Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead
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I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used to get stuff done.
These complex systems are the perfect excuse for procrastination because they make you feel like you are doing something productive while you actually aren't. Just get stuff done.
> I find watching how this knowledge graph grows satisfying
Yep, it's satisfying. Because it's procrastination and gives you the illusion of "being in control" - just like engaging in social media is satisfying. Or cleaning your room while you should be doing homework. I don't think it's useful.
Taking notes is great. Research has shown that active note taking, e.g. while watching a lecture, is a crucial part of learning. Organizing them into some (in case of roam, PAID!) system that you will probably not even come back to? Procrastination.
> active note taking, e.g. while watching a lecture, is a crucial part of learning
I agree! The word “active” is crucial here — categorising, structuring and interlinking knowledge fosters understanding. The Zettelkasten builds on this principle, because — when it works in classroom, maybe it would be good to interlink and structure your ideas outside of it as well.
> Organizing them into some (in case of roam, PAID!) system that you will probably not even come back to?
I sense a straw man here. Of course, if you don’t plan to look at your notes ever again, why bother writing them down in any kind of system?
The whole point of Zettelkasten is to write down notes that you intend to use in the future. You can still have some ephemeral notes, but you don’t rewrite those to the Zettelkasten.
Same thread, on not taking notes, but capturing ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852959
I'm a long time Luhmannian Zettelkasten fan, but thus far all my efforts on keeping one myself have failed. I still admire this method, though; maybe it's just optimized for a different brain than mine. I have had better success with Lion Kimbro's latest (2004-ish, I think) method for indexing paper notebooks. Thanks to a short correspondence with him (really nice guy!), I even dug up his blog posts on that:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042318/http://lion.poste...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130304042836/http://lion.poste...
He outlines his "new" method more thoroughly and with images in the book "Mindhacker" by Ron & Marty Hale-Evans (Hack no 17 - Write Magnificient Notes).
Kimbro's eralier book "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think" has been on HN earlier, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078819
All in all, I suppose it is just a matter of whether someone is a "free-form guy" or tends to prefer more complex, e.g. hierarchical notes. I would like to be more systematic, but I guess in reality I am not.
I want to think that for me the perfect note taking technique is a well built-up "memory palace" + guilt-free forgetting. In other words, taking as little written notes as possible and retaining important things in my head as visual (often metaphorical) images. There is a world where that would keep all relevant ideas and connections always floating on top. And everything irrelevant would magically sink to the bottom of my brain. How easy. Unfortunately I have yet to visit that world.
How do you know? Maybe their set of habits are a complicated system which they are just not aware of being a system, thus not they are not talking about as they consider it as natural or just obvious.
It seems to be some kind of effect of the internet that people talking about everything leads also to people making big science and systems out of every little detail and habit, seeking some big secret and stuff. While on the other side you have people making up cheap solutions on the spot and throw them away when they don't need them anymore, not calling it sytem or such.
> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used to get stuff done.
Yes, customization is a curse. Given enough power, people ultimatly end in corruption until they learn to wield it wisely. But wisdom does not comes easily or fast.
> Just get stuff done.
There are always a multitude of ways to getting stuff done, but some are faster than others, or less exhausting. Thus people aim to be smart and find the best way, which can end in wasting more time on finding the best ways, but also can end in saving time on the grand scale. You need enough experience to smell which road is better and when you should leave it.
You're absolutely right. But with that you are also just arguing about the definition of "system" - everything is a system in one way or another depending on where you draw the line. If I scribble stuff into my notebook and throw it away once it's full, you can call that a system.
By system here I meant a system or product that has a well-known name they can point to, like Zettelkasten or GTD or BASB, etc.
If you do it regulary, then yes, it is. A system in that space is mostly definied by habits and rules. Regulary doing the same stuff again and again, even if it's braindead simple, is basically what people consider as a system. Though, whether it's good, is a different topic.
> By system here I meant a system or product that has a well-known name they can point to, like Zettelkasten or GTD or BASB, etc.
Yes, that's what I'm curious about. Zettelkasten is not very complex. Actually it's even very simple. The whole secret is to use reference in your notes and connect them by using a simple naming/numbering-schema. Not much work, not much system. People do that with their notebooks all the time.
The whole cargo-cult growing from it is a different problem and indeed something really bothersome at some point. But GTD and BASB are also not much more complicated if you take the gist of them.
Maybe people are stimulated to build big trades of them because they are just so quite simple and obvious? Many undefinied are, many space for people to paint their thoughts and habit on the canvas.
> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole.
I think part of the issue is that people try to jump into the middle of something which has evolved without going through that evolution themselves. In other words, they need to go to the starting line and iterate from there rather than pushing through to the finish line. I have seen some complex workflows in Org mode, but those flows were built up over years.
The software analogy would be premature optimization. Developers attempting to use tools which are meant for scaling without knowing the how or why of these tools. If you don't know why you should use something, then you might not be to the point where you need it.
I learn the most about how to tackle a problem once I stumble across the need to fix the problem. The best tools are those I find when I then go in search for the fix.
During 2), I often felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing list of TODOs, in particular those that scheduled at regular intervals.
With paper notebooks, and manual migration of tasks from one month to the next, it's easier to say "no" to things.
But, now that I've filled up three 200-page notebooks, I do struggle to find some old notes, or even remember that they exist.
So, maybe I will revert to an org-mode based "archive" for long-term ideas.
This is an issue with a global set of todo lists. I follow a butchered BASB type of system. I just keep all ideas in resources folders. Todo items go in those folders, but those are just ideas rather than actual todo items. Then do an occasional review to determine what I want to work on. Whatever I decide gets a folder in projects and todo items get actual deadlines. If I can't work on it, then it gets archived and maybe I'll go back to it later. The only todo items I'll look at are in those project folders and they make progress based on deadlines or they get ditched.
This is so true. I use a small subset of Org's features, and I have grown my workflow really slowly.
I also have very minimal dotfiles, yet I consider myself an advanced Emacs and Unix user.
It doesn't need to be a timesink. Also, as you say, complicated workflows are the consequence of iterating through many years and are likely paying off the efforts multiplied by a big factor.
I use org-mode as 'outline mode.' I only do this with it:
* asterisk denotes a level
* asterisk next to an asterisk denotes a sub-level of a level
* sublevels can have sublevels, effectively making them a level, by the above rules
Then you press tab to expand a level or sub-level, press tab again to contract a level or sub-level.
That's it! I tried some of the org-mode add-ons but never found them useful; this is the only one I use regularly.
Then, you can create views of one or several combined files. For example all items with a timestamp in the near future (deadlines). The standard view for organization is called org-agenda.
