SerpApi.Org
Obsidian's been my go-to note-taking app on and off for years, and I've built a whole system around it that mostly works. By "system" I mean junk drawer style where you know a declutter is due, but you're so used to the mess that it somehow works. So I went looking for tips to sort it out, and figured I might as well see how the CEO himself does it. Turns out Steph Ango, who's been running Obsidian since early 2023, publishes his entire personal vault on his blog as a downloadable template. Pretty hard to say no to that.
His setup is what I've aspired to get mine to look like. Fewer folders, a lot more linking between notes, and one thing he keeps circling back to across the whole thing. I ended up spinning up a fresh vault to give it a proper go, because retrofitting my current one felt like a bigger job than starting over.
The CEO of Obsidian publishes his personal vault
And it looks nothing like mine
Steph Ango, or Kepano as he's known online, took over as Obsidian's CEO in February 2023 after starting out as a community contributor. He's got a pretty distinct philosophy around notes that goes beyond just running the app, and his "file over app" essay is probably the piece of his I've come back to the most. The gist is that your notes should outlive whatever software you're using at the time, which is why he's a big Markdown advocate.
His personal vault sits on his blog as a downloadable zip, and you can clone the whole thing to see how he actually works. Reading through his write-up, the shape of it makes sense pretty quickly, and it's not the complex setup I expected it to be. Not many folders, most of his personal notes live at the root, and internal linking is doing a lot of the heavy lifting instead. He also links to notes that don't exist yet, which he calls unresolved links, and treats those as breadcrumbs for future ideas.
The thing that stuck with me the most wasn't any single rule, though. It was how often he circles back to consistency across pretty much everything he does with his vault. He says it flat out too: "Having a consistent style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives me focus." That line kind of frames the whole post; except for me it's more like dozens not hundreds, because I'm not exactly making that many decisions when throwing stuff in my vault.
Trying Steph Ango's setup, in my own way
It's not a full clone, but pretty close in shape
My current vault is too far gone to fix without a full weekend of cleanup, so I just started a fresh one. This was also in the case that his setup didn't work for me at all, so I didn't mess it up even further - but I ended up proving that wrong. The plan was to copy his structure as closely as I could without forcing anything that didn't fit my life, and then see which of his rules actually stuck once I was in there using it.
The bones of my new vault look pretty similar to his at the top level. I ended up with folders for Journal, Notes, References, and one folder I added called Pitches for my article work. The References folder has the same job as his, so subfolders for Books, Movies, and People, each holding entries for the individual titles or names. I stuck with his idea of the tag with the Christmas tree emoji for evergreen notes too, mostly because it's an easy visual marker and I didn't have a better idea.
The Categories property is doing the majority of the organizing, with a base view that pulls everything by type the same way his does. It took a minute to flesh out, but my Graph view also started pulling together thanks to interlinking, one of his top rules.
Where I went a bit off script was mostly around the folders he keeps for admin. I skipped Clippings, Attachments, Daily, and Templates for now because I honestly haven't needed them yet in a fresh vault, and I figured I'd add them if the mess crept back in. I also nested a UX subfolder inside Notes, which is something he explicitly avoids, but I've got a bunch of design-related evergreens I wanted grouped together.
Dates ended up with slashes instead of dashes because that's just what I default to. And my properties are noticeably heavier on References than on Notes, which isn't a rule I was following on purpose, that's just how it panned out for me. There's one thing I picked up from all this that ended up mattering more than the folder choices…
One rule ended up doing most of the work
Folders barely factor into this setup
If I had to name the one rule that actually collapsed decisions for me, it wasn't any of the folder or linking stuff. It was committing to the same set of properties for every note of the same type. Every book note has the same fields, every pitch note has the same fields, every UX note has the same fields, etc. etc. Sounds obvious, but it's not something I've ever actually enforced before, doing it changed how new notes felt to open.
The "what fields does this need" question just goes away. I open a new book entry and I already know it wants an author, a genre, a rating, categories, and all that. This means I don't have to think about it with every new note, or hunt around another note to remember what I did last time. It's pretty much decided once, per type, and forever.
This is also what makes the base view actually work. If I filter by categories: Books, every book shows up because they all carry that property. Skip it on one and it drops out of the view, which sounds obvious but is exactly the point. Consistency isn't a cosmetic thing here, it's what makes the filtering do anything at all.
If writing YAML by hand feels a bit finicky (which, fair, the syntax is picky about indentation and colons), you can get an LLM to generate the property blocks for you based on whatever fields you need, and just paste them in. It's faster than building template files, but same end result.
Folders barely matter in this setup. Links are useful. But properties are what let bases, search, and filtering actually work properly every time.
Turns out the guy who runs the app knows what he's doing
I don't think I'll ever set up a vault the exact way he does, and I don't think that's the point of him publishing it in the first place. There's stuff I picked up that I probably wouldn't have gotten to on my own, and stuff I'll happily leave in his vault. The consistency with properties is what I'm keeping the closest eye on going forward though, since that's the one I can actually feel working.
