
Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead - 7d7n
https://eugeneyan.com/2020/04/05/note-taking-zettelkasten/
======
gas9S9zw3P9c
This seems to be a new trend now. I'm skeptical. Many of the most successful
people I know don't have complicated systems like this - instead of spending
time on optimizing note taking, they actually get stuff done. In fact, many
don't have systems at all. On the other side, most people raving about the
systems are "productivity gurus" writing articles and books, not people who
actually get stuff done or would be considered "successful" in the economic
sense.

I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical
level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp
and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there
to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used to
get stuff done.

These complex systems are the perfect excuse for procrastination because they
make you feel like you are doing something productive while you actually
aren't. Just get stuff done.

~~~
slightwinder
> Many of the most successful people I know don't have complicated systems
> like this

How do you know? Maybe their set of habits are a complicated system which they
are just not aware of being a system, thus not they are not talking about as
they consider it as natural or just obvious.

It seems to be some kind of effect of the internet that people talking about
everything leads also to people making big science and systems out of every
little detail and habit, seeking some big secret and stuff. While on the other
side you have people making up cheap solutions on the spot and throw them away
when they don't need them anymore, not calling it sytem or such.

> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical
> level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp
> and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there
> to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used
> to get stuff done.

Yes, customization is a curse. Given enough power, people ultimatly end in
corruption until they learn to wield it wisely. But wisdom does not comes
easily or fast.

> Just get stuff done.

There are always a multitude of ways to getting stuff done, but some are
faster than others, or less exhausting. Thus people aim to be smart and find
the best way, which can end in wasting more time on finding the best ways, but
also can end in saving time on the grand scale. You need enough experience to
smell which road is better and when you should leave it.

~~~
gexla
Right, iterating on your workflow is a normal part of work.

> I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical
> level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp
> and customization rabbit hole.

I think part of the issue is that people try to jump into the middle of
something which has evolved without going through that evolution themselves.
In other words, they need to go to the starting line and iterate from there
rather than pushing through to the finish line. I have seen some complex
workflows in Org mode, but those flows were built up over years.

The software analogy would be premature optimization. Developers attempting to
use tools which are meant for scaling without knowing the how or why of these
tools. If you don't know why you should use something, then you might not be
to the point where you need it.

I learn the most about how to tackle a problem once I stumble across the need
to fix the problem. The best tools are those I find when I then go in search
for the fix.

~~~
leethargo
I went through multiple stages with org-mode myself: 1) Just use it naively,
instead of the ad-hoc note-taking I did before. 2) Customize it heavily,
including a system for citation management. I definitely wasted a lot of hours
reading documentation and blog post. But I also ended up using that system for
5+ years consistently. 3) Switch to paper notebooks for calendar, tasks and
note-taking.

During 2), I often felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing list of TODOs, in
particular those that scheduled at regular intervals.

With paper notebooks, and manual migration of tasks from one month to the
next, it's easier to say "no" to things.

But, now that I've filled up three 200-page notebooks, I do struggle to find
some old notes, or even remember that they exist.

So, maybe I will revert to an org-mode based "archive" for long-term ideas.

~~~
gexla
> I often felt overwhelmed by the ever-growing list of TODOs

This is an issue with a global set of todo lists. I follow a butchered BASB
type of system. I just keep all ideas in resources folders. Todo items go in
those folders, but those are just ideas rather than actual todo items. Then do
an occasional review to determine what I want to work on. Whatever I decide
gets a folder in projects and todo items get actual deadlines. If I can't work
on it, then it gets archived and maybe I'll go back to it later. The only todo
items I'll look at are in those project folders and they make progress based
on deadlines or they get ditched.

------
tagh
It's important to keep in mind that Zettelkasten's creator was an academic in
the humanities. When I tried this system, I found it really shone when my goal
was literature review -- i.e. to weave together arguments from disparate
sources and articles, particularly when there was no quantitative or numeric
way to do that weaving (e.g. in a table).

I think that more technical and quantitative subjects do not benefit as much
from these large 'connectionist' note-taking systems. For example, if your
goal is to learn a new programming language, I don't see Zettelkasten being
particularly helpful: you've already grokked a a for loop in other languages,
and you gain nothing by creating a new linked note under the 'for loop
construct' heading. Just do some practice problems instead!

But if your goal is to compare and contrast features across many languages, or
to identify where certain software architectures are lacking, Zettelkasten
would work just fine.

~~~
ZainRiz
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...](https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelkasten-
vs-para/)

~~~
Widdlius
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?

~~~
unkulunkulu
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.

~~~
ZainRiz
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

~~~
mattalbie
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.

------
meagher
People love doing things that feel like work, but aren’t.

I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I
could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not
really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how
I’m going to use it someday.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Same; I've been using various note taking approaches over the years, but my
"problem" is that I rarely actually have to go back to a note, they are
usually only relevant for one task like e.g. writing a blog post or
implementing a feature.

So while I'd like to retain my knowledge and research somewhere, at the same
time I don't actually use it???

But some writing I've done that will be relevant in the next years is writing
ADR's (Architecture Decision Records) in my application about technology and
architecture choices I've made, so I can look them up later, use it to train
new people, and have a basis to challenge a decision on as well. That's more
practical for my personal situation.

But maybe one day I'll be doing something more academic and will need a way to
collate research and the like.

~~~
lukevp
I completely agree. Note apps are focused on categorization when 90% of note
taking is creation, not retrieval. I have a new app that’s focused on creating
notes as quickly as possible, working offline, and syncing to all your devices
(web too). I’d love to include you in the alpha we’re launching this week,
just send me an email and we’ll add you. This is open to anyone else as well!

~~~
athenot
This is why I always come back to Apple's humble Notes app after trying the
others. It's simple and dumb enough that it gets out of the way and just lets
me write notes on my mac or my phone and everything is quietly synced for
offline use.

Once I start thinking about how I'm going to use the note, I go down a rabbit
hole of style / format considerations and it gets in the way of the idea I was
trying to capture. So now I give myself permission to just write a note and if
it does need to morph into something more structured, it's only a copy-paste
away to a fancier tool.

------
knzhou
I've taken 3000 pages of notes in a linear, bullet-point fashion, and I also
keep up with education research.

As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly
details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters
is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes
intentional thought.

With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made
aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without
noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your
knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get
"X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then
what was Y for?").

Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into
hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes
time.

~~~
estoniandwarf
For Academic writing like the creator of zettelkasten was, web method is much
preferred.

For linear notes, the remedy is not really feasible, you'd have to go through
everything thoroughly fixing unlinked notes.

For the 2nd, the 'failure mode' of the web note taker as you describe, that
isn't really a problem. Notes are just tools/building blocks to writing or
coming up with cohesive ideas/arguments. If you don't know what Y was for, its
either irrelevant or you've found a gap in your knowledge you need to plug.

