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Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

• monkeydust 6y ago
  Just starting out with Obsidian.md for note taking, going well so far. Love the link connections.
• CatsAreCool 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I had not heard of Zettelkasten, but it is just like the site https://mathlore.org https://mathlore.org I created to help people collect math knowledge to study, learn, and explore mathematics. That is, just like in a Zettelkasten, mathlore.org is a collection of items where each one is a self contained piece of mathematical knowledge that links to other items. It is designed so that the more you add to the system, the more interconnected things are, and the more useful it is. I also decided to use tags instead of categories too. It is really cool to see the creator of Zettelkasten decided the same. Again thanks for sharing this because I tried to find others that had researched a similar approach for storing information that I was thinking of, but I couldn't find any. Now that I know about Zettelkasten I can gain a lot of knowledge in what works well and what doesn't in this approach. It is really cool to know that there are others that like this approach.
  • feanaro 6y ago
    Interestingly, the same thing happened to me when I was designing my note-taking system. I made most of those design decision only to find about Zettelkasten later. It definitely feels like it is some sort of design space minimum.
• vijucat 6y ago
  OneNote's Linked Notes Taking does exactly this. You can combine it with the "Dock to Desktop" / Docked Window feature which makes it hijack a part of the desktop space (to the RHS, typically) so that you can continue to take notes while reviewing stuff on the LHS. The window on the LHS can be another OneNote window (or one of the other Office applications), and as you type in the RHS, docked window, sentences are automatically linked to the page and line on the LHS. Unfortunately, I didn't find a single video showing the power of both Linked Notes AND Dock to Desktop, but these two show the usage of these features separately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyon2RC_NIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyon2RC_NIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_6QsFfk06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_6QsFfk06s
  • nojito 6y ago
    Linked notes are amazing because they instantly give you context to your notes. OneNote is easily the best note taking app out there.
    • criddell 6y ago
      Does OneNote generate back links? If I pull up a note, I'd like to see not just the notes it links to, but also the notes that link to it. It's probably the one thing I wish Evernote would add.
      • nojito 6y ago
        Unfortunately it doesn't, but I haven't seen a need to have that functionality for my workflow.
  • rkangel 6y ago
    i'm using "OneNote for Windows 10" which seems to have lost a lot of the power features. It looks like both Dock to Desktop and Linked Notes have gone.
    • machbio 6y ago
      there are so many power features that were removed after OneNote 2016 - it makes using Onenote obsolete nowadays - hate to start using another note taking method now
    • vijucat 6y ago
      Ah yes. Use OneNote 2016 (or OneNote 2010), which is free to download and use, not the Windows App.
• ZainRiz 6y ago
  I recently studied both Zettelkasten and Build a Second Brain's P.A.R.A note taking methods. They share some core principles but BASB seems much more practical for most people The biggest difference was that Zettelkasten required a ton of work up-front, which made it nearly impossible for me to stick with it. BASB on the other had was more Just-in-Time based which makes it much easier to stick with. I compared the two methods here: https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelkasten-vs-para/ https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelka...
• KayL 6y ago
  Zettelkasten looks like a blogging system for notes, isn't it? Write a piece of notes and tagging it.
• kitd 6y ago
  Does this work well for teams? Or does anyone know of a version of this that would do so? I work on a large K8s-based project. Each person may know a lot about one small part of it, but when they need to find out about an unfamiliar part, they need to trawl through Slack messages or Github issues. I could see something like this being really useful, assuming everyone is disciplined in using it.
  • vvillena 6y ago
    Isn't that what wikis are for? Just remember to avoid creating hierarchies, and focus on making information accessible in 2 ways: search, and links between pages.
    • kitd 6y ago
      Wikis get you most of the way there, but they're missing tagging, which is the differentiating feature of Zettelkasten, it seems to me. Tags provide a semi-structured index into unstructured data, making searching and sorting much easier. Maybe a extension for GH wikis would work.
      • detaro 6y ago
        Most wiki systems have categories you can use like tags and the ability to list pages linking a page, which you can also can use for tags (i.e. if you want to use the category mechanism for hierarchical categories).
