Always Add Metadata to Your Notes
Recently I’ve really been trying to use more plaintext productivity tools in my workflows, mostly for my notes. I’ve used Obsidian and other markdown note apps for years, but I’ve only recently started to do something that is fundamentally changing my notes for the better; I’ve been adding metadata to the head of my notes.
What is Metadata
In the most simple terms, metadata is information about the data, i.e. it’s the properties of the data but not the data of itself. A common example is a file might have “Date Created”, “Date Modified”, and “File Type” fields, which are all properties that define the file and potentially data it contains. You are adding more data to the file in a standardized way to make it easier to identify that note without having to look at the content.
Adding Metadata to Your Notes
So how do you add metadata to a note? Of course you have the metadata of the file itself, but what you should do is also add custom properties in the note. Some apps will do this in different ways, but Obsidian and Zettlr both use YAML at the top of the note for their properties. From what I’ve seen, a lot of apps will use this layout or something similar, so it keeps your notes with properties portable-ish. Below is a basic layout I use for my notes.
---
title: Template - Note
source:
created:
type: Note
tags:
- template
---
Metadata Beakdown
One thing to keep in mind is the purpose of the metadata is to make it easy to identify key data points, but not add so much that it’s more difficult to parse that information. In my example above I have fairly broad properties, but they serve to help me find and filter my data.
Title
The ‘title’ property is used if I have special characters I want in the title but can’t have in the note file name, or if I want to setup a note with some metadata in the filename but not have it in the title, i.e. “bookmark_shopping_ebay.md” might have the title “eBay”.
Source
I use the ‘source’ property for notes that I take in relation to a URL, a Book, or even a person. If I have a source I can attribute the information to, I try to add it here. It’s especially useful later when you try to add more context or potentially dive deeper on a subject.
Created
The ‘created’ property is potentially redundant because the file properties should reflect that information, however if those file properties are lost for one reason or another, or modified in some way, you still have this information internal to the note itself. I like to see what information was added at what time, and if you also break your tasks out into individual notes like I have before, it makes it easier to filter your oldest tasks. You could also have a ‘modified’ property that serves a similar purpose.
Type
The ‘type’ property is a bit less obvious on first glance, but I use it to help me sort between what are Notes, References, Tasks, Projects, etc. References are generally something that I have an attribution source for, like a bookmark, or my summary of a website, or information a specific person gave me. A note with type “Note” is something that is mine, like an opinion, or my own stringing together of ideas, or something that doesn’t have direct attribution.
Tags
This property is one that has the most variance on a per-note basis and is designed to be flexible. I add any “themes” that match that note. In my bookmark example for eBay, I would add the tags “bookmark” and “shopping”. You could even add “secondhand” as a tag if that makes sense in your notes. At work I deal a lot with Intune and EntraID and Microsoft products, so there are lots of notes with those tags in them. This can be useful if you’re using Obsidian for your notes and the Dataview plugin, but even if you are strictly using plaintext and some *nix tools, they can be useful. I can use something like grep -w "shopping" 07_Bookmarks/* to search all my bookmarks for the “shopping” tag or the word shopping.
Caveats
As you can see, there’s a lot of ambiguity to properties and you can do a lot. The danger is doing too much. You don’t want to replace the actual note content with properties, and the temptation is always there. I recommend starting with a small set of properties that 80 - 90% of your notes will share and then add more properties if it makes sense. For example, the following is my “people” note template. Notice that almost everything in that note could be a property, but I’ve only listed the few that are also in all the other notes. The rest are only useful in a people note and so don’t need to be seperated from the content itself into a property.
---
title:
type: Reference
tags:
- people
---
- Full Name:
- Aliases:
- Role:
- Screen Names:
- Relationship:
- Birthday:
- Contact Info:
- Mobile Phone Number:
- Other Phone Number:
- Street Address:
- City:
- State:
- Zip Code:
## Notes:
-
Conclusion
If you are already using markdown for your notes, start adding properties to your next note. Add just a few and create a template file you can copy from easily. Try it for a while, and then iterate on it later. As you reference old notes that don’t have properties, add them. You’ll be glad you did.