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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

#71

Post by sanarothe »

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #11

I searched for hours for a viable Zettelkasten method: org-mode, vim-org, TiddlyWiki, Roam, Notion, Joplin, Notable, Obsidian, Zettlr. All of them were too complex, and not lightweight, cross-compatible, private/secure, or futureproof enough. I decided to settle on the default MacOS editor using a mix of .txt/.rtf files, with extensive folder organization and the built-in tagging system. I plan on consolidating journ…

One of the ideas that Sascha and Christian of Zettelkasten.de have espoused is not not giving too much structure up front. At first I flirted with the idea of markdown files, and using something like an extension to Jekyll to resolve links and generate an HTML render of my zettel archive. But that's the same mistake I always make :) Way too much for what I need.

Like you, I settled on just using a text editor (sublime text and atom) with Markdown files. I don't plan to render them, I just like the syntax highlighting.

I think your proposed system captures the important part of the knowledge intake, ie two levels of abstraction (writing a source note, and then connecting the new knowledge from source note to (or just dumping it in) some existing node.)

But one other idea from Christian and Sascha is to avoid folder structures, and allow the organization to develop over time. On a work topic, notes from a few guidances and presentations, plus my experiences, cluster to create a note which transcends a categorical boundary I would have erected with a folder structure.

So, the suggested alt strategy is dump everything into one folder and create clusters using other structures, as they reveal themselves to be useful.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#72

Post by entha_saava »

I think most of these 'advanced' note taking features (even interlinking when used pervasively) distract more than it helps.

> Regular note taking sucks

It sucks the least, I tried some of note taking apps and software, then settled at some lines of shell script.

    notes () {
        cd ~/notes/$1
        clear
        ls
    }

    note () {
        vim $@
        clear
        ls
    }
This works surprisingly well for most purposes, along with syntax highlighting for markdown. I sometimes wish it had interlinking and images, but I haven't come across a situation where I needed it.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#74

Post by BeetleB »

sandGorgon wrote: post #62
BeetleB wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of like asking why one needs hypertext when a single text file should suffice. The fact that one is linking adds structure, and a simple text search will not be easy. ZK is mostly a Wiki, with some guidelines on how to decide when to link things, etc.

hyperlinks are relevant for navigation. here hyperlinks (as hashtags) are used for discovery. I can understand the first...but not the second if full text search was available.

> hyperlinks are relevant for navigation. here hyperlinks (as hashtags) are used for discovery.

Hyperlinks in Wikis are very much also structural/semantic. They are not primarily for navigation.

Imagine reading Wikipedia without the links, and where you had to use the search box for every potential link. Imagine all the noise you'd get when you'd search.

BTW, I suspect your question is more about Roam then about Zettelkasten. Don't conflate the two. Roam is a general purpose product which utilizes the power of linking. This author is merely adapting it to the Zettelkasten methodology.

If you're asking about what makes linking special in Roam: Any thing you write as a link in your notes (need not be a hashtag) - Roam will create an empty page for that link - perhaps similar to Wikipedia. You can see what notes link to it.

When you enter a date in Roam, it will create a page for that as well.

Same with hashtags.

I suppose you get a fair amount of querying power. I'm not a Roam user, so I don't know.

I believe the other thing Roam users love is that each bullet/paragraph is an independent entity that you can link to/from. So if my paragraph links to "foobar", then on the foobar page I can see which paragraph (not just which page) linked to it.

I don't think the article does a good job highlighting why people love Roam - he was focusing more on ZK. If you want a better article about the strengths of Roam, see https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#75

Post by sjy »

Mizza wrote: post #35

I find it very funny that all of my nerd friends are all suddenly using an archaic German note-taking system. I started a simple system myself after reading the thread about them here a few weeks ago, and I have to say that it's already been useful. It reduces the lookup times from O(all of the internet) to O(just my notes).

This was also an incentive for me to adopt a similar system. As the web gets bigger, it feels as though search engines are losing the SEO arms race and it’s harder to rediscover things I remember reading online in the past. As well as writing more notes, I’ve been making more of an effort to bookmark articles on the web if I think there’s the slightest possibility I’ll want to return to them later. This makes my Firefox omnibar suggestions more useful.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#76

Post by dreamer7 »

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 disagree. The general idea that human mind stores information as a connected knowledge graph is still valid for technical subjects.

Sure, for simpler examples like if statements, you may not gain much. But, even for loops have differences across languages. JS uses for..of for iterating while Python and Swift use for..in

Also, there are different approaches in each language for getting the index and value while iterating.

Then, there are more complex topics like generics which have significant implementation differences between Java and Swift etc.

It would lead to a better understanding looking at these notes in connection rather than in isolation

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#77

Post by BeetleB »

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.

You can implement ZK with a Wiki. ZK is simply a Wiki with discipline about how you create pages, link, etc. Kind of like asking how GTD is any different from a TODO list. It's just a more structured TODO list.

Tools like Roam simply provide more convenient capability than a typical Wiki tool.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#78

Post by twknotes »

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #11

I searched for hours for a viable Zettelkasten method: org-mode, vim-org, TiddlyWiki, Roam, Notion, Joplin, Notable, Obsidian, Zettlr. All of them were too complex, and not lightweight, cross-compatible, private/secure, or futureproof enough. I decided to settle on the default MacOS editor using a mix of .txt/.rtf files, with extensive folder organization and the built-in tagging system. I plan on consolidating journ…

If privacy concerns you, you may want to take a look at: https://twinkle.app/ macOS download is less than 10MB, so it should be a very quick evaluation.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#79

Post by floatingatoll »

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 would find such a thing invaluable for connecting different articles on “the best way to for loop in bash” and “how decomposing a for loop results in AVX512 optimizations”, for example, even if my goal isn’t literary review.

Re: Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

#80

Post by codeisawesome »

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.

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