Kenny's Thinking Garden

Vault Organisation

6 min read

Vault Organisation

Version 4 · Last Updated 2026 Apr 25

It has been updated as my thinking changed. See the Changelog at the bottom for what shifted and when.

Core Idea

How to keep the Evergreen PKM garden clean, navigable, and honest as it grows — covering node naming, folder structure, triage hygiene, and when to reintroduce tooling like semantic search.

State of Thinking

The vault is a node-based Evergreen PKM. The organising principle is not folders — it is ideas, trees, and connections. Folders exist to separate fundamentally different kinds of thinking, not to classify topics.

What the structure looks like now:

  • Notes\ holds personal evolving thinking, split into three typed sub-folders:
    • Mental Models\ — evolving beliefs about how something works
    • Plans\ — strategy and planning nodes
    • Captures\ — atomic, half-formed, reading-triggered thoughts
  • Projects\ holds project and hustle idea nodes — things being built or explored
  • Reference\ holds external material kept for lookup — never evolves
  • Knowledge\ holds personal crystallised understanding — promoted from Notes\ once thinking has stabilised
  • Personal\ holds operational career files — private, never published
  • Each node type has its own template: mental model template.md, plan template.md, capture template.md

What the node system looks like:

  • Each file is a node representing one idea
  • Nodes are named by what the idea is, not where it came from
  • Trees form naturally — a trunk node with child nodes for each dimension
  • Two connection types: evolved from (chain) and part of (hub)
  • Triage processes raw input files and routes thoughts to the right node
  • Version bumps on every update; What/Why changed only filled in for model shifts

What was retired from the old system:

  • Flat Notes\ folder — replaced by typed sub-folders
  • Single node template — replaced by three templates matched to node type
  • Knowledge\ as external reference storage — renamed to Reference\; Knowledge\ now reserved for promoted personal understanding
  • Qdrant semantic search — parked until the garden grows large enough to need it (~30+ nodes)

Current garden state (as of 2026-04-25):

  • Notes\Mental Models\ — 3 nodes: GenAI Development, Vault Organisation, Vault Organisation - Hustle Thoughts
  • Notes\Plans\ — 3 nodes: PO Learning Journey, PO to PM Transition - Learning Strategy, PO to PM Transition - Positioning Strategy
  • Notes\Captures\ — empty
  • Projects\ — 13 nodes across Helper Match SG, SG StoryQuest, games, and other ideas
  • Reference\ — 15 external PM reference files
  • Knowledge\ — empty, ready for first promoted node
  • Personal\ — 2 career strategy nodes

When to reintroduce Qdrant: When triage starts feeling slow because you cannot remember what exists — not before. See Readme.md for reintroduction criteria.

Thinking Trace

  • The old system was folder-based and Obsidian-native — it worked for a while but the triage workflow was heavy and the folder structure kept raising placement questions
  • The shift to Evergreen PKM came from wanting a system where thinking compounds over time, not just accumulates
  • The flat Notes\ folder worked initially but broke down when project nodes (Helper Match SG, SG StoryQuest, games) started mixing with personal mental models — different purposes, same folder
  • Splitting Projects\ out from Notes\ resolved the conflation — project thinking is about things being built, mental model thinking is about how you see the world
  • The Knowledge\ rename came from noticing the folder held external reference material but the name implied personal internalisation — Reference\ is honest, Knowledge\ is reserved for what has actually been promoted from personal thinking
  • Three templates instead of one came naturally — a capture needs a lighter format than a mental model, and a plan needs operational sections that a mental model template doesn’t have
  • Removing Qdrant was the right call at this stage — the garden is small enough to navigate manually and adding search infrastructure now would be overengineering
  • Some old Hustle Thoughts nodes (GroundNews Local, AI Interactive Story Experience) have not been migrated yet — they exist in the old vault but not the new garden

What changed?

v4

Notes\ reorganised from a flat folder into three typed sub-folders — Mental Models\, Plans\, Captures\. Projects\ split out from Notes\. Knowledge\ renamed to Reference\ for external material; new Knowledge\ created for promoted personal understanding. Three templates now exist instead of one.

v3

Changelog section added to node template and triage instructions. What/Why changed sections restructured to versioned sub-headings so history stacks rather than gets overwritten. Changelog entry type now signals whether a bump is a minor addition or a model shift.

v2

The entire organising model shifted — from folder-based notes to idea-based nodes. The vault is no longer structured around where things live but around what they mean and how they connect.

v1

— skip —

Why it changed?

v4

The flat Notes\ structure conflated project thinking with personal mental models — different purposes sharing one folder created routing ambiguity on every new node. Splitting by folder makes the distinction visible in the file tree without needing to consult the index. The Knowledge\ rename came from noticing a mismatch between the folder name and what it actually held. Three templates match three genuinely different node types with different purposes and different levels of formality.

v3

Version history was being lost — when a node reached v3 or v4, the v2 What/Why reasoning would be overwritten and unrecoverable. The versioned sub-heading structure preserves the full reasoning history within the node itself. The changelog distinction between minor and model-shift bumps avoids redundancy with What/Why changed.

v2

The folder system kept raising unanswerable placement questions and the triage workflow was too heavy. The Evergreen PKM model is simpler, more honest to how ideas actually develop, and compounds better over time.

v1

— skip —

Evidence / Signals

  • Every triage session in the old system involved a placement debate — that friction was the signal the structure was wrong
  • The new system produced 12 clean nodes in one session with no placement debates — the structure works
  • The flat Notes\ conflation became visible the moment a reading-triggered capture needed a home — it didn’t fit alongside project nodes or career strategy plans

Open Questions

  • When is the right time to migrate GroundNews Local and AI Interactive Story Experience into the new garden?
  • As the garden grows, will the current folder structure stay navigable or will some grouping mechanism be needed within Projects\?
  • Should there be a periodic garden review — checking for orphaned nodes, stale Open Questions, connections that were never added?
  • At what node count does Qdrant become worth reintroducing?

Connections

Changelog

  • v4 — Model shift: see What/Why changed
  • v3 — Model shift: see What/Why changed
  • v2 — Model shift: see What/Why changed
  • v1 — Initial node

Graph View

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