Zettelkasten, linking your thinking, and Nick Milo's search for ground

It's me, dude! :) (and thanks for reading!)

Thanks so much for reading. I hear great things about Dendron from those who use (and swear by) it.

I was very interested in Zettelkasten, and bought "How to Take Smart Notes". I may be one of the few people who didn't like it: it was sorely in need of an editor and could have been 1/4th the size with the same amount of information, and I think it should've been called "Why to Take Smart Notes". I wanted a how-to guide, but got a persuasion piece on why I should want to do the thing I was already interested enough in that I bought a book to learn how to do it.

Anyway, as interesting as it is, I don't see any way Zettelkasten is useful to me specifically. I get how it could be amazing for others, particularly authors, but I want knowledge retrieval more than knowledge synthesis. Basically, I need a personal wiki. I've found LYT, especially its Maps Of Content, to be an excellent resource for organizing the million and one things I want to drop into a PKM and be able to find later. For me, a web of information is much more useful than a serialization.

I don't believe it has Zettelkasten capabilities built in. You're referring to the Zettelkasten ID toggle button. In actuality, that ID was invented by the creators of Zettelkasten.de (people who I like, though disagree with on several points—I'm an analog diehard); these socalled Zettelkasten IDs are prepended with a timestamp. That's all. The originator of Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann, did not use these types of IDs at all. Unfortunately this confusion now has forked Zettelkasten into two different systems, yet they use the same term.

IMO, the digital Zettelkasten should be rebranded "Hyperlinked Notes".

And the term Zettelkasten should refer to the analog notebox system Luhmann used.

But I don't run the world, so that's what we're stuck with. For this reason I adopted the term Antinet to dilineate. (Antinet Zettelkasten).

I have tried some.

They never stuck and felt more of chores than frameworks.

I think that the first thing you need to clarify is the goal of your notes and then try some relevant system and adapt it.

Obsidian is not complicated, it's a markdown editor with optional plugins.

The workflows people imagine around them are complicated.

I use it in a way that is similar to the 16 minute video posted elsewhere in this thread, and it works well for me.

Biggest benefits for me are:

1. Finding references, before using obsidian I would recall reading something somewhere but would be unable to find the so source

2. I remember stuff I write about better. I use it a lot for work, software engineering, so I summarize new ideas and concepts as notes which makes it so much easier to remember and understand

The important part of that is that it forces me to break ideas down into manageable chunks. I can't make a note about "everything you need to know about react 18", but I can make a note about "React 18's useTransition hook prioritizes rendering of user input".

3. It's fun! I've always enjoyed writing, and always enjoyed customizing editors and IDEs, obsidian is a great fit for that. It's exclusively for so writing and organization, so now I have two main programs, my coding editor and my writing editor.

4. The program also just works really really well. Evernote is bloated and has weird updates, emacs is insanely complicated and maybe just a little bit too powerful? Roam and friends are too chaotic for me, I don't function well with 0 structure. All simple markdown programs I used lacked good syncing, although sublime text with Dropbox came close. But obsidian just syncs perfectly, and has a very performant application on all devices I use, and yes I'm crazy enough to use all three of windows, Linux and Mac os as well as mobile... I like variety

Still, a lot of what obsidian does can be achieved with alternatives. Sublime works well with Dropbox, if you're in the apple ecosystem then Apple notes is great! Regular text editors or traditional note taking apps are still very viable.

In the end it's about what you do. If you are a knowledge worker, or even more particularly a researcher/ academic you need a good solution for organizing your references, notes, ideas etc. Obsidian is a great choice for that.

Otherwise don't bother unless you find it fun or interesting.

Yeah, and sometimes it even works!

A LONG time ago now I went kinda all-in on OrgMode in emacs. I'd dabbled with emacs for years (I'm 52) but it never "took" for me as a full-time editor for lots of reasons.

However, my endless search for a proper to-do management tool eventually led me there, because what I really wanted and needed is more or less Org's whole reason for being: being able to intermingle notes and TODO items, and then being able to generate a dynamic "view" of the TODOs from across a corpus of notes.

Most Todo apps I'd tried, including lots of them based on the last big geek productivity obsession, GTD, had only paltry note features. That didn't work for me or my job AT ALL. I wanted One Trusted System, and Org gave me that.

Now, if I was coming to this need NOW I think I'd probably look more closely at linked, syncing tools like Obsidian. You can mimic the "show me my todos" thing with Obsidian, though it's less organic than with Org -- but on the other hand, Obsidian has mobile apps that are very good, and I have yet to find an iOS tool that meshes will with my work style in OrgMode. Obsidian also has a MUCH MUCH LESS ONEROUS learning curve. I love orgmode, but I would absolutely not suggest that most people undertake learning emacs just for a productivity tool. ;)

(I still don't code in it.)