Aside from that, you have many other features which you won't need to use initially. For example, the ability to embed code and do literate programming.
I’m technical, self-employed, with an academic background. I’m very tempted by systems (I often think of the book “Lila” and his 12K index cards... it’s like thought/note porn). But my need to “ship” keeps my tendencies lightweight. My partner has crates of notes, spends time culling lists and to-dos and plans project work times on her calendar. She struggles to ship and is often frustrated by her own sense of progress.
It’s just a couple of anecdotal data points. I do like to deep dive into research jags and makes lists and record notes, but those usually happen at the beginning of projects or brainstorming sessions... I find old (digital) notes and have a very ephemeral relationship to them.
I care more about digressive and convergent mental habits. When I govern those effectively, I feel creative and productive. My systems tend to stay light.
First, one of my high schools had a workshop on how to study. One of the things they encouraged us to do is to take notes, but only a moderate amount of them. Some amount of note-taking can have a huge positive impact on memory and retention. But overdoing it is actually harmful. It's overwhelming.
The other is that, if there's one thing I really like from name-brand Scrum, it's the idea that you should strive to make each decision no more than once. Lots of deep deep planning ahead tends to maximize the amount of effort you burn on re-making decisions. And the decisions that are most vulnerable to this effect are the ones that you made the furthest ahead of time.
That reminds me.. in college, I was employed by a "Class Notes" service to write the notes that other people in class bought so they didn't have to take notes.
I got great market for my notes, and when the class was over, students were encouraged to report back to the Class Notes company what score they got in the class. Again, by correlation, my notes were well regarded.
I scored very poorly in the class. I spent a lot of time taking notes in class, and then refining the notes to be turned in. Surely, I did less additional homework/studying than I should have. But I also had very little recall of the material.
I definitely wasn't optimizing my own effort along with my class notes effort -- but I stopped doing that as I was already pretty busy and the money was mostly a lift. I did better attending and being the kind of student I already know how to be.
Notes for me now is just a temporarily placeholder to help process a lot of information in one go.
I don't ever store notes long terms until I find myself reaching for it the 2nd time
I admit not reading the article fully - I scanned it and it's not that great. But I'd like to ask - why relate ZK with "getting stuff done"? That's not a selling point of Zettelkasten and seems like misplaced criticism.
ZK is for academics. And while I don't know any personally who used it, I do know plenty who have some sort of extended note system, and the correlation to their success is not low.
And since ZK is becoming more popular, like so many other comments, I would caution people in not expecting too much from it. It is a lot of work. I used to (and still try to) keep notes on my computer for everything I study - done in the "inefficient" manner, and it is very time consuming. ZK requires more effort than that. You can't just dump notes in the system and have it work out. For every note you add, you need to ponder over what other related notes you already have, and explicitly link them. This is not fun and it is "expensive".
I read an account from one academic who started using ZK in his grad school years. He said something similar: It is a lot of effort, and he said most of the real gains happened after he'd collected notes for eight years - then things took off for him.
> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole.
OK - now the gloves come off :-)
Most org mode users don't know elisp. I didn't for almost my first decade of using it. And people only stick to org mode because it is fairly successful for them. I use it extensively to author documents (be it for Word, HTML, LaTeX, Reveal, Beamer, etc). Except for a few PPTs, I haven't authored in any other system for over a decade.
I use it for taking notes, and nothing has replaced it since I started. I often refer to notes I took years ago.
I'll admit I haven't used it well enough as a TODO system and this is likely where people may get stuck tinkering.
I use it as a logging tool (weights, people I've met and when, etc) and it's great.
I use it for literate programming. Awesome - especially when learning a new language. I have code snippets, with evaluated results all in the same document.
All my blog's content is authored in one org document and exported to individual pages. I tried many blogging systems in the past and this is the only one I stick to.
Org mode is just amazing.
And: People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use
Once loaded, scroll all the way to the right:
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNot...
While I wouldn't consider myself the most successful person, I've got a lot done, and I attribute a lot of it to my system, notes, and organization. The system wasn't immediately complicated either, it has been developed and refined over 10 years to suit my needs. And for me in particular, it alleviates a lot of mental overhead and allows me to just focus on whatever it is I'm working on.
But that's just me, I think you do have a point to some extent. It depends on the person, YMMV.
Here's an article that goes into more about these concepts, the author calls it a "Second Brain": https://fortelabs.co/blog/basboverview/
My suspicion is that the natural productivity for individuals in the population follows a bell curve: some people are crazy productive, regardless of their tools, and at the other end are people who are beyond help. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, and these tools will likely help some, but not all of them. It's unlikely any one methodology can help everybody.
As someone who's just beginning to try out orgmode, I can see its value, though it would likely do little to overcome my own personal productivity weaknesses: poor planning and foresight at the beginning. No amount of otherwise excellent tools can overcome a poorly thought out plan. They do, however, highlight how ill-conceived my initial plans were. It's up to me to do something about it. I have found a GTD-like review approach to be the most helpful.
I also don't think you can totally separate a "personal productivity weakness" from "tools". Tools and systems, when learned and used correctly, can go a long way in correcting bad habits and mindless counter-productive actions. An example that has already helped me a lot is the very simple act of writing out only 2 to 3 most important tasks for the day and make them easily visible with some form of stickies. This helps me focus my energy throughout the day instead of letting me wander around mindlessly with whatever free time that comes up, since those 2 to 3 tasks always stay on top of my mind and direct my actions, and are very easy to keep track of. This way I actually get things done constantly every day instead of obliviously letting time slip by while feeling lost amid the dozens of TODOs that I have in org-mode/todo software.
You are going to learn either way.
Roam & Zettelkasten share a user base thick with academics. Productivity doesn't tend to be their stated end goal. Their goal is more often to arrange thoughts into webs of knowledge. They allow connected ideas, like wikis, except with zero forethought put into how the ideas should be organized. People really like being able to start writing without figuring out how to organize the thing they're about to write.
The goals that the R&Z community will benefit everyone as they seep into the broader ecosystem. It's (purported to be [1]) a powerful experience if you have the time to build a visualized network of your thoughts and see how they connect together. But it's not very similar to getting things done.
Incidentally, our app, Amplenote, allows bidirectional linking like Roam, and is focused specifically on helping users get things done (e.g., https://www.amplenote.com/classic_todo_lists_always_fail). In the real world, our product has allowed us to build three businesses that profitability sustain our team of 20. We have zero hype in part because we spend most of our time working. When a relevant comment like this one comes up, I don't see it until 12 hours later. C'est la vie when trying to actually get stuff done.
