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+1 for Obsidian. It’s the best note taking app I’ve yet found, and I’ve tried almost all of them at this point.
Do you have an opinion on Zettlr, which was specifically designed to accommodate the Zettelkasten note-taking technique? Discussed previously on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723775
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I use a rough zettel method as well. I agree about the place to dump everything being the key. Too much structure gets in my way too, but the process of condensing and refining my notes into my zettel has been where some of my best ideas and insights have come when learning and/or creating and designing.
That’s an important point! I mostly just dump in ‘facts’—my frequent flyer number, gift ideas, recipes. It’s just an external drive for my memory... But the active process of reflection and editing and synthesis based on actual notes...I completely miss out on that. It’s not a piece of tech, so much as a process. It reminds me of the Cornell notes system [1]: take raw notes in the moment, then condense and summarize…
I hadn’t heard of Zettelkasten until today. I want to give it a go, but I’ll be honest, I feel a bit overwhelmed after reading about it. I’ve never catalogued my notes before or given each one a unique id.
There's basically just two things you need to know: 1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max. 2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc). It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-d…
Would you break them into multiple notes? Group them together somehow? Have an "index" note with just hyperlinks to the rest?
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There's basically just two things you need to know: 1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max. 2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc). It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-d…
How would you go about storing notes from a book/course so that they fit in this system? Would you break them into multiple notes? Group them together somehow? Have an "index" note with just hyperlinks to the rest?
Overall, they don't. Zettelkasten is just one of the folders within my note-taking app (Obsidian), and notes from books go into a separate folder. If there are some titbits that I see being useful outside of the book, I duplicate it into a zettelkasten note.
> Group them together somehow?
I have an "also see" section in my template where I link every other short note that's somehow connected. That's what I meant by "linking them as much as possible". The end goal is to be able to follow the links between similar notes instead of having to search for them. My library isn't big enough at the moment, but once it becomes, I should be able to click on a random note, follow a few links, and have an entire article with sources to back it up with little to no effort, using thoughts I had months or years ago.
> Have an "index" note with just hyperlinks to the rest?
Yeah I also do this. I have a note titled "00 zk" that's an index note for all the zettelkasten notes. I don't fill it out automatically at the moment, but I have a plugin that can do "link all notes within this folder", and I trigger it with a hotkey from time to time. That index note helps me to see similar notes and interlink them, because I never view that folder with a file explorer.
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How would you go about storing notes from a book/course so that they fit in this system? Would you break them into multiple notes? Group them together somehow? Have an "index" note with just hyperlinks to the rest?
> How would you go about storing notes from a book/course so that they fit in this system? Overall, they don't. Zettelkasten is just one of the folders within my note-taking app (Obsidian), and notes from books go into a separate folder. If there are some titbits that I see being useful outside of the book, I duplicate it into a zettelkasten note. > Group them together somehow? I have an "also see" section in my temp…
I've installed Obsidian and am going to give Zettelkasten a go.
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I seem to notice these posts every month or so and there's some new tool recommended (Foam! Roam! Obsidian! zotero!) and I'll download said tool, try it out for a few minutes and think "Hmm, ok, that might be neat" and then promptly forget about it.
I thought you were being silly with “Foam,” but it really is a thing...