I bought LAS and I’m running the JDex in Obsidian (flat, one note per ID, as the docs describe). I’m migrating my files to this official LAS structure. Now, almost all of my files live in iCloud Drive in matching ID folders. I’m lost on two cases and getting frustrated, so asking here.
1. Journalling (11.32). I have 13+ years of (let’s say monthly) journal files (YYYY-MM-DD.md), currently sitting in iCloud Drive. I have a folder for Journalling with YYYY-MM-DD.md notes and folder with notes on books I read in form of YYYY-MM-DD Book.md.
What is the 11.32 note in my JDex supposed to contain?
Just an index card (“Location: iCloud Drive”)?
Or the journal content itself?
If the files stay in Drive: what’s the actual workflow for writing a new day’s entry if I only use Obsidian for my JDEX notes? Write the note in Obsidian and then move the file out to Drive? That feels backwards. Write directly in Drive with another editor? Then Obsidian search can’t see any of my journal. How do you (or other Obsidian folks here) handle a large body of daily notes without breaking the flat one-note-per-ID JDex?
2. Ongoing learning (11.82). I’m learning Swedish: textbooks and audio live on iCloude Drive 11.82/2025 Swedish, but I also have a constantly growing list of notes: grammar, vocab, homework. If all of that goes into the single 11.82 Hobbies & learning note, it becomes huge and mixed with the metadata, and I can’t jump to it quickly. Options I see:
One giant 11.82 note with headings for all my hobbies
A second note like 11.82 Swedish (does that break one-note-per-ID?)
A new ID like 11.84 Swedish (is that safe, or might a future LAS update claim 11.84?) Can I have more than 5 hobbies?
What’s the intended pattern when one ID accumulates a lot of written content, not files?
Should I “extend the end” like this and keep notes in Obsidian?
I keep logbooks – similar in concept to your journal – in a separate Obsidian vault. The index only has a reference to that vault, rather like your “just an index card”.
There are actually multiple vaults for different logbooks on different subjects, so I have more than just the one reference.
Up to you, and as you’ve identified there are pros/cons to each approach.
Let’s start with the simplest: if having these entries searchable/editable by Obsidian, in the same vault as your JDex, is a requirement, then there’s only one solution, as you’re limited by Obsidian. The entries must be Markdown files in your Obsidian vault.
This is totally fine. I’d keep them neat by creating a folder at 11.32 and stashing them in there. The Folder Notes plugin, which I use myself, can help here. It turns your existing JDex entry for 11.32 into the folder, and in that folder, all your entries. Hard to explain, easy to use.
If you’d rather have those entries as files in your filesystem – external to your JDex – that’s also totally fine. This is just a preference. FWIW I tend towards the first of these solutions, and Lucy tends to prefer the second.
This note was meant as a starter: just somewhere for you to put some stuff.
But remember where we are. We’re in an area called 10-19 Life admin. Is learning Swedish (nice!) ‘life admin’? Not really. It’s a hobby; life improvement.
For this, you probably need another area. In my own personal system I’ve got:
20-29 Create & collect
21 Imaginarium 🧠
- This is a place for all the crazy projects.
22 Humans are brilliant 😍
- A place for 'collected works' but only things
that are made by other humans.
29 The Omnium 🏛️
- This is a place for your historical collected works.
– and in 21 I have 21.14 Learn Japanese. Now that I’ve been using it for a while, I realise it could have been its own category: I can easily see myself wanting to store ~100 unique artefacts to do with Japanese. So maybe I need to promote that ID up to 23 Learn Japanese 🇯🇵.
Thanks for the reply! It kinda makes sense to use Folder Notes in a JDex vault to keep all notes in a folder, but it just looks off to me when I have mixed notes and folders, especially because Obsidian’s native File Explorer groups all folders at the top of the view by default.
Previously, I kept JDex and files in a single Obsidian vault using Folder Notes, but it felt too crowded, so I’m trying to split them now and see how that goes. I also previously extracted 11.80 as a separate “Personal” category. Before that, I had this “Personal” as an area, but I wondered what it would or should look like when integrated into the Life Admin System. Now it makes sense that some LAS IDs are more like hints rather than actual places to keep my things. I might extract it back to the “Personal” area and keep separate hobbies as separate IDs under 16.20 ■ Hobbies & Learning. Thanks again!
I had JDex and my “real” notes in separate vaults for about a year. So (with the help of Claude), I consolidated my vaults into a single one. JDex lives in one folder. I have a folder for day notes, and folders for longer form notes on a project. The advantage of this structure is that backlinks in the JDex card point to the related files (and I also note where there are folders outside the Obsidian system, e.g. #dropbox, #onedrive , etc.
Yeah it’s the inter-linking of notes that drives me to keeping them all in the same place. But then I share @StepanKuzmin’s frustration with the feeling of it being ‘crowded’.
This is something I’m still working through for my own system…
Integrating your JDex into your main notes vault becomes tedious *) if you share the JDex with your partner (for the LAS) but do not want to share your complete vault.
This sounds well-ordered: all in one vault so Obsidian can see it all, but you can still ‘dive into’ one of these domains: jdex, journal, or project notes?
It sounds to me like this approach adds a layer at the front with minimal disturbance and ‘crowdedness’.