• kragen 6y ago
  Maybe a description of my notetaking practice will be useful to others. I don't know if this is strictly a "Zettelkasten" or not. My note box for the last little while is Dercuano: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano. The notes are longer than a single index card (there are 882 notes averaging about 1300 words each), and they are hierarchically organized into sections and subsections. They often include links to other notes or other web pages, and they also have a chronological order and a set of tags. And I frequently grep them. I kept them in Git to keep them synchronized across different computers. Typically a single note draws from many sources, and I tried to keep their contents in a readable order, which is easier to do on a computer where you can insert stuff in the middle. Some notes are one afternoon's thoughts, while others got added to and reorganized for years. So that's one way I make connections: I add hyperlinks, new data, explanations of how and why the entire rest of a note is wrong, new sources, etc. Another is that the process of writing a note involves bringing together different ideas, since few of the notes are just summaries of things others have written. I learned a lot writing Dercuano, but in the end I was more frustrated than effective. I have a series of paper notebooks that are much less voluminous, only a few hundred pages a year, which are worse for text and hyperlinks, but much better for drawing, even things like schematics. Computers offer the potential of doing simulation, calculation, logic, optimization, rendering, data analysis, and data integration, the things that Engelbart and Kay envisioned in the 1960s. Yet Dercuano is stuck in the textual world without even transclusion or sketches. A much better medium is possible. And we have lots of examples: spreadsheets, Jupyter notebooks, observable explanations in JS, diagrams in KSeg or GeoGebra, Observablehq and all of Bostock's previous excellent work. These show us that a better medium is achievable. But incorporating such a model into a note like the ones in Dercuano maybe requires some UI work. I mean the whole revolution of VisiCalc was that you could see the results of your calculation as you changed the calculation, and that doesn't really fit well into editing text files in Emacs. Things like Darius Bacon's Doe and Halp do go some distance toward that integration for textual output. And R-Markdown integrates statistical analysis and data visualization with text, and Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki incorporates different media types on one page, including bytebeat. And I understand that org-mode SRC blocks offer the possibility of displaying image output inline. Still, none of these seem like they can scale to interactively doing a compass-and-straightedge construction or drawing a schematic for an analog circuit. Maybe I'm dismissing them too readily? So I'm trying to figure out what this looks like in https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo.
• matesz 6y ago
  I wonder what Ted Nelson would say to that :)
  • weswpg 6y ago
    "Project Xanadu" Ted Nelson? as i understand it he's known for sinking decades of work into his vision while the modern internet developed instead someone else in the comments said "isn't that what a hyperlink is for" and it reminds me of all the semantic web stuff and RDF. makes me wonder, isn't there some search engine web crawler that graphically depicts trending websites and the pages or ideas that link to / from them?
• Glosster 6y ago
  Is it not super obvious that this post is just marketing for roamresearch?
• BasilPH 6y ago
  I personally found the archive[0] an excellent software to get started with a Zettelkasten. The forum and the blog posts on the site are great. I'm also developing a CLI script to visualize your zettelkasten[1]. I mainly use it to print stats, like the number of connected components and find orphaned notes. [0] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ [1] https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel
• suref 6y ago
  To me the most important thing in notes is to find what you want easily. Because of this I think having some sort of online system is needed, otherwise if you have the notes at different places you will in the end give up on it and also tags and search is a huge advantage. But in the end I don't think there are one system that fits all, Zettelkasten might work for some people while others want it another way, this hypothesis is strengthened by the continuous output of new notes software. For this reason I created my own system, fitting _my_ needs. As a coder I chose markdown to also have the functionality to add snippets and search those snippets. The markdown documents stays in a folder type structure to organize the content and be able to use the vs code command cmd+p that I'm very used to. This works for me, https://www.theorylog.com https://www.theorylog.com.
  • fishmaster 6y ago
    That looks good.
    • suref 6y ago
      Thanks, have worked out so far.
• Cogito 6y ago
  I have no idea what system they used (if any) but this reminded me a lot of how 'Every Frame a Painting' [0] described their note-taking when watching films. One of the best parts of their videos was that every technique they were describing had multiple examples from often very different genres, or directors, or periods. The assumption was that they managed to keep all those connections in their head, but the reality was excellent note taking! [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting
  • boraoztunc 6y ago
    Best channel ever. Miss them so much.