[1] Haven't had time to actually try out networked notes, but we're planning to add it to Amplenote later this month. Will develop an original opinion on them then.
I certainly spent a lot of time taking notes in org-mode but I don't regret it. Whenever I want to look something up and revise, I can find it in an instant by simply grepping my repo or by targeting a header. Goes without saying, this is particularly useful for notes related to programming. However, even for other notes (e.g. vacation plan) I still find tremendous value in org-mode's flexible and powerful approach. In addition, org-mode is also a medium for me to freely write things down and clarify my thoughts whenever I feel the urge to do so. I can even "write and forget", but the reward is already reaped when I wrote out my thoughts in the first place.
However, I have indeed moved time tracking and task management out of org-mode, after struggling with it for a couple of years and trying out various customizations. Ultimately it feels like that org-mode is not built as a suitable system for this purpose, for various reasons. Being "able" to do everything doesn't mean it does everything well, and I fell into the trap of idolizing it too much to the detriment of other viable alternatives. IMO it's a perfect note-taking system for programmers/STEM people, but task management and time tracking should not have been mixed with note taking in the first place. It feels like a bloating of product scope (were it a for-profit product, of course). Now I've switched to a dedicated software for task management + time tracking that has cross-platform support, and I feel much happier and can actually properly track my tasks, review my productivity and get things done.
I think that more technical and quantitative subjects do not benefit as much from these large 'connectionist' note-taking systems. For example, if your goal is to learn a new programming language, I don't see Zettelkasten being particularly helpful: you've already grokked a a for loop in other languages, and you gain nothing by creating a new linked note under the 'for loop construct' heading. Just do some practice problems instead!
But if your goal is to compare and contrast features across many languages, or to identify where certain software architectures are lacking, Zettelkasten would work just fine.
Maybe the problem is English. Maybe there's a way to structure English sentences in a more precise and meaningful way with hypertext linking and structuring like a legal document? ...but for human-to-human communications?
For contracts, there is a customary order, you start with subject of the contract and end with force majeure, severability, term etc.
I don’t believe there is a hyperlinked inherent structure in legal documents. Skilled lawyers can of course draft a meaningful, concise document. But, I think that’s analogous to a skilled programmer writing clear and understandable code.
Most lawyers I know dread formatting and checking for cross-refs.
However, I think we do have one quality, we are used to subconsciously analyze sentences for ambiguities, double meanings, logical contradictions etc. Therefore, lawyers may use English in a way that would do the least harm (or most harm depending on which side they’re on :)).
If we figured out natural language processing or (even if very unlikely) switched our legal documents to an unambigious context-free language such as Lojban, lawyers’ jobs could be entirely automated.
I suspect that impressively structured legal documents stem from templates that have been perfected over the years by multiple lawyers, battle-tested by actual use.
That’s my impression being a junior associate and normally doing the grunt work of checking cross-refs and formatting contracts.
Maybe one implementation of this is that if the people we talk to (perhaps via a chat app) have their own Zettelkasten, the chat is supplemented/augmented by each others Zettelkasten (either publicly or privately) so we have a deeper understanding of each other and we can go on interesting tangents and create new links. This also aids in more progressive discussions.
(I'll add this concept to my Zettel and see where it takes me :) Thanks for the inspiration)
I could also see it being too overwhelming and nobody reading the extra context available to them.
It was sometime difficult for me to figure out how to use an API due to lack of examples. So it's important to document that.
I don't think Zettelkasten will provide much benefits for this type of note taking. It probably still is better than normal note taking, but don't expect great benefits using ZK for things like this.
Sure, for simpler examples like if statements, you may not gain much. But, even for loops have differences across languages. JS uses for..of for iterating while Python and Swift use for..in
Also, there are different approaches in each language for getting the index and value while iterating.
Then, there are more complex topics like generics which have significant implementation differences between Java and Swift etc.
It would lead to a better understanding looking at these notes in connection rather than in isolation
Recently I started with the Zettelkasten approach (120 notes now), so not much experience yet. I did not use something like this for my phd thesis. Thinking back, I don't think it would have helped significantly because computer science works differently than the humanities.
What works very well is to use Zettelkasten as the next step after taking notes from reading book, blog posts, and articles to collect your personal insights. Probably also from movies, podcasts, whatever.
I believe Zettelkasten will help me with writing for my own blog and when I'm collecting information for personal projects. In both cases, I have lots of ideas which are not fully formed yet to be published or implemented. With a job and a family there is little time to pursue it, so I have to work in little steps. Externalizing this ideas is essential and a very-hyperlinked style like Zettelkasten seems to fit well.
For learning little facts about programming languages, spaced repetition is probably more suitable.
Then I discovered Building a Second Brain and it's P.A.R.A. method which was like Just-in-Time Zettelkasten and it's suddenly become a cornerstone of my productivity routine.
I compare the two approaches in this blog post: I recently studied both Zettelkasten and Build a Second Brain (aka P.A.R.A) note taking methods. They share some core principles but BASB seems much more practical for most people
I compared the two here: https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelka...
Have you used anything that you find well suited for the tasks of either PARA or Zettelkasten?
Yet discoverability becomes a huge challenge. I find that I almost never go back to reference those paper notes. I'd need a good system to keep those notes organized
[2] https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
However, I'm starting to experiment with Roam to write more long form notes to see if I can take advantage of the easy linking capabilities it offers
This is when you are learning very basics and not equivalent of literature review.
The proper equivalent would be doing overview of current frameworks. Or learning about bitcoin where you are going through math, design, algorithm, economics considerations and social consideration. Or security where you jump between modeling, attack, defense and tradeoffs.
Or simply linking libraries to ideas for applications, and explaining how they fit together to provide end user functionality.
I started using one to learn Erlang, and have found it incredibly helpful. Going down a wikipedia-style rabbit hole of my own notes is cool, like I'm exploring my own brain. Sometimes I completely forget how something works, and when I look up the note I took I just have to read a few of my own words to immediately remember it all.
I will say though that progress actually feels pretty slow compared to my usual strategy of just reading through books and articles once or twice, and then web searching whenever I forget something. But I guess that just has more to do with meticulous note-taking in general rather than the "zettelkasten" thing.
> you've already grokked a a for loop in other languages, and you gain nothing by creating a new linked note under the 'for loop construct' heading
So don't do that. Your notes are for you and you only. If you write useless notes, then the notes will be useless. Just write down what you think you might have trouble remembering later.
I don't have experience with Zettelkasten, but after reading this article I'm imagining using it for studying algorithms in general and physics simulations in particular.
