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Comment by ZainRiz | Hacker News Reader

I tried Zettelkasten a few months ago and I found a lot of what you said to be true. It also has a serious upfront labor overhead that really makes it hard to stick with.

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...

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I find that for myself, the ease with which I can take notes depends on the tool that I'm using. I've tried Notion and Zettlr, but both take a bit to get going.

Have you used anything that you find well suited for the tasks of either PARA or Zettelkasten?

Roam Research

great but expensive.

To be honest, they aren't even charging yet.

org-roam

Obsidian recently came up here.

Pen and paper, there is something about writing and quickly drawing diagrams using the pen that seems to be involving the right parts of my brain that seem to be asleep otherwise.

Agreed. Pen and paper is great for taking notes

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

The solution for me is to keep an index in the front or back of the notebook. Each time I write something of significance I put it in the index.

Take a look at Emvi [1]. We wrote about how you can use it as a Zettelkasten [2] even it's not build primarily for that.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...

I'm using Evernote as my main note taking tool. They've put more effort into making it easier to put notes into it than the other systems I've seen and the PARA system was designed by a guy who used Evernote so it works really well with it.

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

I have something resembling a Zettelkasten using Tiddlywiki with the Stroll plugin. I'm loving it. I feel like this system is taking me from being someone who hoards notes and never looks at them to someone who actively learns and remembers by making connections between newly-added notes and pre-existing ones in my Tiddlywiki.

https://tiddlywiki.com

https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html

Great write up, thanks!

My pleasure!

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