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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved.

Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.

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I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do.

If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.

I do write for a living, and I found Zettelkasten too high friction to be worth using. Plus, as Cal Newport has argued, it solves the wrong problem. The whole pitch of ZK is that you can jump into your notes and quickly generate new ideas. But experienced writers and researchers rarely struggle to come up with ideas—rather, the real challenge is execution.

My guess is ZK is used primary as a very complex and tedious form of procrastination. Writing the book is hard, so instead, one can endlessly tweak and tune their notes and feel like progress is being made.

Huh, interesting! That makes sense, though.

We're all suckers for processes that promise to solve all your problems, aren't we?

I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information.

Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-wor...

I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.

Esoteric and personal are both adjectives I didn't find before to describe what Zettelkasten represents. That kind of thing that you need to visit again and again until you realize it doesn't fit to your own way of thinking

I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.

I use links, but only when important. And when I notice a really important group of pages I make an index page.

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