It even might be more useful than you think for learning languages. For example, the return expression in Haskell might look like a return statement from an imperative language, and might even be used in a similar way, but under the hood the two have nothing in common. There's a significant amount of foundational knowledge you need before you can jump in and start doing practice problems.
I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how I’m going to use it someday.
> Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.
My translation:
> Already today the book, as tought by academia, is obsolete as transmitting information between two card file systems. Anything of substance is in the Zettelkasten of the researcher, who wrote it, and the scholar, who studies it, assimilates it in his own card file.
[0] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Alles-Wesentliche-findet-si...
I think it's possible to build a personal memex now. I'm looking at couchdb, lucene, apache tika, deno, and node.js as the initial set of tools to mash together and expose through the browser. CouchDB and Lucene will be used for persisence and searching along with Apache Tika for extracting metadata and doing OCR on images and PDFs. Deno and Node.js will be used for executing code on the server and the client. Deno can be used for sandboxing and exposing each person's knowledge base to programmatic control by other people like a federated search engine where people can share interesting code patterns for acting on knowledge bases and exposing hidden patterns.
Combine with some basic machine learning models and you get a pretty useful personal toolkit for knowledge enhancement.
Also, a quote by another good thinker
> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. - Alfred North Whitehead
You can keep doing that, looping. People who are natural contingency planners do this all the time--they map their past onto future-self. Flexing this muscle because it's strongest.
However this is also a good way of preventing yourself from re-exploring new objects through a different lens.
Or asking people, "here's what I tried--what are you doing differently?"
If you can treat it as a skill with unlimited outcomes per-experience, rather than a forced repetition of past-self, you get a huge mental plasticity bonus. Once you've gotten to that point you can also find yourself building your own tech with fewer crippling concerns about future outcomes. It's a great unlocking method.
Edit: ... and I checked out your profile and bookmarked your blog in my feed reader. Awesome!
there are two kinds of people:
- those who make lists and use them.
- and those who make lists and lose them.
I would say 90% of the todos and ideas I jot down and overorganize don't lead to anything. But the 10% I do - they keep the wheels from coming off my life. (to be fair, there is a very low cost of capture, and I do it all electronically)
So while I'd like to retain my knowledge and research somewhere, at the same time I don't actually use it???
But some writing I've done that will be relevant in the next years is writing ADR's (Architecture Decision Records) in my application about technology and architecture choices I've made, so I can look them up later, use it to train new people, and have a basis to challenge a decision on as well. That's more practical for my personal situation.
But maybe one day I'll be doing something more academic and will need a way to collate research and the like.
Once I start thinking about how I'm going to use the note, I go down a rabbit hole of style / format considerations and it gets in the way of the idea I was trying to capture. So now I give myself permission to just write a note and if it does need to morph into something more structured, it's only a copy-paste away to a fancier tool.
As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes intentional thought.
With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?").
Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes time.
Isn't that exactly what the point of a memex-like system is? Instead of simple X-Y links, you get 3-tuples such as (X, "can cause", Y).
For linear notes, the remedy is not really feasible, you'd have to go through everything thoroughly fixing unlinked notes.
For the 2nd, the 'failure mode' of the web note taker as you describe, that isn't really a problem. Notes are just tools/building blocks to writing or coming up with cohesive ideas/arguments. If you don't know what Y was for, its either irrelevant or you've found a gap in your knowledge you need to plug.
1. 80% note-taking value is in writing the info down in *any* form.
2. 19% is in re-reading your notes.
Note-taking changed my life. I urge people to stop chasing perfection and just get started.
1. Writing & reviewing notes is forcing the process. It is not automatic.
2. Specialized methods don't generalize well.
3. Personalized methods/notations/styles emerge naturally.
4. Nothing beats pencil-and-paper (with a lot of sketches).
5. Chasing "more efficient note-taking" is grossly counter-productive.
YMMV.
i bought the first ipad pro with pencil to replace paper for this use case, on the promise of search for handwritten notes. i thought it would be the killer app for ipad pro. instead, it's been disappointing. if only apple had improved the notes app, especially OCR/search, over time rather than regressing it.
Spoiler alert: it's all stuff your parents and teachers have told you before.
This is BY FAR the most important aspect of note taking. Just do it. Start now.
A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.
I believe this kind of work doesn’t share a lot of commonality with the research that readers of HN would do - although it is a very effective tool for some stuff we do.
I think if you’re gonna read it, don’t take it as “the one true way” to take notes. Take what you like and do what works for you.
I'm not sure what your expectations of the "normal" HN reader are but lots of people engage in stuff like creative writing, essays, general research to esoteric topics and so on.
For example I have a notebook I constantly scribble on. I've moved a portion of that scribbling to a zettlekasteln like system to a great benefit - although I just use text files and in a simple onedrive directory structure.
In this case a strange new word like Zettelkasten also caused me to look it up the first time i saw it. Which was sometime this year.
I.e. had it been appearing everywhere before, I would have looked it up earlier.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There is renewed interest.
There is now roam, a new fancy tool which does nothing new, but spreads hard with the new generation and connects well with the zettelkasten-terms. And there recently was was a book about smart notetaking, which sold somewhat well with people who seek some solution but don't know much about this space.
In light of the "graph"-craze I could imagine that we will hear more of it.
That said, it can be helpful for sourcing all kinds of stuff, but still think it is a hipster fad.
edit: some dictionaries suggest that "outliner" is a fitting translation. I don't think that is true due to the hierarchy outliners seem to require.
Once I passed 900, I counted them up and then realized that the best frameworks are those that are actively maintained, and _those_ are more likely to cause churn throughout the system. Activities like reorganization and even condensation. This resulted in a reduction in the file count, but it was definitely for the better.
The most perverse incentive IMO is when your system of organization, structure, and own-ideas is so good that you become addicted to it. You forget to ask others what they think, or what they're doing, because you want to experience and learn it for yourself. Don't tell me--I want to puzzle it out.
But as with just about any perverse incentive, you probably learn about it as you go along, especially if the system is there to help you out in the first place. And then you fix the problem.
The biggest difference was that Zettelkasten required a ton of work up-front, which made it nearly impossible for me to stick with it. BASB on the other had was more Just-in-Time based which makes it much easier to stick with.
I compared the two methods here: https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelka...
All of them were too complex, and not lightweight, cross-compatible, private/secure, or futureproof enough.
I decided to settle on the default MacOS editor using a mix of .txt/.rtf files, with extensive folder organization and the built-in tagging system. I plan on consolidating journal entries into subject categories.
Example: let’s say I learn something about investing. I write something brief about it in my \journal folder, tag it under investing, then maybe save a .pdf of the source to my \investing\temp folder.
