OSINT Researcher Shares Three-Stage Note Workflow to Turn Data Hoards into Actionable Intel

A practitioner who accumulated over 3,000 disorganized OSINT notes in Obsidian over two years found they could not retrieve useful findings when a client asked a basic question about a past investigation. The core problem, they identified, was saving raw sources rather than recording the decisions and questions that gave those sources meaning. They also faulted organizing notes by source type instead of by investigation, and never defining when a note was complete. Their solution, called IEB, routes every piece of information through three distinct stages — Intake, Enrichment, and a final stage — ensuring nothing sits in an undefined limbo. The Intake phase is deliberately minimal, capped at five fields and 30 seconds per entry, to prevent the slow, elaborate capture habits that cause most note systems to collapse within weeks.