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

131–140 of 309 posts

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#131

Post by ramblerman »

erikig wrote: post #85
Normille wrote: post #49

Are Zettelkasten the latest Hipster fad? A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or Frequency Illusion is the phenomenon where something you recently learned suddenly appears everywhere

To some extent that applies.

In this case a strange new word like Zettelkasten also caused me to look it up the first time i saw it. Which was sometime this year.

I.e. had it been appearing everywhere before, I would have looked it up earlier.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#132

Post by lukevp »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #121
meagher wrote: post #22

People love doing things that feel like work, but aren’t. I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how I’m going to use it someday.

Same; I've been using various note taking approaches over the years, but my "problem" is that I rarely actually have to go back to a note, they are usually only relevant for one task like e.g. writing a blog post or implementing a feature. So while I'd like to retain my knowledge and research somewhere, at the same time I don't actually use it??? But some writing I've done that will be relevant in the next years is w…

I completely agree. Note apps are focused on categorization when 90% of note taking is creation, not retrieval. I have a new app that’s focused on creating notes as quickly as possible, working offline, and syncing to all your devices (web too). I’d love to include you in the alpha we’re launching this week, just send me an email and we’ll add you. This is open to anyone else as well!

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#133

Post by slightwinder »

Tomte wrote: post #117
slightwinder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zettelkasten" is a terminus technicus for the specific method Luhmann used. No, it is not. The term was already around decades before Luhmanns birth. > That word isn't in general use in German Wrong.

Believe it or not, but I'm a native speaker and I can say that I've never heard the word in any other context. Despite the fact that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system was pushed by just about every teacher. The usual word is "Karteikasten", "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".

> Believe it or not, but I'm a native speaker and I can say that I've never heard the word in any other context.

How is your own lack of knowledge relevant for this? Did you even bother to at least visit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten to educate yourself first?

> The usual word is "Karteikasten",

That is a modern synonym, but not quite the same. This is more specific for organized indexboxes.

> "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".

Those are not even the same. They are special purpose-tools with specific meaning which just happen to use index-cards and boxes in their analog version. That's like saying notebook is not a word because diary is widely used.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#134

Post by Normille »

erikig wrote: post #85
Normille wrote: post #49

Are Zettelkasten the latest Hipster fad? A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or Frequency Illusion is the phenomenon where something you recently learned suddenly appears everywhere

I stand [partially] corrected. Searching through the archives, I find the term first appeared on HN 4 years ago, with a few mentions a year, ever since. But there's definitely been a cluster of mentions over the past month or so:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#135

Post by fastball »

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

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#137

Post by larschdk »

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 my thoughts and be able to retrieve them later, optionally organize some things for easier access. The rest should be auto-archived by default. I use a college notepad this way, but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#139

Post by limomium »

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.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#140

Post by Widdlius »

ZainRiz wrote: post #97
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…

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?

Post reply on HN