Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

eugeneyan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 309 posts

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#31

Post by traes »

frandroid wrote: post #18
self_awareness wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate why?

He's an anti-scientific schmuck. I basically stopped reading this post 3 sentences after seeing the reference to JP, as clearly this person can't distinguish what's shit from what's useful, as evidenced by this over-involved note overaccumulation system. Also sure, what's-his-face wrote 70 books, but I had never heard of him before. Quantity before volume please, is what note-taking should be about.

Just because you disagree with someone's point of view (even strongly) doesn't mean they can't have admirable qualities. On the topic of Luhmann, perhaps if you were more versed in sociology literature you would have heard of him. I can't say I have, but I'm not a sociologist and am not particularly interested in the field.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#32

Post by kranner »

Gatsky wrote: post #23

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.

Doesn't seem that harmful, as it might increase their motivation to study a subject?

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#33

Post by ramraj07 »

tagh wrote: post #10

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…

This is useful for anyone whos life goals are a little more generic. If all you use it is for learning a new programming language, it's probably limited in usefulness. If however you use it to not just note interesting ideas in a language but whatever you learn about tech in general, it will become more useful. I intend to use it to keep track of interesting tech notes, my project ideas, potential things I want to learn and read further, and some other life activities as well such as house hunting.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#34

Post by sooheon »

Swizec wrote: post #19
tasogare wrote: post #8

> 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.

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 detai…

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#35

Post by 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).

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#36

Post by sooheon »

ssivark wrote: post #27
Gatsky wrote: post #23

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.

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…

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#38

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

gryn wrote: post #16
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #11

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 journ…

The problems with tags last time I searched were that they weren't really that robust, some file systems don't support them and the applications that manipulate files may erase them. Have you ever encountered such problems ?

I was concerned about that too, but I believe Macs at least guarantee tag syncing between other Macs. I may experiment with putting tags on the first line, but for now, I’ll have to rely on folders and my summarizations.

I may just settle for org-mode if I end up doing a PhD because, as the top commenters pointed out, Zettelkasten is meant to be a system to link ideas within the humanities.

However, I’m focused on my professional life right now. Most of my reading material is quantitative, so my current system is fine.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#39

Post by dsp_person »

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #11

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 journ…

I'm thinking of a similar approach with text files and collections of other file types like pdfs, images, etc as you note.

For tags, there are some packages for tagging I've come across like TMSU [1], taggo [2], dantalian [3]

I'm thinking of tagging by just having a tags folder with a txt file for each tag. You could just stick the path to files you want to "tag" in there. Then if desired, have a script to create a bunch of symlinks for a browsable tag file structure. Maybe even have some custom grep code to find specific keywords in my notes and "tag" them automatically

[1] https://github.com/oniony/TMSU [2] https://github.com/xeor/taggo [3] http://darkfeline.github.io/dantalian/

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#40

Post by 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...)

"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.

Post reply on HN