------
omginternets
I've come to realize that:

    
    
        1. 80% note-taking value is in writing the info down in *any* form.
    
        2. 19% is in re-reading your notes.
    

Moreover, you'll evolve a loose/informal system if you stick with it long
enough. You'll learn to read your past self. That's presumably what Herr
Luhmann did.

Note-taking changed my life. I urge people to stop chasing perfection and just
get started.

~~~
dhimes
The power of _any_ system comes when you re-organize the information in your
own mind. Reviewing might be enough to allow your brain to do it
automatically, but you can also force the process with things like concept-
maps and, apparently, this system (which seems to be a type of concept map-
but I've not used it so I'm not sure).

~~~
omginternets
Again, from one internet stranger to another, it has been my experience that:

1\. Writing & reviewing notes _is_ forcing the process. It is _not_ automatic.

2\. Specialized methods don't generalize well.

3\. Personalized methods/notations/styles emerge naturally.

4\. Nothing beats pencil-and-paper (with a lot of sketches).

5\. Chasing "more efficient note-taking" is grossly counter-productive.

YMMV.

~~~
clairity
> "4\. Nothing beats pencil-and-paper (with a lot of sketches)."

i bought the first ipad pro with pencil to replace paper for this use case, on
the promise of search for handwritten notes. i thought it would be the killer
app for ipad pro. instead, it's been disappointing. if only apple had improved
the notes app, especially OCR/search, over time rather than regressing it.

~~~
kragen
I think the Newton was actually better at that.

------
Normille
Are Zettelkasten the latest Hipster fad?

A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to
look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must
have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.

~~~
erikig
Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or Frequency Illusion is the phenomenon where
something you recently learned suddenly appears _everywhere_

~~~
codingdave
That is certainly a thing. But on HN, we really do have topical trends. When
an article gets popular, and piques our interest, people keep researching it.
And finding related topics and articles, and those also get posted. We also
see it impact the "Show HN" posts - before coronacrisis, we were seeing so
many curated job postings sites that it got to be a bit of a joke. Just in the
last couple week, we've see an uptick in blogging tools, and in the past
couple days, an uptick in data gathering sites for police action. Trends do
exist.

~~~
chrisweekly
They sure do. Is there a "HN trends" tool you're aware of?

~~~
codingdave
Not that I recall... but with all the people who participate here, I wouldn't
be surprised if someone has a project along those lines in some stage of
development. If not, it could be a fun project to try.

------
Gatsky
This looks interesting, but one potential problem with this method is that you
start treating the number of notes or the size of the graph as a success
metric. The author even notes how it is 'pleasing' to see their note graph
grow in size. This could be a perverse incentive.

~~~
ssivark
Yes, and what I find even more worrying about a densely connected graph is
that it is not easy to extract information! Lack of connections (factorizing
knowledge) is as important as noticing connections. Otherwise you'll be
swimming in connections of marginal relevance (i.e. distractions). IMHO _a
sprinkling_ of connections, resulting in a relatively sparse graph is quite
easy to make sense of. It's not easy to foresee where the optimum might be.

~~~
sooheon
You're absolutely correct, that is the dominant hyperparameter for a tool like
this. If every word was hyperlinked, it would be nonsense. The good news is we
don't need to analyze and forecast what the optimum is, we just need to ride
the bike and learn to balance.

------
ZainRiz
I recently studied both Zettelkasten and Build a Second Brain's P.A.R.A note
taking methods. They share some core principles but BASB seems much more
practical for most people

The biggest difference was that Zettelkasten required a ton of work up-front,
which made it nearly impossible for me to stick with it. BASB on the other had
was more Just-in-Time based which makes it much easier to stick with.

I compared the two methods here: [https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-
you-read-zettelka...](https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-
zettelkasten-vs-para/)

------
M5x7wI3CmbEem10
I searched for hours for a viable Zettelkasten method: org-mode, vim-org,
TiddlyWiki, Roam, Notion, Joplin, Notable, Obsidian, Zettlr.

All of them were too complex, and not lightweight, cross-compatible,
private/secure, or futureproof enough.

I decided to settle on the default MacOS editor using a mix of .txt/.rtf
files, with extensive folder organization and the built-in tagging system. I
plan on consolidating journal entries into subject categories.

Example: let’s say I learn something about investing. I write something brief
about it in my \journal folder, tag it under investing, then maybe save a .pdf
of the source to my \investing\temp folder.

Next, I add the new info to a note under the relevant category, such as
\investing\ETFs.txt

Or, I create a new .txt/.rtf (depending my needs)

I believe tags are saved as metadata, so it should be cross-compatible.

For books, I’ll structure it as \library\broad_category
\book_name\chapter_n.txt, add the relevant folder tag, and maybe add an
alias/shortcut in the relevant folder. I summarize key points under relevant
files such as \investing\ETFs.txt

This seems like the best method to me, but I’m open to other strategies.

~~~
sjy
Would you mind sharing what caused you to abandon TiddlyWiki? I like the look
of Notion and Roam, but I don’t like SaaS. I’m a few weeks into customising a
TiddlyWiki instance and I am becoming quite committed to it. It seems to have
the right balance of out-of-the-box functionality and customisability for me.
But I am a little apprehensive about finding that it gets slow after a few
years of use, or something like that.

~~~
fsiefken
Another TiddlyWiki fan here, I used to use DevonThink - which is pretty
awesome, but less portable - it only runs on MacOS and has a barebones web
frontend. I could carry or host my OSX VM anywhere, and use VNC or such, but
TiddlyWiki is much more portable as it is a self-contained html+js file
running in the browser. I loose functionality, but there's search, tagging,
linking and listing and a ton of plugins. It's good enough. I used to think of
the file system text file route as well, and there is this vimwiki, but as I'm
used to browsing and looking up information in the browser TiddlyWiki is more
convenient, and I can use SVG, mindmaps and diagrams. Emacs could be used to
with the convenience of org-mode. There is also org-brain... all this is nice
but is a bit more work and a bit less portable.

Regarding the potential slowing and bloating of TiddlyWiki, there is this
filesystem plugin to link to local external images and documents. I use as
much plain text, icons and svg diagrams as possible. I also segment several
tiddlywiki's - perhaps at most 7. Now I use:

* 'VR oriented development, which is very broad and can include WebXR, UE4, Quill, C++, C#, hardware, game development, cyborg antropology, psychology

* Spirituality (meditation, christian theology, hindu tantra and buddhist philosophy) and health

* Family and friends, non-violent communication

* Tasks, notetaking, journaling, habits - including shadow work journaling (semi-spiritual/psychological practice). Work or private related, there is no seperation.

Ideally TiddlyWiki could be mounted in a FUSE-like filesystem manner, more
intuitive search operators or had built-in compression to make it even more
speedy but it's good enough, just like my tweaked dvorak. Perfect doesn't
exist. I don't complain, I love it! I can use it on my phone and on my Quest
as well.

