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Paul's Knowledge Garden Structure

A Knowledge Garden is a digital repository of your notes, projects, posts, photos and anything relevant to cultivating and sharing what you care about and find valuable.

Knowledge Garden's come in all shapes and sizes. Most people just cultivate them privately via apps like Obsidian, Notion, OrgMode, and Anytype. Some people publish interesting public knowledge gardens as websites.

In the document below I, Paul Mullins, will show you how I structured my Knowledge Garden. Hopefully you can integrate some of these behavior patterns in your knowledge garden. When you are done reading this article you can also check out Getting Started with Knowledge Gardening for alternative approaches to get started with Knowledge Gardens.

Knowledge Gardens have a Purpose

Must Have

The Must Have parts of my Knowledge Garden are what I use every day.

  • My Personal Legend (Private)
  • TODO.md File (Private)
    • My TODO.md file contains a list of things I am working on. I also create distinct headings for different TODO lists.
    • Since the TODO file is the only specific file I look at daily I also put reminders in there. An example of a reminder I have is, "Make the Demo Pill front and center on my mememaps.net page".
    • I have tried many different Project Management methodologies without success. At the end of the day a single TODO.md file is what sticks through the ages.
  • Questions/List (Mostly Private)
    • Basically every question I have ever typed out in Obsidian has a note matching its title. It is interesting when I find myself asking the same question months if not years apart. Understanding what questions one finds "valuable" is the key to Quest(ion) Engine.
  • Daily (YYYY-MM-DD) - (Private)
    • Obsidian has a "Daily Note" feature which generates a unique note for each day using the YYYY(Year in Numbers), MM(Month in Numbers), DD(Day in Numbers) format.
    • I use a custom hotkey (CTRL+SHIFT+A) to open my daily note for the current day. (Daily notes: Open today's daily note in Obsidian hotkey settings)
    • I have a ## TODO title on the top of the Daily note with the tasks I wish to accomplish that day.
    • I use my Daily notes for OODA(Observe Orient Decide Act) loops. OODA loops are deep work sessions, where you state what you are going to work on, and then document what happened what you worked on said task.
      • I perform OODA loops under a title with the current timestamp.
        • To create a timestamped title I create a h4 title using #### then input the current timestamp the obsidian-timestamper plugin mapped to (CTRL+SHIFT+R) (TimeStamper: Insert customer time/date stamp in the Obsidian hotkey settings), I get timestamps that look like the following 2025-12-29T00:39:58-05:00
      • Under the timestamped title I start typing. First I "Observe", articulate what I am trying to do as a stream of conscious. Second I "Orient", refine what I am trying to do, I do this by actually reading what I just typed, interrogating it to see if I actually know what I am doing, I continue the typed stream of consciousness with a heightened level of awareness. Third I "Decide", after the task and initial thoughts are typed out I start performing the task, "Act". I revisit the OODA text block whenever I get stuck and use it as a sound board to type out my thinking process. I will do small refinements of the task within a single OODA block, if a large refinement is required I start a new OODA block underneath the previous one.
    • At the end of the day I try and do a summery under the ## Summary title, I previously tried to answer a specific set of questions using a template but couldn't maintain the routine, now I just product a stream of consciousness that describes a minimum of three things that happened that day.
  • assets
    • I place images in the assets/images folder
    • I place files like PDF's in the assets/attachments folder
    • I also create Diagrams via the drawio-obsidian plugin, I store all diagrams in the assets/diagrams folder.

Core

The code scaffolding of my PKMS exists to link ideas, memes, so they can be contextualized. I contextualize everything using links because using "Search" is not consistent, for example The same letters can represent different things, but if the concept is directly linked to there is no ambiguity and can be navigated to via Obsidian Backlinks. It's also useful to see how the same "meme" was used in different places.

  • Acronyms (Public)
    • I have a requirement that whenever an Acronym is used in a document, at least one of the instances of that acronym in that note MUST link to the note with the title of said acronym. For example see how PKMS is used in this document.
  • Concepts/List (Public)
    • Anytime I would link out of my PKMS to something like Wikipedia I create a document with the same title. This allows me to add my own personal notes to the concept itself.
    • Anytime I use a concept word like Blockchain or Memex, I like to link to the Concept so that people not familiar with those concepts can get a nice definition without leaving my notes website, this also removes ambiguity if someone were to search for the concept.
    • Currently many of the concepts I have in my PKMS are empty or articulated poorly, it's a work in progress.
  • Media/List (Selectively Public)
    • I throw anything from a book, movie, video game, academic paper, franchise, or even a individual blog post or tweet in this folder. I originally tried to organize media mediums such as books, movies, and, music distinctly but the edge cases became overwhelming.
    • For tagging media I have a Media/Type folder where I have "Movie", "Video Game", and "Book" documents which I link to from the specific media document. I should probably use tags.
  • Software/List (Public)
    • Anything that would count as a Platform, Protocol, or Application goes in this list. Within my PKMS Instagram(Platform), ActivityPub(Protocol), and Apple Notes (App) are all software that go in this folder.
    • I have a Software/Catagories folder where I have notes titles Frontend, SQL Database, Scraping, and Annotation among others.
    • Similar software is linked to one another, for example sshfs has a link to ssh because they are dependent on one another.
  • Locations (Private)
    • I have find myself mentioning places in my OODA loops and Daily Summaries. I describe these places the same way I express them in conversation, My Apartment, My Parents House etc. etc. I keep these private just like my Daily Notes.
  • Products (Private)
    • Here I put anything I can purchase or subscribe to. If there's a present I want to buy someone, I put it in here, If I am comparing various VPS plans I put each VPS provider in there. I also got a lot of Homelab Fruitboards in there.