Next, I add the new info to a note under the relevant category, such as \investing\ETFs.txt
Or, I create a new .txt/.rtf (depending my needs)
I believe tags are saved as metadata, so it should be cross-compatible.
For books, I’ll structure it as \library\broad_category \book_name\chapter_n.txt, add the relevant folder tag, and maybe add an alias/shortcut in the relevant folder. I summarize key points under relevant files such as \investing\ETFs.txt
This seems like the best method to me, but I’m open to other strategies.
I may just settle for org-mode if I end up doing a PhD because, as the top commenters pointed out, Zettelkasten is meant to be a system to link ideas within the humanities.
However, I’m focused on my professional life right now. Most of my reading material is quantitative, so my current system is fine.
I've barely scratched the surface of tiddlywiki's features, but linking ideas together is easy, in that you can link individual "ideas" (in the form of individual articles, referred to as tiddlers) from each other, and it also supports tagging, and there are built-in scripts for iterating tiddlers with chosen tags.
No affiliation, just a very happy user.
For tags, there are some packages for tagging I've come across like TMSU [1], taggo [2], dantalian [3]
I'm thinking of tagging by just having a tags folder with a txt file for each tag. You could just stick the path to files you want to "tag" in there. Then if desired, have a script to create a bunch of symlinks for a browsable tag file structure. Maybe even have some custom grep code to find specific keywords in my notes and "tag" them automatically
[1] https://github.com/oniony/TMSU [2] https://github.com/xeor/taggo [3] http://darkfeline.github.io/dantalian/
Regarding your fear of it becoming slow, the good part is that you can manipulate the tiddlers easily, so you could import them in another system, if you need to migrate.
Regarding the potential slowing and bloating of TiddlyWiki, there is this filesystem plugin to link to local external images and documents. I use as much plain text, icons and svg diagrams as possible. I also segment several tiddlywiki's - perhaps at most 7. Now I use:
* 'VR oriented development, which is very broad and can include WebXR, UE4, Quill, C++, C#, hardware, game development, cyborg antropology, psychology
* Spirituality (meditation, christian theology, hindu tantra and buddhist philosophy) and health
* Family and friends, non-violent communication
* Tasks, notetaking, journaling, habits - including shadow work journaling (semi-spiritual/psychological practice). Work or private related, there is no seperation.
Ideally TiddlyWiki could be mounted in a FUSE-like filesystem manner, more intuitive search operators or had built-in compression to make it even more speedy but it's good enough, just like my tweaked dvorak. Perfect doesn't exist. I don't complain, I love it! I can use it on my phone and on my Quest as well.
If one day my browser grinds to a halt due to a 20 Mbyte TiddliWiki I'll think of a solution then. I think at most I'm at 16 tiddlers a day on average.
Like you, I settled on just using a text editor (sublime text and atom) with Markdown files. I don't plan to render them, I just like the syntax highlighting.
I think your proposed system captures the important part of the knowledge intake, ie two levels of abstraction (writing a source note, and then connecting the new knowledge from source note to (or just dumping it in) some existing node.)
But one other idea from Christian and Sascha is to avoid folder structures, and allow the organization to develop over time. On a work topic, notes from a few guidances and presentations, plus my experiences, cluster to create a note which transcends a categorical boundary I would have erected with a folder structure.
So, the suggested alt strategy is dump everything into one folder and create clusters using other structures, as they reveal themselves to be useful.
It deals in text files and folders structured the way you describe. Cross platform and simple with some powerful plugins.
It has integrated tagging, journal, to-dos.
I have tried vim-wiki but keep coming back to Zim every time.
I don't know anything about the others, since I haven't really used a note system before, so I can't comment on them. Your system seems to violate a few of your stated concerns though (is it cross compatible?), so I'm confused as to why you find it better.
Given what it is, it's probably safe and a good idea to make the vault on top of a versioned file system, even if that's a dropbox, google drive stream folder, or backblaze folder. It's probably not too hard to get a solution that's encrypted so it's more private as well.
You probably want versioning in all cases (your manual method or Obsidian), and it doesn't negate the benefit of a system that scans and builds a graph of your knowledge provides.
It can be way more simple: I use one folder for my notes, and another one for my "sources" (linear notes on articles, books, talks, etc). Files have unique filenames (guaranteed because a timestamp is added to the name when they are created). And there's no need for structure, because I open the files with Emacs using Projectile, so I can autocomplete the filenames. If I need to search the contents of the files, full text search is also accessible and quick. All note taking programs have these features, and you don't really need much more.
I generally dislike labeling systems. My interpretation of a label is too context-dependent and liable to shift over time. I.e. "architecture" could refer to either systems architecture or building architecture. And I frequently don't think that I'll have a conflict until some day I decide I want to learn about Napoleonic architecture for some reason. And then when I separate them, I'll end up forgetting what I called the label (was it systems-architecture? tech-architecture? application-architecture?) and I end up futzing around to figure out what the label was, breaking my flow of thought.
When creating tasks, the main question that is answered is "in which contexts would I like this note to show up?". The answer to this question is completely subjective. If, for instance, you were doing research for game level design, it makes sense for the systems architecture notes to be tagged with "game engine", "achievements", "quick save", or anything else that you will want to look up later on. The Napoleonic architecture notes could be tagged as "level design", "gameplay cues", or "side quests".
As you can see, these tags would be different for every person, and that's kind of the point. Two people can read the same content, and take the same note from it, but the intended purpose could still be completely different, and that would show up in the tags.
Org mode works well, but honestly what works the absolute best in my experience are actual slips of paper in a slipcase — or 'index cards,' to use the colloquial term. I find that physically writing words with a pen aids memory, and the little notebooks that I form over time (I punch a hole in each slip, and bind them together with a metal ring, and split bundles by topic when they get too unwieldy) seem to help too.
Maybe it's a variant on the method of loci?
I number each slip when I create it, and when I need to reference it I just write [$NUMBER].
I started with a slip numbered 1. I add a new numeral whenever the topic is sufficiently different from any other topic. When a slip fits in with an existing topic, I insert it between cards, giving it a letter. So if 1 were programming languages, maybe 1a is Lisp. Then if I need to move a level down I just go back to numerals: maybe 1d3 is some notes on a Lua interpreter.
But I don't get too hung up on the numbers: as long as similar slips are just somewhat near one another, that's good enough. The goal is to accidentally run into similar thoughts (otherwise one could just number them sequentially, and not worry that card 1,467 is a Lua compiler and 1,468 is a recipe for mutton).