If one day my browser grinds to a halt due to a 20 Mbyte TiddliWiki I'll think
of a solution then. I think at most I'm at 16 tiddlers a day on average.

------
vijucat
OneNote's Linked Notes Taking does exactly this. You can combine it with the
"Dock to Desktop" / Docked Window feature which makes it hijack a part of the
desktop space (to the RHS, typically) so that you can continue to take notes
while reviewing stuff on the LHS. The window on the LHS can be another OneNote
window (or one of the other Office applications), and as you type in the RHS,
docked window, sentences are automatically linked to the page and line on the
LHS.

Unfortunately, I didn't find a single video showing the power of both Linked
Notes AND Dock to Desktop, but these two show the usage of these features
separately:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyon2RC_NIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyon2RC_NIQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_6QsFfk06s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_6QsFfk06s)

~~~
rkangel
i'm using "OneNote for Windows 10" which seems to have lost a lot of the power
features. It looks like both Dock to Desktop and Linked Notes have gone.

~~~
vijucat
Ah yes. Use OneNote 2016 (or OneNote 2010), which is free to download and use,
not the Windows App.

------
madballster
I don't think one should suggest Zettelkasten to anyone who is looking for a
simple to-do list or note taking implementation. Regular notes are perfectly
fine if one wants to take regular notes.

Luhman's zettels weren't random thoughts or casual ideas that popped into his
head during a stroll with the dog., but rather full, jargon-laden sentences
that were close to publication-ready in quality, sometimes highly abstract in
nature. He would take a couple dozen related zettels, arrange them on a table
in sequence, rearrange them and eventually have a rough outline for an article
or the chapter of a book.

Here's a random zettel from Luhmann's archive, translated by deepl.com. This
is 1 out of 90,000 total:

1.6c1 "About an activity, at one time, central and centralization." \-- In
some ways comparable to the view of Mary Parker Follett, Dynamic
Administration, p. 183ff., e.g. p. 195: "Unity is always a process, not a
product." \-- But she confuses unity and unifying, and says below quite
correctly (p. 195): "Business unifying must be understood as a process, not as
a product." \-- Except, of course, that the word unity does not mean process,
this dynamic view is that the process can be described as valuable and
characterizes the organizational view, from the finished fake unit to the
unification unit process.

Source: [https://niklas-luhmann-
archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...](https://niklas-luhmann-
archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_1_NB_1-6c1_V)

~~~
christiangenco
Goodness, that random zettel is hard to grep.

My own zettelkasten of random thoughts and casual ideas that pop into my head
certainly aren't going to be compiled into a chapter of a sociology book, but
I still find value in being able to connect ideas from HN posts and YouTube
videos.

The products of those types of notes for me are just blog posts and
interesting dinner conversations.

------
dang
See also, for your Zettelkästen needs:

4 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837)

7 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196)

Definitely a trend, as 2/3 of the posts have been in the last year:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=zettelkasten&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none)

------
Mizza
I find it very funny that all of my nerd friends are all suddenly using an
archaic German note-taking system.

I started a simple system myself after reading the thread about them here a
few weeks ago, and I have to say that it's already been useful. It reduces the
lookup times from O(all of the internet) to O(just my notes).

~~~
Normille
>reduces the lookup times from O(all of the internet) to O(just my notes).

This ^^

I use a combo of Pinboard [1] to save URLs I think I'll want to refer to in
future, plus NValt [2] stored on my Jottacloud [3] for recording snppets of
info and more free-form notes and for making that info available from any of
my devices.

Nine times out of ten [if not 99 out of 100] however, I'll just StartPage or
DDG whatever info I'm looking for, since I always have a browser open anyway.

It's also quite common that, having thus found such a nugget of info, I go to
add it to my Pinboard or NValt notes for future reference, only to find it was
already stored there [often years ago], if only I'd thought to "shop locally"
in the first place.

[1] [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in)

[2]
[https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt)

[3] [http://jottacloud.no](http://jottacloud.no)

~~~
Normille
I do sometimes wonder though; if there's an inverse correlation between
"complexity of ideas preparation" and "actually getting stuff done" and if all
these systems are the procrastinator's equivalent of the instant weight-loss
diet.

Many's the time I've been about to embark on some actual "thing" I need to do
[producing a piece of art, writing an article, building a web page, fixing
something round the house] only to get completely sidetracked by the thought
that if I just; tweak some software settings... re-organise some folders of
files... dismantle and clean some piece of equipment.. first, I'll get the job
done so much more efficiently. And, of course, I then spend the rest of the
day doing that, instead of actually accomplishing the "thing" I set out to do,
in the first place.

------
tasogare
> Though it’s still early days, adopting a Zettelkasten has been one of my
> most productive habits.

If productivity is measured against the volume of notes taken, sure. Otherwise
probably not. Notes are an intermediate step to build something else, which is
the real output on which productivity is usually measured.

~~~
Swizec
The only note taking approach that's ever worked for me:

1\. Read/listen/absorb

2\. Write down (or tweet) ideas it creates while you're absorbing

3\. Wait

4\. Create

Your mind (or at least mine) finds connections you aren't even aware of and
when the time comes, when the right prompt sparks, there it is. The knowledge
is ready to be used.

Use search and half remembered stuff to find direct citations and brush up on
details when necessary. The internet-as-extended-noosphere metaphor works
great here.

~~~
sooheon
Zettelkasten is exactly what you wrote here, with one addition. It not only
offloads querying for detail (i.e. search) to the machine, it also offloads
some connection-making. Search and lookup is internet-as-extended-memory,
links and backlinks are internet-as-serendipitous-thought.

~~~
Swizec
Ah I thought you had to explicitly create connections. That part seems like a
lot of work that my subconscious seems great at on its own

------
slightwinder
> Zettelkasten is German for “slip-box”. It originates from German sociologist
> Niklas Luhmann.

Should this implicate that Luhmann invented Noteboxes? Because this is
absolute not the case. There are many famous Zettelkaesten from famous people.
The most famous might be the Mundaneum, a kind of wikipedia in noteboxes, from
around 1900.

What Luhmann did was adding basic hypertext-principles to a common note-
taking-tool.

~~~
Tomte
"Zettelkasten" is a terminus technicus for the specific method Luhmann used.
Nobody claims that Luhmann invented rectangular paper.

That word isn't in general use in German, and it's certainly not in general
use in English. So I don't see any confusion.

~~~
slightwinder
> Zettelkasten" is a terminus technicus for the specific method Luhmann used.

No, it is not. The term was already around decades before Luhmanns birth.

> That word isn't in general use in German

Wrong.

~~~
Tomte
Believe it or not, but I'm a native speaker and I can say that I've never
heard the word in any other context.

Despite the fact that the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system)
was pushed by just about every teacher.

The usual word is "Karteikasten", "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".

