Glossary
Every term, in plain words.
Sylvics uses plain names wherever it can. These are the few it had to coin, and the ordinary words it uses in a specific way.
- Sylvics
- A finished life and knowledge system for Obsidian: a ready-made vault plus the
sylvics-coreplugin, stored as plain Markdown files on your computer. Made by Verdant Cybernetics. - Vault
- Obsidian's word for a folder of notes. Sylvics is one vault with ten numbered root folders.
- The ten folders
00 - Atlas(dashboards),01 - Inbox(unsorted),02 - Planning(things with an end),03 - Areas(things with no end),04 - Resources(raw material),05 - Literature(your notes on a source),06 - Permanent(your own ideas),07 - Journal(reflection),08 - Archive(finished),99 - Meta(the machinery).- Masterpage
- The dashboard note of a folder. It lists what the folder holds, shows counts and carries the button that creates a new note of that type.
- Homepage
- The full-screen start page of the vault: a clock, a background that changes with the time of day, and one way in.
- OS Control Center
- The page that leads to every folder and dashboard. It also holds the Start Here card for new users.
- Inbox
- The folder
01 - Inbox, where everything you capture waits until you decide what it is. - Jot
- A captured note in the Inbox, named
✏️ Jot -followed by its title. - Braindump
- The capture page. Type a thought, press Send to Inbox, and it becomes a jot.
- Inbox Processing
- The page that shows the oldest jot first, with one-click buttons to turn it into a task or project, move it, delete it or open it. Its health tile reads Optimal at zero, Warning when the oldest jot is seven days old or there are 30, and Critical at ten days or 50.
- The Daily Loop
- The pages for the day: Vision OS in the morning, Mission Control during the day, Life OS in the evening, plus Braindump, Inbox Processing and the shopping list.
- Mission Control
- The daytime dashboard: today's habits, tasks, projects and calendar.
- Vision OS
- The morning dashboard: identity, goals, vision board, bucket list and decisions that are due.
- Life OS
- The evening dashboard: life areas and reviews.
- Daily note
- One note per day in
07 - Journal, in four parts: morning intention, execution (habits), end of day, and tomorrow priming. A Lite Mode shortens it. - Periodic reviews
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly notes that collect what happened from the notes below them. The weekly review ends with a score for each life area.
- Wheel of Life
- The scores you give each life area in the weekly review, drawn as a radar and followed over months.
- Area
- A part of life with no finish line. Sylvics has eight: Health, Relationships and social, Business and career, Finances, Home and environment, Personal growth, Recreation, Spirituality and meaning.
- Planning cascade
- How plans connect in
02 - Planning: Alignment (identity, values, archetypes, affirmations), Strategy (goals, habits, skills), Execution (projects, tasks, decisions) and Latent (ideas, decisions to make, bucket list). - Latent
- The holding area for ideas, open decisions and the bucket list: things you are not committing to yet.
- Literature note
- Your account of one source in your own words, in
05 - Literature, named📖 Author on subject. - Permanent note
- One idea of your own, in
06 - Permanent, whose title is a full claim, such as💎 One missed day does not break a habit. - Knowledge Compass
- The five directions on a permanent note: North (where it came from), West (similar ideas), Centre (the mechanism), East (the opposing view) and South (what it led to).
- Knowledge map
- A note that gathers a dozen or so permanent notes on one subject, kept in
00 - Atlas. - The Canopy
- The 3D graph of the vault, with twelve views: Arbor, Grove, Cosmos, Orb and Signature for the whole vault, and Plan, Habits, Knowledge flow, Structure, Balance, Days and People for insights.
- View
- One way of arranging the Canopy to answer one question. Each view comes with a legend, a short list of findings in plain sentences, and a replay of how the vault grew.
- Sage
- The optional assistant. It answers from your own notes, using a local model or your own API key, lists the notes it used, and acts only when asked.
- Edit Setup
- The builder that turns any note into a dashboard: header cards for key properties and modules such as lists, tables and charts, arranged in tabs.
- Knowledge, Action, Reflection
- The three modes of work in Sylvics: learning (Resources, Literature, Permanent), doing (Planning, Areas) and looking back (Journal).
- PARA
- A method for organising notes by actionability (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive). Sylvics uses an extended version of it for where notes live.
- Zettelkasten
- A method of writing one idea per note and linking ideas to each other. Sylvics uses its own adaptation for how ideas mature.
- Mira Castellan
- The invented person whose year fills the example vault: a product manager saving for a sabbatical, taking an evening statistics course, lifting and climbing. Every example note is hers and can be removed in one place.
- Verdant Cybernetics
- The independent studio that makes Sylvics, founded by Matthieu.