The Thinkers Club

The Thinkers Club

The Obsidian Tag I’m Using to Surface Ideas

An experiment in capturing sentence-level “seeds” so useful quotes, thoughts and concepts don’t disappear inside my notes.

James Bedford's avatar
James Bedford
Oct 13, 2026
∙ Paid

Every now and then, I experiment with a new way of working in my Obsidian vault. This typically comes from me feeling as though I am not getting what I need from my current setup, or that a flow could be improved.

I am experimenting with a new tag throughout my vault, which I am hoping will surface smaller ideas up more efficiently.

Typically I don’t share when I am trying something new as I don’t want people to pick up methods that end up not working for me.. But I am coming to realise that everyone has their own way of thinking with digital tools, so being more transparent with tips I am trying can only be a net positive - as long as others are getting something from it!


The Problem


I have been using the same tagging structure for a couple of years now, and it has been mainly based on “note-level” tagging.

Tagging structure on a typical note. All tags at the top.

At the top of all of my notes I will use this form of metadata - three different tags #type, #area, #keyword and then I collect sub-tags for each of these areas. If you haven’t seen me write about this before, this nested tag concept, in my humble opinion, is one of Obsidians biggest strengths. It gives you a beautiful and effective method of navigating through your vault.

Whilst this has been working well for me, the limitation is that things are not broken down to any surface lower than the note itself.

I believe I could do a better job of retaining and resurfacing these smaller ideas that I don’t want to lose.

My experiment is to introduce a tag where I can be bought back to the sentence level, and tied to a specific concept, rather than a note. This should be much more effective at surfacing up ideas, no matter how small, when I need them.

The rest of this post is for Thinking Club members.

I’m sharing more of the experiments, systems & ideas I’m actively testing in Obsidian. My goal is to help those who think for a living, do the best thinking of their lives.

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