~~~
slightwinder
> Believe it or not, but I'm a native speaker and I can say that I've never
> heard the word in any other context.

How is your own lack of knowledge relevant for this? Did you even bother to at
least visit
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten)
to educate yourself first?

> The usual word is "Karteikasten",

That is a modern synonym, but not quite the same. This is more specific for
organized indexboxes.

> "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".

Those are not even the same. They are special purpose-tools with specific
meaning which just happen to use index-cards and boxes in their analog
version. That's like saying notebook is not a word because diary is widely
used.

~~~
read_if_gay_
You’re defending the claim that Zettelkasten is a commonly used word. You do
that by smugly telling GP they need to go to Wikipedia to educate themselves
about it. I guess that nicely proves their point?

~~~
cycomanic
He is correct though, just because the GP has not heard of it doesn't mean it
isn't commonly used. I'm also a German native speaker and I agree the term
Zettelkasten is more common than Karteikasten. I encountered Zettelkasten when
I was in high-school a long time ago. That said the way I've encountered it
was always more as a study tool (like flashcards, or the vokabelkarten/box the
GP mentioned ) not so much for note taking, but then that's what you do in
high-school.

~~~
read_if_gay_
I’m also native (NRW), never heard of Zettelkasten before here, we just say
Karteikarten (not even -kasten). Same for a Bavarian friend of mine. Where are
you from?

------
dghf
IIRC, Robert Pirsig (author of _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ )
described pretty much exactly this method of taking and organising notes on
index cards in _Lila_ , his 1991 follow-up to _Zen ..._.

Does anyone know whether Pirsig got the idea from Luhmann, Luhmann from
Pirsig, both from someone else, or if both invented it independently?

~~~
gooseyard
hah that was my first thought as well; I've always been tempted to try it, but
I was dubious about whether I'd have the discipline to keep the cards
organized, and I feared that if I tried to make myself a piece of software to
do it that I'd get so distracted by writing the software that I'd never write
any notes. So I'm curious to give it a whirl now with someone else's software
:)

------
bowmessage
Roam looks neat. I wonder if anyone has tips on how one could use org-mode to
achieve some similar results?

~~~
ssivark
There's already an Emacs package which has become quite popular over the last
few months! :-)

See "org-roam" [1,2] (and several blog posts and youtube videos by now)

[1]: [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org-
roam) [2]:
[https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/](https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/)

~~~
dangirsh
Love org-roam. I've been heavily using it for a few months, and not looking
back.

Don't miss these additional packages, which build on org-roam:

org-roam-server: better graph visualization and navigation [1]

org-roam-bibtex: Reference management in your Zettelkasten [2]

The latter, combined with org-ref and org-noter, is the most effective way
I've found for taking notes on PDFs. Beautiful demo at [3].

FWIW RoamResearch has yet to implement a useful graph view, PDF annotation, or
reference management. OTOH, tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily
become a time-sink, and it's single-player only.

[1]: [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server](https://github.com/org-
roam/org-roam-server)

[2]: [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex](https://github.com/org-
roam/org-roam-bibtex)

[3]: [https://youtu.be/Wy9WvF5gWYg](https://youtu.be/Wy9WvF5gWYg)

~~~
nanna
> tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily become a time-sink

I've started to wonder if the Emacs community should put together versions
that are ready for different kinds of users out of the box. Say, a version for
scholars with everything Auctex, org/org-roam, spell check, email, rss, etc
already there, and a walkthrough to boot. Like a distro or spin, basically.

~~~
dangirsh
There are a few projects that do this, but I think there's certainly room for
more. I'd love to see one focused on using the Zettelkasten method.

Here are three I'm aware of:

Scimax:
[https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax](https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax)

Emacs Speaks Statistics: [https://github.com/emacs-
ess/ESS](https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS)

Frontmacs:
[https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs](https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs)

So long as these approaches expose the full power of Emacs to their users, I
can't imagine the UX being as rock-solid as we might expect from modern
purpose-built tools (e.g. PyCharm, Overleaf, Obsidian, ...).

It might help to hide/disable most default interactive functions, which
provide a huge surface area for non-Emacsers to break things. Emacs actually
does this by default for a few functions:
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DisabledCommands](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DisabledCommands)

Also relevant here is wakib-keys: [https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-
keys](https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-keys).

~~~
nanna
Thank you! Good pointers indeed.

------
can3p
I tried roam research and org roam only to find out that the overhead of
managing notes quickly started preventing me from taking notes in the first
place.

Why? Because now instead of just writing down a note I started thinking about
what terms do I want to make links and maybe go through previous notes to do
the same. Of course you don't have to do that but the whole promise of the
system is that the more you connect the more value you get.

I've dealt with this problem a lot (for example it's the same with going
through lot's of rss feeds to categorize articles for later reading) and it's
always about book keeping taking more time than an actual action.

After that I started thinking what was the most important about note for me.
Actually it wasn't connections it was about the sole fact of taking a note (it
has a higher chance that I'll remember it) discovery and ability to take a not
from any where. A laboratory journal of sorts.

In my particular case discovery is easily covered by git grep and since I use
plain markdown files I can always edit it offline with vim or online via
github/gitlab web ide. Since it's only one file I don't even need to think
about file names. The structure of notes is pretty well defined so it
shouldn't take too much to write a script that would generate a digest for
some term.

~~~
marvinblum
The part about "just write it down" is the most important. Connecting
information as you go can add value to the knowledge base, but writing down
everything that's important is the first step and the tool you use should
support that. I think the book keeping part is more of a personal thing and
some people feel that they need to do it and others do not. I for myself
"separate" notes into problem domains (when I think about them I have a
broader topic in mind) and connect all the notes that belong to the same topic
when I see fit. That greatly reduces the book keeping part and I can add
connections as I go.

We build Emvi [1] to support that idea if you're interested.

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

------
Kosirich
It might sound kinda weird, but I see Azure DevOps Boards (or similar) as an
ideal system for implementing this. Why: 1) Small notes via User Stories (or
tasks) 2) Has linking capabilites 3) Has TAGs 4) Visual representation of
LINKS 5) Most of the grind associated with doing this via other systems is
removed 6) Free & you can download the data in .csv if needed

Thoughts? It is something I wanted to try out for a while ( I currently use
onenote with #(tags)).

------
GekkePrutser
I used to do all my notetaking in Tomboy. It had very few features (no
embedding of pictures even) but it was lightning-fast and you could add links
on the go just by typing them. One of the big benefits was that there were
keyboard shortcuts for literally everything.

However the application was deprecated and the "NG" version of Tomboy didn't
have the same performance. I moved to OneNote for the pictures which didn't
help.

