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The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

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Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#41

Post by yesenadam »

This sounds very similar to a paper version of what I do with LaTeX PDF books. I constantly am typing and pasting stuff into a notes .txt file–every idea I have, anything I don't want to forget, anything I learn, URLS, names of books/movies etc. Then every few weeks I move stuff from the notes file to a place in a LaTeX PDF book, mainly the current year's book, then others split off as they get big enough, e.g. programming languages, mathematics, my programs, my essays etc. I put lots of pictures, and the books look lovely. (I find links between stuff isn't often necessary, as the hierarchical structure is so clear, and so easy to change around. But hyperlinking any 2 things is easy.)

It did take me about 3 months to master LaTeX and the common packages enough that I don't have to give it a thought these days.

Before that, I spent 25 years filling notebooks with ideas, notes, diagrams, drawings, maths, etc and never looking in them again, because there was no way of organizing them. Everything was just lost and forgotten.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#42

Post by reidjs »

I write a lot and for most of my career I just used a Notes.md file synced across devices with iCloud.

I forked foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam A few months ago and have been using it as my note taking system. It works great even if you rarely backlink or tag, just every now and then you should clean out your inbox.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#43

Post by gglitch »

bodge5000 wrote: post #21

Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread! On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sou…

To forestall premature optimization about notebooks or any form of linearity, I start with looseleaf paper.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#44

Post by smarx007 »

lkois wrote: post #37
bodge5000 wrote: post #21

Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread! On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sou…

I've found the perfect notebooks for me are A5 spiral bound dot grids. Fairly compact size, unintrusive binding. The dot grid forces less structure than lined, but isn't the wild west of blank. A few months ago I also looked into a bunch of note taking methods, even bought a similar A5, spiral bound, pre-formatted organizer and thought it'd be perfect for organizing my days. It remains unused except for a couple of l…

I have since improved on a similar setup by using B5 notebooks with margins (to punch holes) and "filing stripes" [1]. It allows me to take notes of different kinds ("odd chicken scratchings of work notes") just by opening a new clean sheet (at a cost of occasionally wasting a clean page on the reverse side of a previous sheet) and then tear the sheets off and file them neatly (I use the stripes upside down so that an append "operation" is less costly).

For long-running projects, I also use A5 notebooks that are pre-partitioned at a given % (I use 60-70%). The idea is that you go over your old notebook with "odd chicken scratchings", count the number of pages spent on each topic, calculate the ratios and multiply them by 70%*NUM_PaGES. Then you allocate this number of pages in the new (clean) notebook and put tab stickers on each section. I also leave around 4 pages for the TOC in the beginning of a notebook. It's just 2 sheets, but the ability to go back and put an extensive TOC later helps a lot when you refer to a finished notebook. With a bit of patience, you can but together a perfectly ordered TOC in a completely messy notebook (by doing one pass over all notes before writing down the TOC and grouping them by project). I also tried keeping notes on paper and writing down the TOC digitally in my Evernote to keep it searchable.

Regarding spiral binding, I find it too flimsy. If you damage the spiral, flipping pages would cause damage to the pages. I prefer hardbound notebooks. I use fountain pens and previously used expensive paper but since the pandemic I tried Idena [2] and it simply blew me away with its high quality and ink resistance (except for some rare inks) at such a low cost (but I had to give up the dot grid).

Ultimately, I am convinced that all of this has a limit and a Zettelkasten method of sorts is needed for a long-running knowledge base project.

[1]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004F69CRC [2]: https://www.amazon.de/Idena-209281-Notizbuch-kariert-schwarz...

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#45

Post by kkoncevicius »

I don't get these methods. So it's a note taking system with hyperlinks between them. OK. So what if we made it digital - then it would be like HTML, right? Now, since more notes is better - what if we also let other people write notes and add them into the same library. Oh look, we just invented the world wide web.

What am I missing here?

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#47

Post by bodge5000 »

gglitch wrote: post #43
bodge5000 wrote: post #21

Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread! On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sou…

To forestall premature optimization about notebooks or any form of linearity, I start with looseleaf paper.

For me it was actually the opposite, I went with a small, bound notebook so I couldnt obsess over how things are arranged and what goes where and what goes in the front and so on. Basically its the most basic, limiting system I could find, short of carving my notes into stone

Obviously that rigidity has its flaws but not to worry, I'll deal with that later. Or at least thats what I tell myself ;)

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#49

Post by henrikeh »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #45

I don't get these methods. So it's a note taking system with hyperlinks between them. OK. So what if we made it digital - then it would be like HTML, right? Now, since more notes is better - what if we also let other people write notes and add them into the same library. Oh look, we just invented the world wide web. What am I missing here?

There is a big difference between writing meant for public distribution and personal notes. The point of a Zettelkasten (or any notes) is not to build a comprehensive encyclopedia, but to support and augment your work.

I don’t necessarily agree either that “more notes is better” as an absolute statement.

Re: The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

#50

Post by nojito »

disabled wrote: post #6
CraigJPerry wrote: post #5

I tried hard to like this, i still have my “second brain” collection in onenote (which worked surprisingly well across linux, Windows & mac) but i don’t add to it anymore. However PARA has just proven more ergonomic and far less time consuming for me. https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ 1. I don’t waste time trying to eek out atomic thoughts, PARA is a more pragmatic idea - if some bit of knowledge proves useful it will…

There is some obscenely expensive program for that (I have tried to search for traces of it online). I should do an advanced search again, using key words from the YouTube video below. The course is here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/ Anyways, there is this guy who is really good at hacking life who describes it and took the course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3dA2GcAh8 Anyways, his channel is interesti…

The real productivity experts are the ones who make their revenue optimizing their actual day job and not hocking productivity advice online for views.

The best productivity tool is interviewing successful people.

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