Unfortunately, I didn't find a single video showing the power of both Linked Notes AND Dock to Desktop, but these two show the usage of these features separately:
OneNote is easily the best note taking app out there.
Luhman's zettels weren't random thoughts or casual ideas that popped into his head during a stroll with the dog., but rather full, jargon-laden sentences that were close to publication-ready in quality, sometimes highly abstract in nature. He would take a couple dozen related zettels, arrange them on a table in sequence, rearrange them and eventually have a rough outline for an article or the chapter of a book.
Here's a random zettel from Luhmann's archive, translated by deepl.com. This is 1 out of 90,000 total:
1.6c1 "About an activity, at one time, central and centralization." -- In some ways comparable to the view of Mary Parker Follett, Dynamic Administration, p. 183ff., e.g. p. 195: "Unity is always a process, not a product." -- But she confuses unity and unifying, and says below quite correctly (p. 195): "Business unifying must be understood as a process, not as a product." -- Except, of course, that the word unity does not mean process, this dynamic view is that the process can be described as valuable and characterizes the organizational view, from the finished fake unit to the unification unit process.
Source: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
My own zettelkasten of random thoughts and casual ideas that pop into my head certainly aren't going to be compiled into a chapter of a sociology book, but I still find value in being able to connect ideas from HN posts and YouTube videos.
The products of those types of notes for me are just blog posts and interesting dinner conversations.
4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837
7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196
Definitely a trend, as 2/3 of the posts have been in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I started a simple system myself after reading the thread about them here a few weeks ago, and I have to say that it's already been useful. It reduces the lookup times from O(all of the internet) to O(just my notes).
This ^^
I use a combo of Pinboard [1] to save URLs I think I'll want to refer to in future, plus NValt [2] stored on my Jottacloud [3] for recording snppets of info and more free-form notes and for making that info available from any of my devices.
Nine times out of ten [if not 99 out of 100] however, I'll just StartPage or DDG whatever info I'm looking for, since I always have a browser open anyway.
It's also quite common that, having thus found such a nugget of info, I go to add it to my Pinboard or NValt notes for future reference, only to find it was already stored there [often years ago], if only I'd thought to "shop locally" in the first place.
Many's the time I've been about to embark on some actual "thing" I need to do [producing a piece of art, writing an article, building a web page, fixing something round the house] only to get completely sidetracked by the thought that if I just; tweak some software settings... re-organise some folders of files... dismantle and clean some piece of equipment.. first, I'll get the job done so much more efficiently. And, of course, I then spend the rest of the day doing that, instead of actually accomplishing the "thing" I set out to do, in the first place.
Should this implicate that Luhmann invented Noteboxes? Because this is absolute not the case. There are many famous Zettelkaesten from famous people. The most famous might be the Mundaneum, a kind of wikipedia in noteboxes, from around 1900.
What Luhmann did was adding basic hypertext-principles to a common note-taking-tool.
That word isn't in general use in German, and it's certainly not in general use in English. So I don't see any confusion.
No, it is not. The term was already around decades before Luhmanns birth.
> That word isn't in general use in German
Wrong.
Despite the fact that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system was pushed by just about every teacher.
The usual word is "Karteikasten", "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".
How is your own lack of knowledge relevant for this? Did you even bother to at least visit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten to educate yourself first?
> The usual word is "Karteikasten",
That is a modern synonym, but not quite the same. This is more specific for organized indexboxes.
> "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".
Those are not even the same. They are special purpose-tools with specific meaning which just happen to use index-cards and boxes in their analog version. That's like saying notebook is not a word because diary is widely used.
Does anyone know whether Pirsig got the idea from Luhmann, Luhmann from Pirsig, both from someone else, or if both invented it independently?
Regular notes are a spoon, this method may be a fork. Until you know what type of dish you're going to be eating, it's hard to advocate one utensil over another, although when in doubt, a spoon is a pretty decent universal.
See "org-roam" [1,2] (and several blog posts and youtube videos by now)
[1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam [2]: https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/
Don't miss these additional packages, which build on org-roam:
org-roam-server: better graph visualization and navigation [1]
org-roam-bibtex: Reference management in your Zettelkasten [2]
The latter, combined with org-ref and org-noter, is the most effective way I've found for taking notes on PDFs. Beautiful demo at [3].
FWIW RoamResearch has yet to implement a useful graph view, PDF annotation, or reference management. OTOH, tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily become a time-sink, and it's single-player only.
[1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server
I've started to wonder if the Emacs community should put together versions that are ready for different kinds of users out of the box. Say, a version for scholars with everything Auctex, org/org-roam, spell check, email, rss, etc already there, and a walkthrough to boot. Like a distro or spin, basically.
Here are three I'm aware of:
Scimax: https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax
Emacs Speaks Statistics: https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS
Frontmacs: https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs
So long as these approaches expose the full power of Emacs to their users, I can't imagine the UX being as rock-solid as we might expect from modern purpose-built tools (e.g. PyCharm, Overleaf, Obsidian, ...).
It might help to hide/disable most default interactive functions, which provide a huge surface area for non-Emacsers to break things. Emacs actually does this by default for a few functions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DisabledCommands
Also relevant here is wakib-keys: https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-keys.
Why? Because now instead of just writing down a note I started thinking about what terms do I want to make links and maybe go through previous notes to do the same. Of course you don't have to do that but the whole promise of the system is that the more you connect the more value you get.
I've dealt with this problem a lot (for example it's the same with going through lot's of rss feeds to categorize articles for later reading) and it's always about book keeping taking more time than an actual action.
After that I started thinking what was the most important about note for me. Actually it wasn't connections it was about the sole fact of taking a note (it has a higher chance that I'll remember it) discovery and ability to take a not from any where. A laboratory journal of sorts.
In my particular case discovery is easily covered by git grep and since I use plain markdown files I can always edit it offline with vim or online via github/gitlab web ide. Since it's only one file I don't even need to think about file names. The structure of notes is pretty well defined so it shouldn't take too much to write a script that would generate a digest for some term.
We build Emvi [1] to support that idea if you're interested.
Thoughts? It is something I wanted to try out for a while ( I currently use onenote with #(tags)).
However the application was deprecated and the "NG" version of Tomboy didn't have the same performance. I moved to OneNote for the pictures which didn't help.
I find snapping screenshots of meeting is much less helpful to memorise them than trying to filter them down to a few lines of written summary during the meeting itself. It requires more active listening rather than the practice of "let's snap all the slides in case I ever need to look at them later"
Unfortunately all the recommended apps here seem to be Electron which tend to be slow and wasteful and have poor keyboard control. I don't think this will work for me.