I find snapping screenshots of meeting is much less helpful to memorise them
than trying to filter them down to a few lines of written summary during the
meeting itself. It requires more active listening rather than the practice of
"let's snap all the slides in case I ever need to look at them later"

Unfortunately all the recommended apps here seem to be Electron which tend to
be slow and wasteful and have poor keyboard control. I don't think this will
work for me.

But in general, the practice of notetaking itself is in my opinion more
important than the linking and method of storing them. It helps store
information in our brain which is the fastest database we have :)

~~~
avian
Another former user of Tomboy here, back from the GNOME 2 era. I think I ran
it for a good while after the .deb was removed from official repositories. I'm
just using paper notebooks now.

------
alexashka
I think it's important to identify what your goal is, _before_ deciding which
note taking system works for you.

Regular notes are a spoon, this method may be a fork. Until you know what type
of dish you're going to be eating, it's hard to advocate one utensil over
another, although when in doubt, a spoon is a pretty decent universal.

------
miki123211
99% of the notetaking tools I've tried were completely inaccessible for screen
readers.

In the end, I went with a much simpler, zettelkasten-like approach. All my
notes are stored in a single wiki.txt file, stored on Dropbox for easy editing
and in Git for history and as a backup. The file has very little formatting,
two blank lines to separate notes, a line surrounded by single blank lines for
headings and a "-" for lists. New notes are always appended at the end, and my
journal for the current day is always my last note. That makes it very easy to
append stuff there.

I use hashtags for organization. If I consider a note relevant to an idea, i
just put #ideaName in there, wherever it fits. I find connections by searching
for #ideaName via the search box of my text editor.

The system is very simple, very portable and works pretty well for me.

~~~
kragen
Raman uses org-mode with emacspeak, last I heard. He reports it's the first
thing he's found that beats raw HTML for writing HTML.

------
john4532452
One datapoint of a power user using this method
[https://braindump.jethro.dev/](https://braindump.jethro.dev/)

~~~
h0p3
Related, [https://philosopher.life/](https://philosopher.life/) and
[https://sphygm.us/](https://sphygm.us/) may be worth checking out too.

------
chadlavi
It's completely possible to achieve the same connection with a git repo of
simple markdown files if you make sure:

* each file has a descriptive name that starts with an iso date

* each file is on a specific topic or idea

* you are using a text editor/IDE like vscode that has good search tools

You can search a keyword across your whole notes database and you can see
immediately when the note was written to get some chronological context and
see, of course, the note itself. You can scroll through the list of results to
see other places where you're using that keyword.

The visual graph part the author is using is just a toy.

TLDR: any full-text-search notes database is functionally a Zettelkasten,
don't stress about it, just start taking notes

------
tugberkk
A CRUD system where every post is a page, and every post can link to other
posts in form of (look: topic) can help tremendously. I think that this is an
improved form of Zettelkasten. For every topic there will be a timestamped
post, unlimited.

~~~
elbear
That's how I'm using Tiddlywiki basically.

------
Cogito
I have no idea what system they used (if any) but this reminded me a lot of
how 'Every Frame a Painting' [0] described their note-taking when watching
films.

One of the best parts of their videos was that every technique they were
describing had multiple examples from often very different genres, or
directors, or periods. The assumption was that they managed to keep all those
connections in their head, but the reality was excellent note taking!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting](https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting)

~~~
boraoztunc
Best channel ever. Miss them so much.

------
entha_saava
I think most of these 'advanced' note taking features (even interlinking when
used pervasively) distract more than it helps.

> Regular note taking sucks

It sucks the least, I tried some of note taking apps and software, then
settled at some lines of shell script.

    
    
        notes () {
            cd ~/notes/$1
            clear
            ls
        }
    
        note () {
            vim $@
            clear
            ls
        }
    

This works surprisingly well for most purposes, along with syntax highlighting
for markdown. I sometimes wish it had interlinking and images, but I haven't
come across a situation where I needed it.

------
fastball
I'm building a knowledge-base / note-taking platform[1] built around digital
notecards rather than documents. One of the things we found is that
Zettelkasten is great, but it can shoehorn you into a certain organization
method when sometimes it doesn't make sense. So we also allow multi-parent
nesting and tagging as powerful ways to organize your notes.

[1] [https://supernotes.app](https://supernotes.app)

~~~
limomium
I will most certainly not hand something as vital to me as my notes to some
unrealiable cloud provider that advertises "no commitments" and provides no
guarantees for persistence!

A colleague fell for this kind of thing and lost everything when the service
went bust.

~~~
fastball
That's fair. Our platform is built around markdown, and you already have the
ability to export all of your cards at once in that format. Of course, you
lose the structure that we provide between those notes (whether nesting or
zettelkasten), but that is also something we are actively working on to make
sure that your data stays portable and accessible forever (also working to
include more export formats in general). It is difficult though, as no one
else supports both multi-parent nesting and zettelkasten like Supernotes does,
so your data does lose some functionality if taken off the platform.

One of our long-term goals is actually to try to make data ownership _better_
than the status quo by integrating with other providers that would normally
hold on to your data and instead get it back to being owned by you, all in one
place.

Might I ask which service went bust? Want to make sure we don't follow in
their footsteps! We're also very much trying to directly charge our users
rather than relying on an additional business-facing offering to pay the
bills, as we think the result is a more sustainable business (if everyone that
is actively using the platform is paying for it, hypothetically we will not go
bust). All of my notes (1000+) are on Supernotes, so I'm fairly invested in
making sure they're always available.

------
xseparator
This reminds me of a piece Stephen Johnson once wrote for the New York Times
called "Tool for Thought", which described his process using DEVONthink
software.

([https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-
tho...](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-
thought.html))

"The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and
notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past
decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that
have influenced me[...]Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book,
which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write
a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for
interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the
software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly,
a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that
triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile,
still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the
chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association
in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select
that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to
it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the
trail of associations the machine had assembled for me."

That process eventually turned into a startup around 2010 I helped found in
NYC. Good times.

------
qwerty456127
By the way, what I hate about most of the note-taking apps is they usually
require or push you to give every note a title. C'mon, people, do you invent a
title for every note you would write on a paper or a sticky?

The same is relevant to e-mail subjects: i many cases the subject is wide,
volatile or plain lacking. It often happens the actual contents of an email I
receive has nothing to do with what's there in the subject field.

~~~
livesinhel
I share your frustration. However, it makes sense, if you think about it.
Having to give a note a title makes you think it through, and with
Zettelkasten you can easily split it into many atomic notes, each covering
their own thing.

As a workaround, you can have one note dedicated to all your random notes,
which you can periodically review and reorganize.

------
goktugk97
I would say if your workflow is not research-centric where you only implement
software, these kinds of methods are not necessary. Only simple note-taking
would suffice to ease your brain.

