My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
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My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
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Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#2I’m fascinated by the rise of the Zettelkasten concept among hackers (I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere mainstream yet) and the fundraising that Notion & Roam have accomplished. Based on the title of the post, I assume you are inspired by Tiago Forte?
I’d be interested to hear more about how your notes are organized and what they help you accomplish.
The idea of moving notes across 4 platforms as described in this article makes me wince, which is why I’m on OneNote for now - maybe not quite as nice for linking stuff but included in O365 which my work uses, cross platform, etc.
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#3I’m fascinated by the rise of the Zettelkasten concept among hackers (I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere mainstream yet) and the fundraising that Notion & Roam have accomplished. Based on the title of the post, I assume you are inspired by Tiago Forte? I’d be interested to hear more about how your notes are organized and what they help you accomplish. The idea of moving notes across 4 platforms as described in this…
For me it was about getting the notes in one place where I could manage them as I would in my text editor.
I always got frustrated with the implementation of Markdown and no being able to manipulate the text as I would in a .md document.
I have lost some functionality that Notion had, like for Kanban boards and such but being able to manipulate the plain text is where I want to be.
The only downside I have really is that I'm tied to using a VS Code now for writing notes, if I want to go mobile I can use something like GitJournal on android and make changes there, and there's now code spaces in GitHub so I could in theory use a code space in a tablet on the move, but none of us are out and about that much these days
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#4I've recently had much more luck with https://johnnydecimal.com/ , mirroring content structure across all my devices and even physically.
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#5So the author writes their notes in mark down with a VS code extension and stores them on GitHub?
Is there more to this that I'm not getting?
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#6I 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.
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#7I've been using the Zettelkasten method for a few months now and I could never go back to the way I was taking notes before. I picked "The Archive" for the app and have a Git repo located on OneDrive. It just works and there is no guessing how things get organized.
I can keep my notes not only synced, but I also get version controlled markdown files. You can setup VSCode to accomplish the same tasks through extensions, but it's not 100% perfect.
The Archive is great software, but they also have a fantastic community that's researching this subject.
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#8I 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-discovering some of my thoughts from months or years ago.
Unique IDs are easy. For example, Unix timestamp or just YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. Here's a commonly shared public database to get you hooked: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#9For anyone who wants the gist of Zettelkasten, I've just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.
Here's my rather brief summary of the process:
* You create fleeting notes to capture ideas as they happen. They should be short lived notes that don't become the main store of your knowledge.
* You create literature notes as your read material. These should include your own thoughts on highlighted passages, not just quotes and highlights on their own.
* You organise your fleeting notes as permanent notes into your 'Slip Box' (taken from the original use index cards). Each note should contain a single idea and should be understandable when reading in isolation.
* You want to avoid burying knowledge in large notes as it makes it hard to glance at and link to other notes in a concise way.
* Notes are linked to other notes which support your ideas. This also help the discovery of new ideas.
* You use your slip box to help you do your thinking. You want to ask it questions, find the related notes that support/oppose the arguments and find gaps or newly related information.
* You can create index notes that help you find your way around.
* Part of the process is to help your understanding by writing. With a well maintained slip box, you'll never be starting from a blank sheet. You decide what insight/question/knowledge you want to explore, and pull together the notes that give you the body of research to get you started. You shouldn't need to start a new blog post by researching, that happens prior by taking smart notes as you naturally read what you're interested in.
Hope that's somewhat helpful. I'm still experimenting with it to find out what I understand correctly and what I don't.
Re: My Second Brain – Zettelkasten
#10Recently started using TiddlyWiki as personal notes archive. The automatic indexes of really work well to connect each note to others.