• stippenplan 6y ago
  Personally, I am a big fan of Vim-Wiki [0]. Provides basic note taking, can be reached anywhere from Vim. It is great for jotting down TODOs, while it is also suited for more substantial, longer thoughts. You can add links to other notes as references, or just for quick navigation. These internal links can then be visualised, to highlight the connection between your notes and thoughts [1]. [0] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki [1] https://github.com/maxvdkolk/vimwikigraph https://github.com/maxvdkolk/vimwikigraph
  • pundurs 6y ago
    Yeah, agreed about vimwiki. I've been using it as a knowledge base for years, for quick snippets, ideas, article/book synopsis and notes etc. And the fact that you can interlink them conveniently is a big upside. A question about vimwikigraph while I'm at it - does it work with the markdown syntax? For instance, VimwikiCheckLinks doesn't work for me at all. And the HTML export isn't supported, although that's a minor issue since there are a million tools which can parse markdown into anything.
    • stippenplan 6y ago
      So far it does not support markdown syntax yet. I made it over the weekend, and as my vimwiki uses the vimwiki syntax, I started out with that. I will add an issue to support markdown as well, I will probably get to it this week.
      • stippenplan 6y ago
        Added basic markdown syntax style support to vimwikigraph.
  • baylessj 6y ago
    Agreed, I've been using VimWiki as the means for writing my Zettelkasten and I've really enjoyed it. Wrote a post about the experience on my blog here: https://jonathanbayless.com/2020/03/09/zettelkasten-vimwiki.html https://jonathanbayless.com/2020/03/09/zettelkasten-vimwiki....
• Kosirich 6y ago
  It might sound kinda weird, but I see Azure DevOps Boards (or similar) an ideal system for implementing this. Why: 1) Small notes via User Stories (or tasks) 2) Has linking capabilites 3) Has TAGs 4) Visual representation of LINKS 5) Most of the grind associated with doing this via other systems is removed 6) Free & you can download the data in .csv if needed Thoughts?
• Kosirich 6y ago
  It might sound kinda weird, but I see Azure DevOps Boards (or similar) as an ideal system for implementing this. Why: 1) Small notes via User Stories (or tasks) 2) Has linking capabilites 3) Has TAGs 4) Visual representation of LINKS 5) Most of the grind associated with doing this via other systems is removed 6) Free & you can download the data in .csv if needed Thoughts? It is something I wanted to try out for a while ( I currently use onenote with #(tags)).
• fastball 6y ago
  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 https://supernotes.app
  • limomium 6y ago
    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.
    • fastball 6y ago
      That's fair. Our platform is built around markdown, and you already have the ability to export all of your cards at once in that format. Of course, you lose the structure that we provide between those notes (whether nesting or zettelkasten), but that is also something we are actively working on to make sure that your data stays portable and accessible forever (also working to include more export formats in general). It is difficult though, as no one else supports both multi-parent nesting and zettelkasten like Supernotes does, so your data does lose some functionality if taken off the platform. One of our long-term goals is actually to try to make data ownership better than the status quo by integrating with other providers that would normally hold on to your data and instead get it back to being owned by you, all in one place. Might I ask which service went bust? Want to make sure we don't follow in their footsteps! We're also very much trying to directly charge our users rather than relying on an additional business-facing offering to pay the bills, as we think the result is a more sustainable business (if everyone that is actively using the platform is paying for it, hypothetically we will not go bust). All of my notes (1000+) are on Supernotes, so I'm fairly invested in making sure they're always available.
• BenGosub 6y ago
  I am doing my daily journal in Roam and it's very practical. Marketing or no marketing I think that the personal knowledge base is always best represented as a graph.
• larschdk 6y ago
  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.
  • mtsr 6y ago
    Maybe something like devonthink? It’s not really clean slate every time, but it links notes automatically through use of word vectors and similarity.
    • disposedtrolley 6y ago
      DevonThink doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve been using it for the past few months and find it immensely useful for organising documents and other media, but it’s a very average note taking experience. There are too many things like folder structure, tags, and even the format of the note (plain, MD, rich) to consider during the note taking experience. There’s also an annoying separation between note editing and viewing.
  • elbear 6y ago
    You could use Tiddlywiki. You create entries (called tiddlers) and you can hide them. Then, you won't see them by default, but you can search for them. You can also set it to show you a specific tiddler when you load the page.