On the contrary, if you are reading papers and doing research, taking notes in
a meaningful way is more helpful than you would realize. The human brain tends
to skip information while reading and you only realize you didn't actually
understand that part when you try to write it yourself. The note-taking part
doesn't actually take that much brain resources. I am not a native English
speaker but I am taking my notes in English. While taking my notes I don't
care about grammar or anything, I just read and write what I understood. When
I finish the paper and I am comfortable with the topic, I return to my notes,
fix grammars and, link them with my other notes. For example, sometimes I come
up with a research idea, I make a note about it. In the future, while reading
a paper, I realize some of the techniques that are described in the paper
might be beneficial to that idea so I link them together.

In conclusion, it really depends on your area of work whether to take regular
notes or Zettelkasten notes. Forcing your workflow to these methods might hurt
your productivity but if you are a researcher I can say, it will be
beneficial.

I recommend reading "How to take smart notes" book if you are interested in
the topic.

I am using [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam](https://github.com/org-
roam/org-roam) to take my notes, [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-
server](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server) to visualize it.

------
CatsAreCool
Thanks for sharing this. I had not heard of Zettelkasten, but it is just like
the site [https://mathlore.org](https://mathlore.org) I created to help people
collect math knowledge to study, learn, and explore mathematics.

That is, just like in a Zettelkasten, mathlore.org is a collection of items
where each one is a self contained piece of mathematical knowledge that links
to other items. It is designed so that the more you add to the system, the
more interconnected things are, and the more useful it is.

I also decided to use tags instead of categories too. It is really cool to see
the creator of Zettelkasten decided the same.

Again thanks for sharing this because I tried to find others that had
researched a similar approach for storing information that I was thinking of,
but I couldn't find any. Now that I know about Zettelkasten I can gain a lot
of knowledge in what works well and what doesn't in this approach.

It is really cool to know that there are others that like this approach.

~~~
feanaro
Interestingly, the same thing happened to me when I was designing my note-
taking system. I made most of those design decision only to find about
Zettelkasten later. It definitely feels like it is some sort of design space
minimum.

------
carterklein13
I've found that as a software engineer, the best note-taking medium for me is
just one massive GitHub repo. It takes a bit of extra planning and oftentimes
a bit of reorganizing to keep things in the right place, but I feel like as a
software engineer it's the one place I can truly keep all my relevant notes in
one place. I can keep code snippets along with markdown notes files along with
little hello world apps I build out.

notes \- OS \-- mutexes \-- concurrency \- architecture \-- microservices \---
serverless \--- MOMs

etc etc... I think it's very useful to me to keep high-level notes next to
actual executable code. But perhaps most importantly is the ease with which I
can replicate and reference other notes. While I'm writing out notes on
concurrency with Go, I can easily reference or fully copy over my high-level
concurrency notes.

It's a little bulky, and requires a bit more overhead, but I think for a
software engineer it's one of the best ways to keep all your thinking in one
place.

------
suref
To me the most important thing in notes is to find what you want easily.
Because of this I think having some sort of online system is needed, otherwise
if you have the notes at different places you will in the end give up on it
and also tags and search is a huge advantage. But in the end I don't think
there are one system that fits all, Zettelkasten might work for some people
while others want it another way, this hypothesis is strengthened by the
continuous output of new notes software. For this reason I created my own
system, fitting _my_ needs. As a coder I chose markdown to also have the
functionality to add snippets and search those snippets. The markdown
documents stays in a folder type structure to organize the content and be able
to use the vs code command cmd+p that I'm very used to. This works for me,
[https://www.theorylog.com](https://www.theorylog.com).

~~~
fishmaster
That looks good.

~~~
suref
Thanks, have worked out so far.

------
mark_l_watson
I have invested a lot of time and thought in organizing my notes, including
writing an Evernote mini-clone in Clojure and Clojurescript (with a Javascript
Firefox plugin for capturing stuff on the web) many years ago.

I settled instead on Google Keep because at the time I didn't have a way to
backup Apple Notes. I then saw a reference to the macOS Exporter app, it works
OK, and I moved to Apple Notes because I slightly prefer Apple's privacy
policies.

Now, on any device (use web app for Linux) I can get to my notes and search
them. I especially like the interface on iOS and iPadOS: doing a global search
on everything on the device shows results for the Notes.

I do a lot of research, writing, and development and I really need an extended
digital memory. I also need the process of saving information to be as fast as
possible so I don't avoid doing it.

The Zettelkasten systems, like Roam, seem like there is too much up front
effort.

------
monkeydust
Just starting out with Obsidian.md for note taking, going well so far. Love
the link connections.

------
larschdk
Is there a note taking tool that fully separates taking the note from the
organizing (filing) and auto-archives everything? After using any tool, e.g.
OneNote or even just a text file for a while, I get overwhelmed every time I
open it to take a note as it is littered with stuff that I no longer need. I
want a tool that only shows me what I'm working on. I don't want to build a
collection of notes. I want to record my thoughts and be able to retrieve them
later, optionally organize some things for easier access. The rest should be
auto-archived by default. I use a college notepad this way, but found no tool
that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.

~~~
mtsr
Maybe something like devonthink? It’s not really clean slate every time, but
it links notes automatically through use of word vectors and similarity.

~~~
disposedtrolley
DevonThink doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve been using it for the past few
months and find it immensely useful for organising documents and other media,
but it’s a very average note taking experience.

There are too many things like folder structure, tags, and even the format of
the note (plain, MD, rich) to consider during the note taking experience.
There’s also an annoying separation between note editing and viewing.

------
hypertexthero
Creativity is just connecting things together.

Consider paper and pencil or ink when away from a computer.

Consider the simplest notes application that supports a wiki linking system
when on a computer.

For the latter I like [nvAlt][n] which lets you write [[this]] to create a
link to and a note titled ‘this’, and I hope Simplenote [implements wikilinks
functionality][s] at some point.

[n]:[https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)

[s]:[https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-
macos/issues/185](https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-macos/issues/185)

------
sandGorgon
In terms of an actual product, this is a note with clickable hashtags ?

This seems like an evolution of an idea that originated in the days before
free text search.

If you have a personal diary which supports free text search (most hug
trackers), why would you need to build structure?

~~~
BeetleB
That's kind of like asking why one needs hypertext when a single text file
should suffice. The fact that one is linking adds structure, and a simple text
search will not be easy.

ZK is mostly a Wiki, with some guidelines on how to decide when to link
things, etc.

~~~
sandGorgon
hyperlinks are relevant for navigation. here hyperlinks (as hashtags) are used
for discovery.

I can understand the first...but not the second if full text search was
available.

~~~
BeetleB
> hyperlinks are relevant for navigation. here hyperlinks (as hashtags) are
> used for discovery.

Hyperlinks in Wikis are very much also structural/semantic. They are not
primarily for navigation.

Imagine reading Wikipedia without the links, and where you had to use the
search box for every potential link. Imagine all the noise you'd get when
you'd search.

