I work on multiple projects and need to quickly switch between them. Currently I need to close all my documents and then start over every time I switch projects.

I do have a handful of templates for books, articles, and zettels to help in prompting me to fill in appropriate meta data for various notes more quickly. For this I’m using the built-in Templates plug-in and then ctrl-shift-T to choose a specific template as necessary.

For some smaller self-contained things like lectures, I may keep a handful of notes together rather than splitting them apart, but they may be linked to larger structures like longer courses or topics of study.

In other words, it was wasted time. Now, if I have to write about a specific topic, I can use the line:(#tag1 #tag2 #tag3) search command to find previously encountered ideas I need for a given purpose.

Now, I simply (1) highlight what I find relevant and useful in journal articles or book chapters, (2) tag each highlight as I go in Acrobat Reader for articles or Kindle for chapters, (3) import them into Obsidian in a folder called ‘Highlight notes’, and (4) rework them with my own ideas into outputs. Perhaps the key to this system is that I not only tag each highlight for its key concepts, I also tag their ‘rhetorical purposes’ which will help me to find them again later. So, an example for a useful quote that defines the writing prompts used in an assessment like NAPLAN (Australia’s national writing test) might be: