I run two Obsidian vaults. One private, one public. The public one gets turned into a website by Quartz.
The private vault
This is where thinking actually happens. Messy notes, half-formed ideas, work stuff, personal things I’d never publish. I loosely follow PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) but don’t stress about it. The point is having a place to dump thoughts without worrying about whether they’re “ready.”
The public vault
When something from the private vault feels worth sharing, I copy it over here and clean it up. This creates a natural filter - most of what I write stays private, and that’s fine. The public vault is just the subset that might be useful to others.
This separation matters more than it sounds. When everything you write might be published, you self-censor. You polish instead of exploring. Having a private space lets you think freely, and having a separate public space forces you to actually curate instead of dumping everything online.
Publishing with Quartz
Quartz takes the public vault and generates a static site. It handles the stuff you’d expect - backlinks, graph view, search, dark mode. The workflow is just: edit markdown, commit to git, push. Vercel picks it up and deploys automatically.
Why Quartz over Obsidian Publish? It’s free, I control the output, and I can customize it if needed. Obsidian Publish is easier but costs money and you’re locked into their hosting.
On typing speed
This might seem unrelated, but touch typing makes a real difference. When you can type without thinking about typing, writing becomes closer to thinking. Ideas get captured before they evaporate. If you’re still hunting for keys, it’s worth fixing - the payoff compounds forever.
How it fits together
Idea appears → quick note in private vault → sits there, maybe gets linked to other notes → eventually I notice it’s developed into something → copy to public vault, clean up → commit and push → done.
Most notes never leave the private vault. That’s the point. The public garden is curated, not comprehensive.