BTW, I suspect your question is more about Roam then about Zettelkasten. Don't
conflate the two. Roam is a _general purpose_ product which utilizes the power
of linking. This author is merely adapting it to the Zettelkasten methodology.

If you're asking about what makes linking special in Roam: Any thing you write
as a link in your notes (need not be a hashtag) - Roam will create an empty
page for that link - perhaps similar to Wikipedia. You can see what notes link
to it.

When you enter a date in Roam, it will create a page for that as well.

Same with hashtags.

I suppose you get a fair amount of querying power. I'm not a Roam user, so I
don't know.

I believe the other thing Roam users love is that each bullet/paragraph is an
independent entity that you can link to/from. So if my paragraph links to
"foobar", then on the foobar page I can see which paragraph (not just which
page) linked to it.

I don't think the article does a good job highlighting why people love Roam -
he was focusing more on ZK. If you want a better article about the strengths
of Roam, see
[https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam](https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam)

------
stippenplan
Personally, I am a big fan of Vim-Wiki [0]. Provides basic note taking, can be
reached anywhere from Vim. It is great for jotting down TODOs, while it is
also suited for more substantial, longer thoughts. You can add links to other
notes as references, or just for quick navigation. These internal links can
then be visualised, to highlight the connection between your notes and
thoughts [1].

[0] [https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki)

[1]
[https://github.com/maxvdkolk/vimwikigraph](https://github.com/maxvdkolk/vimwikigraph)

~~~
pundurs
Yeah, agreed about vimwiki. I've been using it as a knowledge base for years,
for quick snippets, ideas, article/book synopsis and notes etc. And the fact
that you can interlink them conveniently is a big upside.

A question about vimwikigraph while I'm at it - does it work with the markdown
syntax? For instance, VimwikiCheckLinks doesn't work for me at all. And the
HTML export isn't supported, although that's a minor issue since there are a
million tools which can parse markdown into anything.

~~~
stippenplan
So far it does not support markdown syntax yet. I made it over the weekend,
and as my vimwiki uses the vimwiki syntax, I started out with that.

I will add an issue to support markdown as well, I will probably get to it
this week.

~~~
stippenplan
Added basic markdown syntax style support to vimwikigraph.

------
BasilPH
I personally found the archive[0] an excellent software to get started with a
Zettelkasten. The forum and the blog posts on the site are great.

I'm also developing a CLI script to visualize your zettelkasten[1]. I mainly
use it to print stats, like the number of connected components and find
orphaned notes.

[0] [https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-
archive/)

[1] [https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel](https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel)

------
johnminter
One needs to find a note-taking tool that fits one's workflow. I do a lot of
analysis using R and compose many documents in Rmarkdown using R-Studio. I
keep a git repository with "tips" \- one Rmarkdown document per subject area
and master document that links all the others. I can access my notes from any
computer and it is easy to keep them in sync. Like Zettelkasten's creator,
writing (and editing) these help refine my thinking.

------
zez
Interesting, I keep coming across the technique but have yet to give a a try,
I enjoy the thought of linking notes especially cross concept/domain which I
can imagine aids in learning and saving to both short/long term memory

But rather than fumbling with cards it seems like an interesting use case for
AR/VR

I always thought VR/AR would be very interesting in the studying/notetaking
space, are any of you working on something similar?

------
potas
It looks like a simple tagging system with extra steps. Pretty much all modern
blogs and social networks have tags/hashtags. You can also refer to other
posts with links.

Here the same idea is applied to notes, and I'm pretty sure it's already been
explored before (e.g. Bear app).

I feel like someone is trying to give a fancy name to an ordinary thing, so it
would look like a fancy, innovative thing.

------
codeisawesome
I found it interesting to consider that the people who leave lasting impact
and legacy on the world, don’t have extensive note-taking or organisation
systems (like I am anxiously given to do) or whatever else. That’s not what we
remember them for.

Maybe a drive to “do” and “build” - and actually doing something about that -
is far more important... I’m probably not articulating this properly.

~~~
jasonv
If I think about writers and scientists, I think about their archives being
homed at universities and such. I'm always kind of amazed that certain artists
(writers, painters, etc) end up with volumes of letters that sometimes get
published after they've passed on.

I don't know if we'll have that rich vein to mine with everyone doing things
in computers. Sometimes you'll get some emails from a dead author, but letters
and notes? It'll be interesting to see what variation of material gets
preserved when we look back in 20-50 years.

------
dschramm
Nice to see that the "Zettelkasten" is getting more and more attention. We
published an article about it on our blog a couple of months ago as well:

[https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-
productivity-t...](https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-
tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv)

------
kitd
Does this work well for teams? Or does anyone know of a version of this that
would do so?

I work on a large K8s-based project. Each person may know a lot about one
small part of it, but when they need to find out about an unfamiliar part,
they need to trawl through Slack messages or Github issues.

I could see something like this being really useful, assuming everyone is
disciplined in using it.

~~~
vvillena
Isn't that what wikis are for? Just remember to avoid creating hierarchies,
and focus on making information accessible in 2 ways: search, and links
between pages.

~~~
kitd
Wikis get you most of the way there, but they're missing tagging, which is the
differentiating feature of Zettelkasten, it seems to me.

Tags provide a semi-structured index into unstructured data, making searching
and sorting much easier.

Maybe a extension for GH wikis would work.

~~~
detaro
Most wiki systems have categories you can use like tags and the ability to
list pages linking a page, which you can also can use for tags (i.e. if you
want to use the category mechanism for hierarchical categories).

------
Kosirich
It might sound kinda weird, but I see Azure DevOps Boards (or similar) an
ideal system for implementing this. Why: 1) Small notes via User Stories (or
tasks) 2) Has linking capabilites 3) Has TAGs 4) Visual representation of
LINKS 5) Most of the grind associated with doing this via other systems is
removed 6) Free & you can download the data in .csv if needed

Thoughts?

------
Siddharth_joshi
I have followed a somewhat similar technique to zettelkasten-technique for
cross-referencing information, and it has really helped deriving substantial
perspective on the information presented. Hence, I believe this approach helps
relate/recall conceptual relationships while re-visiting those notes at a
later time.

------
sharker8
This is not a cure-all. I started one, and much like a todo list, it stressed
me out to look at the pile of cards.

------
danboarder
I would like to understand how this note taking method is different than a
hypertext wiki for notes? (e.g. TiddlyWiki) It seems very similar to use based
on glancing through the examples in the article.

See [https://tiddlywiki.com](https://tiddlywiki.com) for example.

~~~
BeetleB
You can implement ZK with a Wiki. ZK is simply a Wiki with discipline about
how you create pages, link, etc. Kind of like asking how GTD is any different
from a TODO list. It's just a more structured TODO list.

Tools like Roam simply provide more convenient capability than a typical Wiki
tool.

