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Comment by starky | Hacker News Reader

How many people actually find utility from a Zettelkasten system?

I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.

I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.

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I've written thousands of notes with just vim and the file system for over 20 years with little protocol. It's worked out great for me. Simple short text files that eventually graduated to markdown. I have folders and subfolders for top level topic hierarchy. Usually just a single level, a parent folder and then files for specific topics. It rarely goes deeper than two levels. I title everything descriptively to guide me to find what I need later. Like I said, thousands of notes spanning 20 years, never a problem.

I'm no expert, but looking from afar it seems to me that complex note-taking systems are an optimization on some anticipated theoretical future problem that seldom materializes in practice, and I think trying to squeeze those promised extra 10% of efficiency might possibly qualify as diminishing returns.

It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye to producing more, you will need to take a lot of research notes and you will inevitably organize them one way or another. If you are a working software developer, your needs are very different. I think most of the HN-blog-ecosystem-adjacent zettelkastens exist mostly for the fun of playing with information.

I don't follow this system per se, but for me the unlock was to build a a map of my life from the get go, following the PARA system (projects, areas, resources, archives). It has been a game changer because now I willingly take more notes, snip more quotes etc as it's never a struggle to know where they fit.

I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt: /template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .

It's just so easy.

Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.

I developed one for a specific personal research topic. Once I answered my question, the initiative petered out.

I've considered starting another based on the idea of getting high off knowledge. I don't see the point as an information store, but as a toy it makes sense; use it spark curiosity, make neat connections, etc.

One of the core ideas - atomicity of notes - is a practice valuable on its own, and maybe the fundamental value of Zettl. It has really helped me to reduce digital note sprawl, and a natural sort of topic taxonomy has revealed itself as I refactor notes and link between them. Ensuring that my notes are atomic means that, as I write, natural fracture lines emerge - and I follow them. I break notes up along these lines, keeping them linked if there’s a relationship - which may be parent/child, peer, or whatever.

Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.

The system also feels to me like it would be busywork for most people. I just make notes in a very unorganized way and do some cross-linking. I rely on search for actually finding things, though I feel like I can improve search by using sentence/text embeddings and some vector search.

Definitely not. I really like Obsidian, but organize everything like a book, which gives just enough structure to know where everything goes without thinking about it, and no more.

There’s just not enough there to make into a blog post.

At the least, Zettelkasten like habit can be helpful.

For me, I don't bookmark a webpage, I'm usually after a sentence or something after.

Highlighting that one sentence or webpage is a habit.

Throwing a tag or two on them isn't as hard when you can call the tags whatever you want.

After that, those topics are one click away, 5-10 years later.

Trying out Zettelkasten, or PARA, Johnny Decimal or some other system, one will work for you. It's less about perfectionism at the start and just improving.

It's also possible to have an AI just organize the folders for you little by little.

It can not be great at first to play around but the more you work at it the more it does become.

I am in the same boat. And then with full text search, I wonder how much it is truly needed.

But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.

> I just can't bring myself to go to the effort

That's what LLMs are best, actually. Go through all your stuff and painstakingly document, add tags, refer to other documents, etc

> Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information

LLMs can also separate what information was only useful at a specific time vs more perennially useful notes.

Isn't the "gardening" aspect part of it though? It's where you naturally review and mentally correlate topics, infer connections in your brain and spark new paths?

This is true. It would be beneficial to do such a task

However, if one doesn't want (or just doesn't have time) to do the task but still want a tidy cross-referenced set of notes, one could outsource to a LLM

I found it useful when writing a thesis. It gave me a way to research many ideas, not directly connected to the main topic, but still interesting in my mind at least. I really enjoyed this unstructured approach. I didn't have to worry that I will get stuck, because I always had a way back to the main topic.

So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.

I think your analysis is right, zettelkasten is really good for research, writing and well... Linking ideas together. For projects, I just have a directory with plain text notes, todos, references and links.

It comes down to are you reading to write, or reading to think?

Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.

Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.

I came to a similar conclusion. I’m just writing notes so I can remember things. I’m not writing my thesis.

At some point, these complex systems become a form of procrastination.

I got enthusiastic about ZK years ago, learned about it and decided it was not for me, it is just too much work with very little to gain from it. Just use Google Keep

It does feel very cultish, with a lot of hand-waving and very little that seems useful. No one has ever answered your question when I've asked it.

They point to Luhmann and his hundreds of academic papers. But I’ve asked two sociology professors about Luhmann and they had never heard of him.

Luhmann left behind 70,000 index cards, published over 70 books and ~400 papers, and his systems theory is still actively applied in sociology, legal theory, and organizational studies. He's required reading at German universities. Your sample size of n=2 is methodologically a little thin – which Luhmann himself would have appreciated, given that he had a particular fondness for pointing out systemic blind spots.

"Two professors hadn't heard of him" is a fascinating epistemological standard. Like me stating: I've also met two cardiologists who didn't know who Rudolf Virchow was. Guess he wasn't that productive either.

Fair enough, I missed the mark that I was intending. Possibly he remains better recognized in Germany than in North America; and it’s admittedly not my field. At the same time, more than once when I’ve posed the question about the utility of ZK, I’ve been pointed only to Luhmann. His academic productivity isn’t in dispute. And seemingly, for him, it was aided by the methodology that is promoted by ZK followers now. But it’s also an n=1 data point. I wonder if the ZK community has identified other productive and impactful academics who are devotees.

As for the last comment: having gone to medical school some decades ago and trained in cardiology, I’m familiar with Virchow. I would be surprised to encounter any physician who hadn’t any familiarity with him. But who knows?!

Yeah, I admit, Virchow was a low hanging fruit as a cynical comparison. I stumbled upon Luhmann in school. I always wished, I had a ZK. I never got around to being disciplined enough to build one.

I also was more of an Foucault guy at university. So I never really got into Luhmann. Albeit I originally studied literature and my uni was quite cultural studies heavy - this is why I read quite a lot from other disciplines back in the days.

I feel Luhmann might be a great poster child for deferred gratification. But that might just be the cynic speaking.

[Luhmann, back from the dead]: how has my work been received?

Sociology prof: "uhhhh. Well, the good news is that there are a ton of YouTube videos about you."

the zettelkasten of niklas luhmann is currently being digitized. you can browse it online. zettelkasten II is the more interesting one.

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhalt...

Most scientists are not very well known, even in their own discipline. Their fame is usually locally and temporary, limited to which ever bubble they were roaming. Luhmann was well known in Parts of Europe and South-american, and died ~30 years ago. Not unusual for someone today to never heard of him if they are living in other regions.

I remember doing some research on this topic, and, when I looked for usage patterns for my type of job specifically, I realized that most people were just posting about their workflows learning about... taking notes.

I asked it since I wasn't sure if I was just my brain being the odd one out here.

I tend to just remember topics and search for them when needed. For example, I rely completely on Outlook's search to find the email from 5 years ago that I remember X person sending (and I mention Outlook specifically because surprisingly Gmail is terrible at this)

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