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

261–270 of 309 posts

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#261

Post by rkallos »

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 have something resembling a Zettelkasten using Tiddlywiki with the Stroll plugin. I'm loving it. I feel like this system is taking me from being someone who hoards notes and never looks at them to someone who actively learns and remembers by making connections between newly-added notes and pre-existing ones in my Tiddlywiki.

https://tiddlywiki.com

https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#262

Post by floatrock »

rendall wrote: post #95
themodelplumber wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in a perceptive loop concerning this particular object (systems like this) then. You see future-self behaving as past-self did. You can keep doing that, looping. People who are natural contingency planners do this all the time--they map their past onto future-self. Flexing this muscle because it's strongest. However this is also a good way of preventing yourself from re-exploring new objects through a differen…

This is a pretty astonishing insight! @themodelplumber1 do you have more information about this? Either a blog post you have written, or a book you read (or wrote!) on the topic? Edit: ... and I checked out your profile and bookmarked your blog in my feed reader. Awesome!

Also google "growth mindset" -- cultivate a mental state where it's not about ruminating about past failures, but rather focus on what you learned from past experiences (what doesn't work) and use that to iterate on your future self.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#263

Post by browningstreet »

mumblemumble wrote: post #228
browningstreet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked with a few very successful business people. What was common among them was they wrote things down (frequently, but a little, not a lot) and had excellent recall. They wrote on anything handy, and discarded when done. Their systems were mostly disposable. They didn’t create libraries of notes. I’m technical, self-employed, with an academic background. I’m very tempted by systems (I often think of the book…

Two random thoughts: First, one of my high schools had a workshop on how to study. One of the things they encouraged us to do is to take notes, but only a moderate amount of them. Some amount of note-taking can have a huge positive impact on memory and retention. But overdoing it is actually harmful. It's overwhelming. The other is that, if there's one thing I really like from name-brand Scrum, it's the idea that you…

Ha.

That reminds me.. in college, I was employed by a "Class Notes" service to write the notes that other people in class bought so they didn't have to take notes.

I got great market for my notes, and when the class was over, students were encouraged to report back to the Class Notes company what score they got in the class. Again, by correlation, my notes were well regarded.

I scored very poorly in the class. I spent a lot of time taking notes in class, and then refining the notes to be turned in. Surely, I did less additional homework/studying than I should have. But I also had very little recall of the material.

I definitely wasn't optimizing my own effort along with my class notes effort -- but I stopped doing that as I was already pretty busy and the money was mostly a lift. I did better attending and being the kind of student I already know how to be.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#264

Post by jldugger »

frogpelt wrote: post #240
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.

You may have experienced the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. https://www.google.com/search?&q=baader+meinhof+phenomenon

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten suggests the vast majority of posts are recent, and the older ones received far less traction.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#265

Post by dangirsh »

nanna wrote: post #195
dangirsh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love org-roam. I've been heavily using it for a few months, and not looking back. Don't miss these additional packages, which build on org-roam: org-roam-server: better graph visualization and navigation [1] org-roam-bibtex: Reference management in your Zettelkasten [2] The latter, combined with org-ref and org-noter, is the most effective way I've found for taking notes on PDFs. Beautiful demo at [3]. FWIW RoamResea…

> 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.

There are a few projects that do this, but I think there's certainly room for more. I'd love to see one focused on using the Zettelkasten method.

Here are three I'm aware of:

Scimax: https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax

Emacs Speaks Statistics: https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS

Frontmacs: https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs

So long as these approaches expose the full power of Emacs to their users, I can't imagine the UX being as rock-solid as we might expect from modern purpose-built tools (e.g. PyCharm, Overleaf, Obsidian, ...).

It might help to hide/disable most default interactive functions, which provide a huge surface area for non-Emacsers to break things. Emacs actually does this by default for a few functions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DisabledCommands

Also relevant here is wakib-keys: https://github.com/darkstego/wakib-keys.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#266

Post by miguelmota »

gas9S9zw3P9c wrote: post #196

This seems to be a new trend now. I'm skeptical. Many of the most successful people I know don't have complicated systems like this - instead of spending time on optimizing note taking, they actually get stuff done. In fact, many don't have systems at all. On the other side, most people raving about the systems are "productivity gurus" writing articles and books, not people who actually get stuff done or would be con…

I do a lot of planning before 'getting stuff done' which involves jotting down a ton of ideas and linking them to formalize the thought process before performing the actual work. It's not exactly Zettelkasten but the essence is the same. I don't consider it procrastination because a lot of planning ahead of time means less adhoc lower quality planning during implementation.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#267

Post by benhurmarcel »

julianeon wrote: post #249
slightwinder wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of the most successful people I know don't have complicated systems like this How do you know? Maybe their set of habits are a complicated system which they are just not aware of being a system, thus not they are not talking about as they consider it as natural or just obvious. It seems to be some kind of effect of the internet that people talking about everything leads also to people making big science and sy…

I know elisp and I never use it for org-mode. Actually all of my use of org-mode can be summarized in this short comment. I use org-mode as 'outline mode.' I only do this with it: * asterisk denotes a level * asterisk next to an asterisk denotes a sub-level of a level * sublevels can have sublevels, effectively making them a level, by the above rules Then you press tab to expand a level or sub-level, press tab again…

I've been using Dynalist very similarly. I agree that it's a very simple approach but works well.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#269

Post by jsilence »

gas9S9zw3P9c wrote: post #196

This seems to be a new trend now. I'm skeptical. Many of the most successful people I know don't have complicated systems like this - instead of spending time on optimizing note taking, they actually get stuff done. In fact, many don't have systems at all. On the other side, most people raving about the systems are "productivity gurus" writing articles and books, not people who actually get stuff done or would be con…

So instead of training hard to master martial arts you suggest to not waste time, go out and just fight people.

You are going to learn either way.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#270

Post by jasonv »

codeisawesome wrote: post #80

I found it interesting to consider that the people who leave lasting impact and legacy on the world, don’t have extensive note-taking or organisation systems (like I am anxiously given to do) or whatever else. That’s not what we remember them for. Maybe a drive to “do” and “build” - and actually doing something about that - is far more important... I’m probably not articulating this properly.

If I think about writers and scientists, I think about their archives being homed at universities and such. I'm always kind of amazed that certain artists (writers, painters, etc) end up with volumes of letters that sometimes get published after they've passed on.

I don't know if we'll have that rich vein to mine with everyone doing things in computers. Sometimes you'll get some emails from a dead author, but letters and notes? It'll be interesting to see what variation of material gets preserved when we look back in 20-50 years.

Post reply on HN