------
pmdulaney
I started using the Zettelkasten approach for a side project (using The
Archive) and it has a lot going for it, but one big minus: It felt like work
rather than something fun.

I've reverted just to a combination of handwritten notes and notes files
written in vim (which I find enjoyable).

------
cheschire
I make sure to link my OneNote pages together by simply right clicking on a
page and copying the link, then pasting it into another page.

When I want to find things, I use the search. If I was diligent about my
taxonomy, then it's effective.

Is there anything else to this system that I'm missing?

------
passer_chen
I'm using VSCode/Markor to write notes and I'm using ripgrep to find the
things I want to recall, it's straightforward and easy to maintain. The method
used in this post isn't particularly convenient in mobile device.

------
BenGosub
I am doing my daily journal in Roam and it's very practical. Marketing or no
marketing I think that the personal knowledge base is always best represented
as a graph.

------
mgualt
Is there a handwritten (stylus) notes software which can be used for this type
of linking? I'm not talking about OCR, but handwritten/drawn as default
format.

------
keyle
Isn't this how everyone takes notes?

Apple notes is geared towards this without the linking but you can hashtag the
topics as you write notes and the search is very good.

------
kentosi
I'm finding this a concept a little hard to understand, but it vaguely sounds
like a system involving hyperlinkable notes.

Wouldn't vimwiki basically accomplish this?

------
jimothyhalpert7
How is this different to \- making a note for every idea in an article \-
putting a hashtag of the article name and the idea name in the note ?

------
wendyshu
There's some optimal place between writing nothing down and writing everything
down. I don't think this is that optimal place.

------
auggierose
Don't know how these systems work, but I can recommend Quiver for note-taking.
You can link to other notes from within notes.

~~~
auggierose
Oh, I actually have "How to take smart notes" in my library ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
andi999
If I take a note, then I shd cross reference it. But how do I find the cross
reference? Do I have to remember it? Anybody help?

------
KayL
Zettelkasten looks like a blogging system for notes, isn't it? Write a piece
of notes and tagging it.

------
DevKoala
Use a system that lets you add tags to your notes for quick indexing.

------
matesz
I wonder what Ted Nelson would say to that :)

~~~
weswpg
"Project Xanadu" Ted Nelson? as i understand it he's known for sinking decades
of work into his vision while the modern internet developed instead

someone else in the comments said "isn't that what a hyperlink is for" and it
reminds me of all the semantic web stuff and RDF.

makes me wonder, isn't there some search engine web crawler that graphically
depicts trending websites and the pages or ideas that link to / from them?

------
BiteCode_dev
Isn't what hypertext links are for ?

------
wruza
That is a mindmap, isn’t it?

------
kragen
Maybe a description of my notetaking practice will be useful to others. I
don't know if this is strictly a "Zettelkasten" or not.

My note box for the last little while is Dercuano:
[http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano](http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano).
The notes are longer than a single index card (there are 882 notes averaging
about 1300 words each), and they are hierarchically organized into sections
and subsections. They often include links to other notes or other web pages,
and they also have a chronological order and a set of tags. And I frequently
grep them. I kept them in Git to keep them synchronized across different
computers.

Typically a single note draws from many sources, and I tried to keep their
contents in a readable order, which is easier to do on a computer where you
can insert stuff in the middle. Some notes are one afternoon's thoughts, while
others got added to and reorganized for years. So that's one way I make
connections: I add hyperlinks, new data, explanations of how and why the
entire rest of a note is wrong, new sources, etc. Another is that the process
of writing a note involves bringing together different ideas, since few of the
notes are just summaries of things others have written.

I learned a lot writing Dercuano, but in the end I was more frustrated than
effective. I have a series of paper notebooks that are much less voluminous,
only a few hundred pages a year, which are worse for text and hyperlinks, but
much better for drawing, even things like schematics. Computers offer the
potential of doing simulation, calculation, logic, optimization, rendering,
data analysis, and data integration, the things that Engelbart and Kay
envisioned in the 1960s. Yet Dercuano is stuck in the textual world without
even transclusion or sketches. A much better medium is possible.

And we have lots of examples: spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, observable
explanations in JS, diagrams in KSeg or GeoGebra, Observablehq and all of
Bostock's previous excellent work. These show us that a better medium is
achievable. But incorporating such a model into a note like the ones in
Dercuano maybe requires some UI work. I mean the whole revolution of VisiCalc
was that you could see the results of your calculation as you changed the
calculation, and that doesn't really fit well into editing text files in
Emacs.

Things like Darius Bacon's Doe and Halp do go some distance toward that
integration for textual output. And R-Markdown integrates statistical analysis
and data visualization with text, and Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki
incorporates different media types on one page, including bytebeat. And I
understand that org-mode SRC blocks offer the possibility of displaying image
output inline. Still, none of these seem like they can scale to interactively
doing a compass-and-straightedge construction or drawing a schematic for an
analog circuit. Maybe I'm dismissing them too readily?

So I'm trying to figure out what this looks like in
[https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo](https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo).

~~~
marttt
Very interesting. I suppose when you use this every day, you actually won't
get "lost" within it. Also, this kind of links to the One Big Text File idea
(discussed here and there quite often in around 2005-2006, see e.g.
[http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-
tex...](http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-text-file-a-
poor-mans-wikiblogpim.html)).

~~~
kragen
Yeah, Danny O'Brien is a friend of mine, and we discussed the idea a bit at
the time. I feel like it might be easier to not get lost with the file divided
into units smaller than a megabyte though. Does org-mode scale up to files
with 10,000 headings?

~~~
marttt
Interesting question. I did some research, but couldn't figure this out. I did
find a reddit thread where org's performance with larger files is discussed:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/orgmode/comments/e9p84n/scaling_org...](https://old.reddit.com/r/orgmode/comments/e9p84n/scaling_org_better_to_use_more_medsize_files_or/)

I suppose it is best to ask this in emacs-orgmode list.

Re: One Big Text File: About a decade ago I used it daily for everything for
about a year or even longer. Strangely, it was actually working remarkably
well. I like to think that over time it grows into a nice image of a person's
brain. It is very flexible -- loosely structured "dump" where needed, and
strictly structured on other places.

I abandoned it in favor of "one thought, one file" type of approaches, just
out of curiosity, I guess; I was hoping to create a Zettelkasten That Works
For Sure instead. But this never happened.

I still think One Big Text File a great, somewhat forgotten idea. It's easy to
add some structure to everyday use with scripting/grep, turning it into a
loosely structured database of sorts. I did less of that at the time than I
initially imagined myself doing, though.

~~~
kragen
Is One Big Text File somewhat forgotten? I think of it as being pretty
prevalent, maybe more so now than before, now that org-mode is in such wide
use.

------
modzu
i feel better about having dozens of sticky notes all over my desk now

