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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

#171

Post by read_if_gay_ »

cycomanic wrote: post #165
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re defending the claim that Zettelkasten is a commonly used word. You do that by smugly telling GP they need to go to Wikipedia to educate themselves about it. I guess that nicely proves their point?

He is correct though, just because the GP has not heard of it doesn't mean it isn't commonly used. I'm also a German native speaker and I agree the term Zettelkasten is more common than Karteikasten. I encountered Zettelkasten when I was in high-school a long time ago. That said the way I've encountered it was always more as a study tool (like flashcards, or the vokabelkarten/box the GP mentioned ) not so much for no…

I’m also native (NRW), never heard of Zettelkasten before here, we just say Karteikarten (not even -kasten). Same for a Bavarian friend of mine. Where are you from?

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#172

Post by rboyd »

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?

org-roam

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#173

Post by read_if_gay_ »

slightwinder wrote: post #168
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re defending the claim that Zettelkasten is a commonly used word. You do that by smugly telling GP they need to go to Wikipedia to educate themselves about it. I guess that nicely proves their point?

No, because nobody can know everything. Even common knowledge is not so common that everyone knows all and the same. And the mention of wikipedia was more to show the usage and origin of this, not how common or uncommon it is. Because that's not really mentioned there.

There is a certain point where few enough people know something that it can’t be called common. Maybe GP is not the exception for not knowing but you are for knowing?

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#174

Post by vvillena »

danboarder wrote: post #73

I would like to understand how this note taking method is different than a hypertext wiki for notes? (e.g. TiddlyWiki) It seems very similar to use based on glancing through the examples in the article. See https://tiddlywiki.com for example.

Sönke Ahrens writes about this similarity in his book "How to take smart notes". A linked notes system is indeed very similar to a wikipedia. The difference lies in the usage. In a personal system, there's a bit more "wiki" and not that much "pedia". Encyclopedic classification of content is not the aim of a linked notes system. The notes should be collected and connected based on your interests, aims, and whims.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#175

Post by pvitz »

dghf wrote: post #166

IIRC, Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ) described pretty much exactly this method of taking and organising notes on index cards in Lila , his 1991 follow-up to Zen ... . Does anyone know whether Pirsig got the idea from Luhmann, Luhmann from Pirsig, both from someone else, or if both invented it independently?

At least Luhmann was trained in German public administration after the Second World War. The general ideas or seeds for his invention of the Zettelkasten stem from there.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#178

Post by can3p »

I tried roam research and org roam only to find out that the overhead of managing notes quickly started preventing me from taking notes in the first place.

Why? Because now instead of just writing down a note I started thinking about what terms do I want to make links and maybe go through previous notes to do the same. Of course you don't have to do that but the whole promise of the system is that the more you connect the more value you get.

I've dealt with this problem a lot (for example it's the same with going through lot's of rss feeds to categorize articles for later reading) and it's always about book keeping taking more time than an actual action.

After that I started thinking what was the most important about note for me. Actually it wasn't connections it was about the sole fact of taking a note (it has a higher chance that I'll remember it) discovery and ability to take a not from any where. A laboratory journal of sorts.

In my particular case discovery is easily covered by git grep and since I use plain markdown files I can always edit it offline with vim or online via github/gitlab web ide. Since it's only one file I don't even need to think about file names. The structure of notes is pretty well defined so it shouldn't take too much to write a script that would generate a digest for some term.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#180

Post by citizenkeen »

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?

Obsidian recently came up here.
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