Key for non Zettelkästen is to refactor notes and delete/store those older notes, this way you also throw away part of that nested hierarchy. You simply combine it with your own trajectory and ongoing inevitable specialization, software notes would house the notes about software that you actually use.
I'm not a big fan of Zettelkästen for this reason, there is no need for those if you go through note refactors and make it a yearly routine (I combine it with OS reinstalls and trying new programs). I don't care about note program longevity for this reason, I'm not bound to a particular program because refactoring also means rewriting many notes from scratch, based on older notes and current knowledge.
This refactoring/rewriting is also a good refresher and helpful for really internalizing broader concepts (which you then can apply to other seemingly similar areas).
You can have tags instead of hierarchy and then you also have a network.
So instead of "java notes" and "design notes" you add the "java" and "design" tag, etc., so you can approach your notes in any direction: you can find "java" notes and then narrow the result sets to design notes (so java+design), and vice versa.
And you can add links too between the nodes, so you can also walk them in any order you define.
Existing tools can do this already, it's just a matter of using them.
Is there any more to zettelkasten? Its author invented the same thing on paper notes, but digital tools provide this naturally.
Zettelkasten is very simple and that is the point: You create small and connected notes. This constraint turns out to be useful for research and writing for some people.
hm, now that i am reading this, would that basically be the equivalent of paragraph tagging/paragraph connections in a longer document?
i.e. you use one note document for 1 specific book and it might be 1500 words. but instead of linking the documents, you link specific words/paragraphs to other notes/paragraphs?
Yes, you could easily create a Zettelkasten in a single file. Or with pen and paper.
The gist is focused and self-contained notes, linked together to form structure and connections. A personal wiki with attention of recontextualization.
That wasn't necessarily my point. I cannot visiualise how you use self-contained notes for something like book notes or meeting notes, browsing random links just seems completely inefficient and not transporting the actual meaning/context of the notes
The primary change of thinking that a Zettelkasten system requires is giving up the idea of keeping notes about a book or meeting. Instead, keep notes about topics you care about, using the book or meeting as a source.
You are not browsing the notes at “random”. You read your notes because you are working on something and what to see how your collection of notes might help you.
It takes effort to support this workflow. Notes have to be self-contained and of a somewhat permanent relevance. You don’t put raw reading and meeting notes there.
Zettelkasten fights this complexity by much more up-front work when adding and linking note, instead of a tree structure, you have a network.
I wonder if I am doing it wrong. I certainly organize my notes into tree format when I am doing intensive reading on a book. This is to keep my head straight on what topics had been touched on by that book.
On occasions, I do opportunistic linking, however.
> This is to keep my head straight on what topics had been touched on by that book.
Most of the time, it’s more be beneficial to file notes according to the situation in which they’ll be useful rather than where they came from: If you’re going to have a tree structure, the original sources should be out at the leaves as external references rather than the root. This manifests in many forms from lots of different people giving advice:
In Getting Things Done, Allen spends a lot of time on the importance of organizing your todo lists by where you’ll be able to do the actions.
Luhmann used his original Zettelkasten to store passages that he could pull to make drafts of papers, and cross-referenced them to other passages that could be included together.
In How to Write a Thesis, Eco recommends writing a preliminary outline of your thesis and then tagging notes with the section number they’re relevant to.
In his MasterClass series, Chris Hadfield emphasizes the benefit of collecting summary notes organized by the interface you’ll see when actually performing an activity.
Normal notes are fighting complexity by creating smaller and smaller categories of notes
Example:
splitting "engineering notes" to "software notes" and "technical writing notes"
and then "software notes" to "java notes" and "design notes"
And this way the notes get deeper and deeper in your notebook and you stop interacting with them.
This described well my personal experience.
----
Zettelkasten fights this complexity by much more up-front work when adding and linking note, instead of a tree structure, you have a network.