  • hollander 6y ago
    I've used personal wikis for many years. It's easy to link between notes, it's searchable. I used camelcased words as hashtags. I had several thousands notes in it, personal and work related. Then the smartphone came and took over, and there was no good wiki-app and in the browser didn't really work. Since then I've switched to Evernote. Again more than 1000 notes without transferring the wiki to Evernote. I can get lost sometimes, and then it needs some work to clean up tags and notes. > 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 don't understand your problem. Evernote can be sorted on date of last access, so you always see the most recent notes on top. You don't want a collection of notes, but you want auto-archive? Isn't auto-archive the collection? > but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history. In evernote and probably any note taking app you can open a new note and start clean.
• tugberkk 6y ago
  A CRUD system where every post is a page, and every post can link to other posts in form of (look: topic) can help tremendously. I think that this is an improved form of Zettelkasten. For every topic there will be a timestamped post, unlimited.
  • elbear 6y ago
    That's how I'm using Tiddlywiki basically.
• GekkePrutser 6y ago
  I used to do all my notetaking in Tomboy. It had very few features (no embedding of pictures even) but it was lightning-fast and you could add links on the go just by typing them. One of the big benefits was that there were keyboard shortcuts for literally everything. However the application was deprecated and the "NG" version of Tomboy didn't have the same performance. I moved to OneNote for the pictures which didn't help. I find snapping screenshots of meeting is much less helpful to memorise them than trying to filter them down to a few lines of written summary during the meeting itself. It requires more active listening rather than the practice of "let's snap all the slides in case I ever need to look at them later" Unfortunately all the recommended apps here seem to be Electron which tend to be slow and wasteful and have poor keyboard control. I don't think this will work for me. But in general, the practice of notetaking itself is in my opinion more important than the linking and method of storing them. It helps store information in our brain which is the fastest database we have :)
  • avian 6y ago
    Another former user of Tomboy here, back from the GNOME 2 era. I think I ran it for a good while after the .deb was removed from official repositories. I'm just using paper notebooks now.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• auggierose 6y ago
  Don't know how these systems work, but I can recommend Quiver for note-taking. You can link to other notes from within notes.
  • auggierose 6y ago
    Oh, I actually have "How to take smart notes" in my library ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• dghf 6y ago
  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?
  • pvitz 6y ago
    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.
  • gooseyard 6y ago
    hah that was my first thought as well; I've always been tempted to try it, but I was dubious about whether I'd have the discipline to keep the cards organized, and I feared that if I tried to make myself a piece of software to do it that I'd get so distracted by writing the software that I'd never write any notes. So I'm curious to give it a whirl now with someone else's software :)
• john4532452 6y ago
  One datapoint of a power user using this method https://braindump.jethro.dev/ https://braindump.jethro.dev/
  • h0p3 6y ago
    Related, https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/ and https://sphygm.us/ https://sphygm.us/ may be worth checking out too.
• can3p 6y ago
  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.
  • marvinblum 6y ago
    The part about "just write it down" is the most important. Connecting information as you go can add value to the knowledge base, but writing down everything that's important is the first step and the tool you use should support that. I think the book keeping part is more of a personal thing and some people feel that they need to do it and others do not. I for myself "separate" notes into problem domains (when I think about them I have a broader topic in mind) and connect all the notes that belong to the same topic when I see fit. That greatly reduces the book keeping part and I can add connections as I go. We build Emvi [1] to support that idea if you're interested. [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/
• dschramm 6y ago
  Nice to see that the "Zettelkasten" is getting more and more attention. We published an article about it on our blog a couple of months ago as well: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
• andi999 6y ago
  If I take a note, then I shd cross reference it. But how do I find the cross reference? Do I have to remember it? Anybody help?
• bronlund 6y ago
  Write something down. Link it to other things. This reminds me of something...
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I have invested a lot of time and thought in organizing my notes, including writing an Evernote mini-clone in Clojure and Clojurescript (with a Javascript Firefox plugin for capturing stuff on the web) many years ago. I settled instead on Google Keep because at the time I didn't have a way to backup Apple Notes. I then saw a reference to the macOS Exporter app, it works OK, and I moved to Apple Notes because I slightly prefer Apple's privacy policies. Now, on any device (use web app for Linux) I can get to my notes and search them. I especially like the interface on iOS and iPadOS: doing a global search on everything on the device shows results for the Notes. I do a lot of research, writing, and development and I really need an extended digital memory. I also need the process of saving information to be as fast as possible so I don't avoid doing it. The Zettelkasten systems, like Roam, seem like there is too much up front effort.
