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Comment by kevinslin | Hacker News Reader

Zettelkasten was a tool designed for a very specific purpose but of late, is the proverbial hammer that is being applied to everything. As the founder of a note taking tool (dendron.so), I see lots of new users trying out PKM for the first time because they heard about zettelkastenw hen all they needed was a bullet journal instead.

This is my first time coming across LYT - thanks for the writeup!

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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 read the book and found it delivered as advertised. If you were looking for a step-by-step guide then yes that is not what you got but I found it explaine, even excessively so at times, "how to take smart notes."

I think what I was looking for was the equivalent of “Getting Things Done” that mixed the theory of why you’d want to take notes this way with an explanation of how to. The promise of Zettelkasten wasn’t so much of the taking of notes, which I thought was useful but not really life-changing, but on what to do with them afterward. After a couple hundred pages of how that kind of organization could benefit me, I really wanted to know how to achieve it.

I don't think this is in the book because this is highly personal to you and what your goals are. Sonke and Luhmann had the goal of research and writing. They use their Zettelkasten to produce research which I think Sonke explains pretty well how he does it but if you aren't interested in research or writing then that's explanation is kinda useless. So how you use it will be very dependent on why you want to use it. If you're taking notes just to take notes then you will likely not get any value out of it.

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

Thanks :)

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