Organizing Obsidian with Maps of Content (MOCs)

so maybe you've taken a couple hundred notes in your obsidian vault and now you're getting to the point say how the heck do i organize this stuff hey folks my name is justin with effective remote work and today we're going to talk about how to organize your vault using maps of content maps of content is a term or an organizational or thought process i guess method that was developed by nick milo he's the guy behind the linking your thinking youtube channel for the purposes of this video you can think of maps of content essentially as a workspace or a launchpad it's a way to get into your notes easily just by following some links to explore them but it's also a way to structure your notes or give yourself a workspace to be able to flesh out a specific topic or idea that you are working on so at the core a map of content is really a broad idea that you want to explore or learn but maybe don't have very many notes on yet or it's a place where you can pull together notes that you have on an existing topic to try to whittle those notes down into a cohesive set of thoughts let's dive into obsidian so i can show you my vault and how i've been working with maps of content lately okay so on the screen here you can see that i have my dashboard note up the dashboard note is really my home page if you visit my obsidian publish site at notes.justintoros.com this is what you're going to see i've got some loose structure here and again i'm still fleshing this out for the holistic picture of my note but i've got some jump off points to get into tags i've got some launch points here into some high level maps of content and i have a very very rudimentary vault workflow here that kind of shows the different tools and the processes that i use to craft notes inside of my vault now if i jump into this productivity map of content you can see this is kind of a mess it's a work in progress and that is one of the benefits of taking the maps of content mode of thinking toward organizing your notes you can start off at a very high level and you can bring things up into a map of content you can explore into them basically it's a place for you to put your ideas so that you can launch into them at a later point in time now what i have done here is under productivity map of content i have created a header for key topics here these are key topics that are related to literature notes and permanent notes that i have in my vault then at this point in time i've linked all the notes that i could find that were relating to the broad subject area of productivity this is one of the ways that you can approach a map of content you can pull information into the map of content and then eventually i'm going to work on sorting this out what's relevant to this particular map of content what's relevant to this broad idea of productivity is there a deeper subject area that i want to dive into which we'll talk about in just a moment then i can start to whittle these notes down i can leave the relevant notes there i can start to flesh out ideas directly in this map of content and i can delete links to notes that maybe aren't as relevant in the future so if i were to create another map of content say i want to take the top down approach there is a subject that i've been interested in lately called time blocking so i'm going to create a time locking moc then what i can do when i open that up i will link to the productivity moc just so that i have a way back to it then this is essentially a workspace now time blocking is a subject that i've been interested in and so i've been reading articles about it and there's an excellent article on the doist blog uh ambition and balance that i'm going to go take a look at and i'll pull it up and then i'm going to take some notes on it here so i'll be back in just a second and i'll show you what i have okay so this is really just a very very basic start i've got this article here which i'm going to clip the link in here because i forgot to do that okay so i've got this article on the right hand side of the screen here this time blocking by guide by doist i've started taking some very light literature notes on it just to give a sense of how you might use a map of content to flesh out some ideas regarding a specific topic area as you can see i've got just a couple thoughts here structure in your work week can yield greater results in less time there are three different variations of time blocking what this article talks about task batching day theming and time boxing now what i've done here in the map of content is i've created a link to this literature note here then eventually once i flesh this literature note out and i start to flesh out some permanent notes from that then i'll start linking those permanent notes over here as well then i can start to get a cohesive idea of what this subject means to me and start to whittle those notes down in here start to flesh out the ideas and the time blocking map of content all together now this might not be the only way that you want to create a map of content there's the other way this was the top-down approach where you take a broad subject area and you want to dig into it a little bit maybe you've read a number of books on a certain subject area or you have a lot of notes in here that are centered around a certain topic and you want to bring those notes together well there is a way to do that that's actually pretty easy inside of obsidian and i'm going to talk about that here so what i'm doing is i have this creativity map of content and there's a subject range uh based upon the book range by david epstein that is really something that i am passionate about so i'm going to create a range if i can type today not rage moc range moc and then i'm going to do the same thing i did in the last one i'll link that to the creativity moc okay so i have a few notes that are on this subject of generalists um because that's what the book range is about it's about the power of generalists and how our society has undervalued generalists and overvalued specialists and we need a combination of both of these people to balance our society out because many of our creative problems that we're solving in today's world require range to be able to gather enough information to solve them because they are multifaceted and they are a lot of times crossing multiple fields of study as well so what we can do here and this is a fancy new feature that came out in obsidian recently is we can just do a search for i think one of the topic areas that i had here for this was generalists okay so yep here it is then so we search for the term generalists now what we can do which i think is really cool is we can actually click and drag these links into this node so let's see here i've got knowledge work generalists range generalization needs space to work well and so on so the book time off which i've mentioned on this channel again recently is where a lot of this has come from too there's a lot of overlap between range the book by david epstein and time off because there's a lot of interplay within those ideas so what i've done here is i've just started to create links to the notes that are relevant to this map of content the topic of range or generalism and now what i can do is as i build this out over time i can let these ideas kind of i get the way nick milo terms it is they essentially duke it out and to try to figure out what is the most cohesive idea that belongs in this map of content i don't have this process nailed down to a science and in fact i really feel like developing a map of content is something that's more exploratory in nature there's not a science to it there's not a formula to it but it's really figuring out what is of interest to you and then starting to either dive into that subject area or pull the information in your vault around that subject area together and then just try to figure out what makes sense to you for how to organize it or how to think about it in your vault each and every one of us thinks through information differently and therefore the way your maps of content might look may look completely different than mine it's really just a structural tool in your vault to help you explore ideas either dig into ones you don't know yet or to try to wrap your head around the ideas that you already have spent time digging into but crystallize the information a little bit more in your vault so it's easier to access and easier to use so what do you think about maps of content what do you think about organizing your vault are you doing something different i would love to hear from you in the comments below again make sure to subscribe if you found this video helpful my name is justin with effective remote work thanks for watching and i'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Effective Remote Work

Views: 18,134

Keywords:

Id: 7GqQKCT0PZ4

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021