But in general, the practice of notetaking itself is in my opinion more important than the linking and method of storing them. It helps store information in our brain which is the fastest database we have :)
In the end, I went with a much simpler, zettelkasten-like approach. All my notes are stored in a single wiki.txt file, stored on Dropbox for easy editing and in Git for history and as a backup. The file has very little formatting, two blank lines to separate notes, a line surrounded by single blank lines for headings and a "-" for lists. New notes are always appended at the end, and my journal for the current day is always my last note. That makes it very easy to append stuff there.
I use hashtags for organization. If I consider a note relevant to an idea, i just put #ideaName in there, wherever it fits. I find connections by searching for #ideaName via the search box of my text editor.
The system is very simple, very portable and works pretty well for me.
* each file has a descriptive name that starts with an iso date
* each file is on a specific topic or idea
* you are using a text editor/IDE like vscode that has good search tools
You can search a keyword across your whole notes database and you can see immediately when the note was written to get some chronological context and see, of course, the note itself. You can scroll through the list of results to see other places where you're using that keyword.
The visual graph part the author is using is just a toy.
TLDR: any full-text-search notes database is functionally a Zettelkasten, don't stress about it, just start taking notes
One of the best parts of their videos was that every technique they were describing had multiple examples from often very different genres, or directors, or periods. The assumption was that they managed to keep all those connections in their head, but the reality was excellent note taking!
> Regular note taking sucks
It sucks the least, I tried some of note taking apps and software, then settled at some lines of shell script.
notes () {
cd ~/notes/$1
clear
ls
}
note () {
vim $@
clear
ls
}
A colleague fell for this kind of thing and lost everything when the service went bust.
One of our long-term goals is actually to try to make data ownership better than the status quo by integrating with other providers that would normally hold on to your data and instead get it back to being owned by you, all in one place.
Might I ask which service went bust? Want to make sure we don't follow in their footsteps! We're also very much trying to directly charge our users rather than relying on an additional business-facing offering to pay the bills, as we think the result is a more sustainable business (if everyone that is actively using the platform is paying for it, hypothetically we will not go bust). All of my notes (1000+) are on Supernotes, so I'm fairly invested in making sure they're always available.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-tho...)
"The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me[...]Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me."
That process eventually turned into a startup around 2010 I helped found in NYC. Good times.
The same is relevant to e-mail subjects: i many cases the subject is wide, volatile or plain lacking. It often happens the actual contents of an email I receive has nothing to do with what's there in the subject field.
As a workaround, you can have one note dedicated to all your random notes, which you can periodically review and reorganize.
On the contrary, if you are reading papers and doing research, taking notes in a meaningful way is more helpful than you would realize. The human brain tends to skip information while reading and you only realize you didn't actually understand that part when you try to write it yourself. The note-taking part doesn't actually take that much brain resources. I am not a native English speaker but I am taking my notes in English. While taking my notes I don't care about grammar or anything, I just read and write what I understood. When I finish the paper and I am comfortable with the topic, I return to my notes, fix grammars and, link them with my other notes. For example, sometimes I come up with a research idea, I make a note about it. In the future, while reading a paper, I realize some of the techniques that are described in the paper might be beneficial to that idea so I link them together.
In conclusion, it really depends on your area of work whether to take regular notes or Zettelkasten notes. Forcing your workflow to these methods might hurt your productivity but if you are a researcher I can say, it will be beneficial.
I recommend reading "How to take smart notes" book if you are interested in the topic.
I am using https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam to take my notes, https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server to visualize it.
That is, just like in a Zettelkasten, mathlore.org is a collection of items where each one is a self contained piece of mathematical knowledge that links to other items. It is designed so that the more you add to the system, the more interconnected things are, and the more useful it is.
I also decided to use tags instead of categories too. It is really cool to see the creator of Zettelkasten decided the same.
Again thanks for sharing this because I tried to find others that had researched a similar approach for storing information that I was thinking of, but I couldn't find any. Now that I know about Zettelkasten I can gain a lot of knowledge in what works well and what doesn't in this approach.
It is really cool to know that there are others that like this approach.
notes - OS -- mutexes -- concurrency - architecture -- microservices --- serverless --- MOMs
etc etc... I think it's very useful to me to keep high-level notes next to actual executable code. But perhaps most importantly is the ease with which I can replicate and reference other notes. While I'm writing out notes on concurrency with Go, I can easily reference or fully copy over my high-level concurrency notes.
It's a little bulky, and requires a bit more overhead, but I think for a software engineer it's one of the best ways to keep all your thinking in one place.
I settled instead on Google Keep because at the time I didn't have a way to backup Apple Notes. I then saw a reference to the macOS Exporter app, it works OK, and I moved to Apple Notes because I slightly prefer Apple's privacy policies.
Now, on any device (use web app for Linux) I can get to my notes and search them. I especially like the interface on iOS and iPadOS: doing a global search on everything on the device shows results for the Notes.
I do a lot of research, writing, and development and I really need an extended digital memory. I also need the process of saving information to be as fast as possible so I don't avoid doing it.
The Zettelkasten systems, like Roam, seem like there is too much up front effort.
There are too many things like folder structure, tags, and even the format of the note (plain, MD, rich) to consider during the note taking experience. There’s also an annoying separation between note editing and viewing.
You create entries (called tiddlers) and you can hide them. Then, you won't see them by default, but you can search for them.
You can also set it to show you a specific tiddler when you load the page.
Then the smartphone came and took over, and there was no good wiki-app and in the browser didn't really work. Since then I've switched to Evernote. Again more than 1000 notes without transferring the wiki to Evernote. I can get lost sometimes, and then it needs some work to clean up tags and notes.
> OneNote or even just a text file for a while, I get overwhelmed every time I open it to take a note as it is littered with stuff that I no longer need
I don't understand your problem. Evernote can be sorted on date of last access, so you always see the most recent notes on top. You don't want a collection of notes, but you want auto-archive? Isn't auto-archive the collection?
> but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.
In evernote and probably any note taking app you can open a new note and start clean.
Consider paper and pencil or ink when away from a computer.
Consider the simplest notes application that supports a wiki linking system when on a computer.
For the latter I like [nvAlt][n] which lets you write [[this]] to create a link to and a note titled ‘this’, and I hope Simplenote [implements wikilinks functionality][s] at some point.
[n]:https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
[s]:https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-macos/issues/185
This seems like an evolution of an idea that originated in the days before free text search.
If you have a personal diary which supports free text search (most hug trackers), why would you need to build structure?
ZK is mostly a Wiki, with some guidelines on how to decide when to link things, etc.
I can understand the first...but not the second if full text search was available.
