particular prose; for example, the novel I am writingā€”the folder (notebook) structure I use for each project looks something like this (which is similar to how most novel writing software is organized):

Project 1, Short|Novel: Story Name Here
.. !Artifacts
.. 1.0 Manuscript
.. .. Act 1
.. .. Act 2
.. .. Act 3 (etc...)
.. 1.1 Structure
.. .. 1.1.0 Outline
.. .. 1.1.1  Scene Cards
.. .. .. Act 1
.. .. .. Act 2
.. .. .. Act 3 (etc...)
.. .. 1.1.2 Characters
.. .. 1.1.3 World
.. 1.2 Research
.. ~Archive

UPDATE (2020-05-26):
As I have used this over time, the structure has been refined. Thus, it is now updated here. Note: The !'s ~'s and numbering assume you have View > Sort Notes|Notebooks By set to Title. That will keep the ordering the way it is intended. I now have a project notebook for every project that looks a lot like this.

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Yes, youā€™re right but Mermaid is static : you draw what you decided/planned.

I was talking about dynamic graph which shows some corresponding thoughts when you entered a research.

First, you enter a research word into the searchbar

Then Joplin draws a graphical map with your notes inside, letā€™s say some boxes, exactly like a brain neuronal

At last, you could click on one of this box and, Joplin would search for all related notes and show them to you within a new graphical map.

Try to imagine to look for notes with a graphical engine

Sorry, not so easy to explain in english (Iā€™m french)

Olivier

Le mer. 1 janv. 2020 Ć  12:17, Subi via Joplin Forum cozic@discoursemail.com a Ć©crit :

Check out this program, @psophos. Neither open source nor totally free to use, but is probably what you want. Sorry for the link to some other software))

On the original question. I got Inbox folder to store things I am not sure where to put yet. A Wiki folder with a bunch of sub folders on topics. I also got Contacts (yes, I do store some of them in Joplin). And I got a Diary folder with pages named like 2020-01-07 under it.

I do think that structured (hierarchical) tags could help categorization in Joplin A LOT making it one of the best software in any list. If you do too, please upvote the issue (or even help with it if you got skills).

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Thank you @ivangretsky, thats indeed a great software the Brain

Le lun. 6 janv. 2020 Ć  23:30, ivangretsky via Joplin Forum cozic@discoursemail.com a Ć©crit :

One of the things Iā€™m doing is to use a sub-notebook entitled Kanban, with its own sub-notebooks set as numbered columns. I then move todo notes as if they were Kanban cards from one column to another. Enabling the notes counter gives me a WIP approach. Itā€™s really all I need for issue tracking in many projects.

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One of the things Iā€™m doing is to use a sub-notebook entitled Kanban, with its own sub-notebooks set as numbered columns. I then move todo notes as if they were Kanban cards from one column to another.

I really like that idea. Thanks a lot for sharing!

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I donā€™t use notebooks at all. I use tags. And because of this problem, I usually only use the ā€œtitleā€ area and donā€™t put anything as the note content.

But when I need an actual checklist, I use note body and add - [ ] instead of adding todos to my notebook. Which means my entire usage of joplin is based on doing the opposite of what Joplin offers.

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Hey, Ramis. My usage is simple. I have a highly overactive mind that is constantly overflowing with thoughts, anxieties, old memories, etc, and lots of dead time with my work, so I pretty much document my daily thoughts as they come as I get the time to do such.

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I second this notion. Such a great idea. I wonder if this idea could be used for budgeting purposes? Hmmm

For that use case, I prefer using Keepass on PC and Keepass2android on Smartphone.

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I have a folder for

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I found the P.A.R.A. method to be the most robust ā€” and possible to implement in Joplin, as well as other apps (Dropbox, your hard drive etc), so that all your information is consistent. The free posts in the site I linked explain it quite well.

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Hi Rami,
Iā€™ve used folders + tags forever (at least 20 years) to organize my thoughts, web clippings, archiving, etc. Last week after a lot of thought I decided to create tags of the names of my folders and subfolders then tag the notes within those folders/subfolders to match. What I found after stepping back and really looking at how I was using the folder/subfolder + tag approach is that I would rely on the folder/subfolder approach and get lazy with tagging, therefore I could easily misplace notes I wanted to find. Now, without folders (well, presently one folder seems to be a requirement so Iā€™ve made #Everything) notes go into it and I tag immediately. Now when I want to find my information, since I add multiple tags I donā€™t lose it. And, if all else fails all notes are in the #Everything folder.

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I use Joplin as knowledge base and today I have only five notebooks. Two notebooks have many levels of sub-notebooks but I will change it as soon as the hierarchical tags be available. All others have just one level according to a learning area. All of my notes have at least two tags and to me, this is the best way keep them organized.

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I'm reading P.A.R.A. method now. Interested to know how you personally implemented in Joplin :slight_smile:

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It's an old topic, but I want to revive it (since I was about to start a new topic, but the software suggested me to continue this old ome). I start to be interested about other ways to organise my Joplin notes. For as long as I use Joplin, I was using a strategy using a hierarchy of notebook. It worked fine, but I start (mostly because of the differents graph ui plugins) to be curions about using tags... I'm less and less certain that I have a good strategy and would love to hear suggestions

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Hi Greg,
I have read the p.a.r.a info and it sounds appealing to me. Do you still use it with Joplin or didnā€˜t it work out for you on thelong run?