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Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

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Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#251

Post by clairity »

omginternets wrote: post #230
dhimes wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

> "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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#252

Post by nojito »

criddell wrote: post #201
nojito wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linked notes are amazing because they instantly give you context to your notes. OneNote is easily the best note taking app out there.

Does OneNote generate back links? If I pull up a note, I'd like to see not just the notes it links to, but also the notes that link to it. It's probably the one thing I wish Evernote would add.

Unfortunately it doesn't, but I haven't seen a need to have that functionality for my workflow.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#253

Post by 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...

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#254

Post by ZainRiz »

Widdlius wrote: post #140
ZainRiz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ze…

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?

I'm using Evernote as my main note taking tool. They've put more effort into making it easier to put notes into it than the other systems I've seen and the PARA system was designed by a guy who used Evernote so it works really well with it.

However, I'm starting to experiment with Roam to write more long form notes to see if I can take advantage of the easy linking capabilities it offers

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#255

Post by ZainRiz »

unkulunkulu wrote: post #182
Widdlius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#256

Post by nanna »

ssivark wrote: post #235
nanna wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The rising popularity of Emacs “starter kits” (Doom, Spacemacs, Centaur, Prelude, etc) is exactly in this spirit. While not segmented by audience, each of them aims to provide sane defaults and package collections for a varied set of common use cases.

Yeah, I hear that. I still think segmenting by audiences - especially non-programmer audiences - would make it possible to really pitch it as an alternative to tools like, for academics and writers, Scrivener and Word. An audience-segmented starter kit based on other starter kits, perhaps.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#257

Post by vijucat »

rkangel wrote: post #193
vijucat wrote: post #92

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 au…

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.

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

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#258

Post by gexla »

leethargo wrote: post #245
gexla wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nee…

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…

> 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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#259

Post by wtracy »

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…

> if your goal is to learn a new programming language, I don't see Zettelkasten being particularly helpful

I don't have experience with Zettelkasten, but after reading this article I'm imagining using it for studying algorithms in general and physics simulations in particular.

It even might be more useful than you think for learning languages. For example, the return expression in Haskell might look like a return statement from an imperative language, and might even be used in a similar way, but under the hood the two have nothing in common. There's a significant amount of foundational knowledge you need before you can jump in and start doing practice problems.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#260

Post by qznc »

slightwinder wrote: post #81

> 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…

Wikipedia says it was Conrad Gessner in the 16th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
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