Hyperlinks in Wikis are very much also structural/semantic. They are not primarily for navigation.
Imagine reading Wikipedia without the links, and where you had to use the search box for every potential link. Imagine all the noise you'd get when you'd search.
BTW, I suspect your question is more about Roam then about Zettelkasten. Don't conflate the two. Roam is a general purpose product which utilizes the power of linking. This author is merely adapting it to the Zettelkasten methodology.
If you're asking about what makes linking special in Roam: Any thing you write as a link in your notes (need not be a hashtag) - Roam will create an empty page for that link - perhaps similar to Wikipedia. You can see what notes link to it.
When you enter a date in Roam, it will create a page for that as well.
Same with hashtags.
I suppose you get a fair amount of querying power. I'm not a Roam user, so I don't know.
I believe the other thing Roam users love is that each bullet/paragraph is an independent entity that you can link to/from. So if my paragraph links to "foobar", then on the foobar page I can see which paragraph (not just which page) linked to it.
I don't think the article does a good job highlighting why people love Roam - he was focusing more on ZK. If you want a better article about the strengths of Roam, see https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam
A question about vimwikigraph while I'm at it - does it work with the markdown syntax? For instance, VimwikiCheckLinks doesn't work for me at all. And the HTML export isn't supported, although that's a minor issue since there are a million tools which can parse markdown into anything.
I will add an issue to support markdown as well, I will probably get to it this week.
I'm also developing a CLI script to visualize your zettelkasten[1]. I mainly use it to print stats, like the number of connected components and find orphaned notes.
But rather than fumbling with cards it seems like an interesting use case for AR/VR
I always thought VR/AR would be very interesting in the studying/notetaking space, are any of you working on something similar?
Here the same idea is applied to notes, and I'm pretty sure it's already been explored before (e.g. Bear app).
I feel like someone is trying to give a fancy name to an ordinary thing, so it would look like a fancy, innovative thing.
Maybe a drive to “do” and “build” - and actually doing something about that - is far more important... I’m probably not articulating this properly.
I don't know if we'll have that rich vein to mine with everyone doing things in computers. Sometimes you'll get some emails from a dead author, but letters and notes? It'll be interesting to see what variation of material gets preserved when we look back in 20-50 years.
https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
I work on a large K8s-based project. Each person may know a lot about one small part of it, but when they need to find out about an unfamiliar part, they need to trawl through Slack messages or Github issues.
I could see something like this being really useful, assuming everyone is disciplined in using it.
Tags provide a semi-structured index into unstructured data, making searching and sorting much easier.
Maybe a extension for GH wikis would work.
Thoughts?
See https://tiddlywiki.com for example.
Tools like Roam simply provide more convenient capability than a typical Wiki tool.
I've reverted just to a combination of handwritten notes and notes files written in vim (which I find enjoyable).
When I want to find things, I use the search. If I was diligent about my taxonomy, then it's effective.
Is there anything else to this system that I'm missing?
Wouldn't vimwiki basically accomplish this?
Apple notes is geared towards this without the linking but you can hashtag the topics as you write notes and the search is very good.
someone else in the comments said "isn't that what a hyperlink is for" and it reminds me of all the semantic web stuff and RDF.
makes me wonder, isn't there some search engine web crawler that graphically depicts trending websites and the pages or ideas that link to / from them?
My note box for the last little while is Dercuano: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano. The notes are longer than a single index card (there are 882 notes averaging about 1300 words each), and they are hierarchically organized into sections and subsections. They often include links to other notes or other web pages, and they also have a chronological order and a set of tags. And I frequently grep them. I kept them in Git to keep them synchronized across different computers.
Typically a single note draws from many sources, and I tried to keep their contents in a readable order, which is easier to do on a computer where you can insert stuff in the middle. Some notes are one afternoon's thoughts, while others got added to and reorganized for years. So that's one way I make connections: I add hyperlinks, new data, explanations of how and why the entire rest of a note is wrong, new sources, etc. Another is that the process of writing a note involves bringing together different ideas, since few of the notes are just summaries of things others have written.
I learned a lot writing Dercuano, but in the end I was more frustrated than effective. I have a series of paper notebooks that are much less voluminous, only a few hundred pages a year, which are worse for text and hyperlinks, but much better for drawing, even things like schematics. Computers offer the potential of doing simulation, calculation, logic, optimization, rendering, data analysis, and data integration, the things that Engelbart and Kay envisioned in the 1960s. Yet Dercuano is stuck in the textual world without even transclusion or sketches. A much better medium is possible.
And we have lots of examples: spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, observable explanations in JS, diagrams in KSeg or GeoGebra, Observablehq and all of Bostock's previous excellent work. These show us that a better medium is achievable. But incorporating such a model into a note like the ones in Dercuano maybe requires some UI work. I mean the whole revolution of VisiCalc was that you could see the results of your calculation as you changed the calculation, and that doesn't really fit well into editing text files in Emacs.
Things like Darius Bacon's Doe and Halp do go some distance toward that integration for textual output. And R-Markdown integrates statistical analysis and data visualization with text, and Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki incorporates different media types on one page, including bytebeat. And I understand that org-mode SRC blocks offer the possibility of displaying image output inline. Still, none of these seem like they can scale to interactively doing a compass-and-straightedge construction or drawing a schematic for an analog circuit. Maybe I'm dismissing them too readily?
So I'm trying to figure out what this looks like in https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo.
I suppose it is best to ask this in emacs-orgmode list.
Re: One Big Text File: About a decade ago I used it daily for everything for about a year or even longer. Strangely, it was actually working remarkably well. I like to think that over time it grows into a nice image of a person's brain. It is very flexible -- loosely structured "dump" where needed, and strictly structured on other places.
I abandoned it in favor of "one thought, one file" type of approaches, just out of curiosity, I guess; I was hoping to create a Zettelkasten That Works For Sure instead. But this never happened.
I still think One Big Text File a great, somewhat forgotten idea. It's easy to add some structure to everyday use with scripting/grep, turning it into a loosely structured database of sorts. I did less of that at the time than I initially imagined myself doing, though.
If productivity is measured against the volume of notes taken, sure. Otherwise probably not. Notes are an intermediate step to build something else, which is the real output on which productivity is usually measured.
1. Read/listen/absorb
2. Write down (or tweet) ideas it creates while you're absorbing
3. Wait
4. Create
Your mind (or at least mine) finds connections you aren't even aware of and when the time comes, when the right prompt sparks, there it is. The knowledge is ready to be used.
Use search and half remembered stuff to find direct citations and brush up on details when necessary. The internet-as-extended-noosphere metaphor works great here.