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Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

eugeneyan.com

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Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#141

Post by Normille »

Normille wrote: post #61
Mizza wrote: post #35

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).

>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…

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#142

Post by mtsr »

larschdk wrote: post #137

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 m…

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

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#143

Post by fastball »

limomium wrote: post #139
fastball wrote: post #135

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

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.

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#144

Post by disposedtrolley »

mtsr wrote: post #142
larschdk wrote: post #137

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 m…

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

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#145

Post by chronikewok »

koheripbal wrote: post #13
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…

As a programmer, every time I try to nail down the flow for a new program, I quickly realize that I'm just writing pseudo-code - and often, just straight code. Maybe the problem is English. Maybe there's a way to structure English sentences in a more precise and meaningful way with hypertext linking and structuring like a legal document? ...but for human-to-human communications?

I like this idea of somehow augmenting human language with more associative structures for deeper meaning and shared understanding.

Maybe one implementation of this is that if the people we talk to (perhaps via a chat app) have their own Zettelkasten, the chat is supplemented/augmented by each others Zettelkasten (either publicly or privately) so we have a deeper understanding of each other and we can go on interesting tangents and create new links. This also aids in more progressive discussions.

(I'll add this concept to my Zettel and see where it takes me :) Thanks for the inspiration)

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#146

Post by elbear »

larschdk wrote: post #137

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 m…

You could use Tiddlywiki.

You create entries (called tiddlers) and you can hide them. Then, you won't see them by default, but you can search for them.

You can also set it to show you a specific tiddler when you load the page.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#147

Post by 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 :)

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#148

Post by elbear »

sjy wrote: post #69
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…

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 t…

I'm using Tiddlywiki as well, but I haven't customized it much yet.

Regarding your fear of it becoming slow, the good part is that you can manipulate the tiddlers easily, so you could import them in another system, if you need to migrate.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#149

Post by elbear »

tugberkk wrote: post #138

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.

That's how I'm using Tiddlywiki basically.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#150

Post by hollander »

larschdk wrote: post #137

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 m…

I've used personal wikis for many years. It's easy to link between notes, it's searchable. I used camelcased words as hashtags. I had several thousands notes in it, personal and work related.

Then the smartphone came and took over, and there was no good wiki-app and in the browser didn't really work. Since then I've switched to Evernote. Again more than 1000 notes without transferring the wiki to Evernote. I can get lost sometimes, and then it needs some work to clean up tags and notes.

> 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 don't understand your problem. Evernote can be sorted on date of last access, so you always see the most recent notes on top. You don't want a collection of notes, but you want auto-archive? Isn't auto-archive the collection?

> but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.

In evernote and probably any note taking app you can open a new note and start clean.

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