Writing

Writing is a tool I use to clean up my thoughts.

  • Thoughts (Mostly Private)
    • Whenever I come up with something interesting that I want to remember, I just create a fresh note and throw it in the Thoughts folder. I also create a timestamped OODA loop in my Daily Note with a link to the thought.
    • I also have a Thoughts/Chaos.md file so I can just dump stuff without having to go through the process of creating an titling an entirely new note.
  • Posts (Public)
  • Writings (Private)
    • This is where I work on posts before making them public in Posts
  • Tutorials (Mostly Public)
    • I often find myself having to relearn the same thing over and over again. In Tutorials I write down how I did something so it is repeatable not only for me but other people.

People Focus

Greatness is Other People, here I take notes on people, how they are connected, and my relationship to them.

  • Relationships/People (Private)
    • Here I create distinct notes for each person I know of significance.
    • I link the individuals Socials, X, Instagram, Whatsapp in their file using the same links I just linked here for context.
    • It's nice to see how a person is mentioned over years in my Daily Notes.
    • I also place fictional characters, celebrities, intellectuals, and politicians in this folder and treat them the same way as Actual People
  • People (Public)
    • Here I place public notes about people. So far I only have myself Paul Mullins listed in there.
    • When mememaps.net becomes more wiki like other people will be able to add themselves and edit one anthers profile notes.
  • Community/List
    • I treat any group of people as a community, it can be a conference, meetup, Discord guild, Hackerspace, or even a Subreddit. Wherever I can imagine a group of people with an identity and a name I throw it in Community.

Self Knowledge

Here I put anything that focuses on Me, Myself and I.

My "Self Knowledge" stuff is a mess. I never consistently put anything in here or came up with a system to structure it. If you have any systems for this kind of "Self Knowledge" I would love to know what they are so I can also implement them.

  • Skills (Semi Public)
  • Self Authoring/Therapy (Private)
    • I try to place any notes from a Therapy session in here, and link it to my Daily Note. Any work I do for therapy also goes in here
  • Self Authoring/Dreams (Private)
    • I write about my dream in here, each dream has a separate file, I link to the Daily Note from the dream to help track the date.
  • Self Authoring/Wants (Private)
    • Anything I want, I create a distinct note for it.
  • Self Authoring/Behaviors (Private)
  • Self Authoring/Health (Private)
    • Here I track my weight and workouts. I would also put Dental, Doctor, Medication, and Supplement notes in here if I got around to it.
  • Self Authoring/Possessions (Private)
    • Here I track my Digital and Physical goods. I track my Servers and Fruitboard's in here. I mostly track my digital goods in here such as Games, DNS names, Accounts, and even track Virtual Machines in here.
  • Self Authoring/Observations (Private)

Project Management

To learn more about my projects please checkout my root page -> Paul Mullins and read the Paul's Projects section.

  • MyProjects (Semi Public)
    • Here I create a folder for each project and document it. I selectively publish notes from here for other people to lean about these projects.
  • Quests (Private)
    • Any TODO list item, or something that can't be completed in a single day goes in the quests folder. In a traditional project management sense this would be a ticket.
  • Backlog (Private)
    • Any set of TODO list items that can be grouped together ends up in here. This mostly includes projects but also includes upgrades to my apartment, a list of AI tools I want to try, and things I want to change about my personality.
  • Research (Private)
    • Here I put my research in specific topics. I already have a good amount of research done in my Concepts folder, the Research folder is for more private research or research that lacks context to be published.
  • Queries and Prompts (Private)
    • I found when doing research that the most valuable context was what I typed into a search engine or a LLM. So now I just create a title with the search query/prompt and link it where it needs to be linked.
  • Courses (Private)

Other

  • Code Snippets (Private)
    • Here I store code snippets, mostly for Unix commands and React
  • Presentations (Semi Public)
  • Templates (Private)
    • Here I store template notes I can inject into other notes.
  • Quotes (Private)
    • Any quote I find, be it from a friend, a book, or a phrase I personally said, I treat the entire quote as a title for a note and put it in this folder.
  • Heuristics (Public)
    • There are plenty of "Rules", "Laws", "Theory's", "Effects", and "Self Help Concepts" out there. I place all those in this folder.
  • Chaos (Private)
    • Anything I write a note about but I don't know where to place it I throw in here.
  • Dents (Private)
    • Any social media post I posted that I want to link in my PKMS, I first create a Note in the Dents folder and link to it from other notes