• gas9S9zw3P9c 6y ago
  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 considered "successful" in the economic sense. I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used to get stuff done. These complex systems are the perfect excuse for procrastination because they make you feel like you are doing something productive while you actually aren't. Just get stuff done.
  • henrikeh 6y ago
    I think your skepticism and concern is well placed -- the output is what matters. But I'm a little confused about one aspect: what is it that you perceive as "complicated" and "complex" in this? Genuinely curious and not meant to be snarky.
    • gas9S9zw3P9c 6y ago
      By using tools for this you will inevitably spend additional time organizing, tagging, and summarizing notes, most of which is probably a waste of time. The article has a pretty good example of this > I find watching how this knowledge graph grows satisfying Yep, it's satisfying. Because it's procrastination and gives you the illusion of "being in control" - just like engaging in social media is satisfying. Or cleaning your room while you should be doing homework. I don't think it's useful. Taking notes is great. Research has shown that active note taking, e.g. while watching a lecture, is a crucial part of learning. Organizing them into some (in case of roam, PAID!) system that you will probably not even come back to? Procrastination.
      • sethammons 6y ago
        For me, I am a hand-written note taker. Action items, insights, situation summaries, interesting thoughts or quotes. They are rough and often hastily written. Some numbers of days later, I review all of them and transcribe important notes to a nicer notebook. This allows for some spaced repetition and ensures I don’t miss action items. Way less frequently, I review my nicer notes. Anything still relevant gets rewritten and pulled forward in the notebook. I spend less than fifteen minutes a week on this. This isn’t procrastination, it is organization that ensures I don’t forget important and not yet completed things. I later learned of bullet journaling. Mine is similar in spirit but waaaaay less formal or structured.
• wruza 6y ago
  That is a mindmap, isn’t it?
• modzu 6y ago
  i feel better about having dozens of sticky notes all over my desk now
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• johnminter 6y ago
  One needs to find a note-taking tool that fits one's workflow. I do a lot of analysis using R and compose many documents in Rmarkdown using R-Studio. I keep a git repository with "tips" - one Rmarkdown document per subject area and master document that links all the others. I can access my notes from any computer and it is easy to keep them in sync. Like Zettelkasten's creator, writing (and editing) these help refine my thinking.
• passer_chen 6y ago
  I'm using VSCode/Markor to write notes and I'm using ripgrep to find the things I want to recall, it's straightforward and easy to maintain. The method used in this post isn't particularly convenient in mobile device.
• miki123211 6y ago
  99% of the notetaking tools I've tried were completely inaccessible for screen readers. In the end, I went with a much simpler, zettelkasten-like approach. All my notes are stored in a single wiki.txt file, stored on Dropbox for easy editing and in Git for history and as a backup. The file has very little formatting, two blank lines to separate notes, a line surrounded by single blank lines for headings and a "-" for lists. New notes are always appended at the end, and my journal for the current day is always my last note. That makes it very easy to append stuff there. I use hashtags for organization. If I consider a note relevant to an idea, i just put #ideaName in there, wherever it fits. I find connections by searching for #ideaName via the search box of my text editor. The system is very simple, very portable and works pretty well for me.
  • kragen 6y ago
    Raman uses org-mode with emacspeak, last I heard. He reports it's the first thing he's found that beats raw HTML for writing HTML.
• mgualt 6y ago
  Is there a handwritten (stylus) notes software which can be used for this type of linking? I'm not talking about OCR, but handwritten/drawn as default format.
• carterklein13 6y ago
  I've found that as a software engineer, the best note-taking medium for me is just one massive GitHub repo. It takes a bit of extra planning and oftentimes a bit of reorganizing to keep things in the right place, but I feel like as a software engineer it's the one place I can truly keep all my relevant notes in one place. I can keep code snippets along with markdown notes files along with little hello world apps I build out. notes - OS -- mutexes -- concurrency - architecture -- microservices --- serverless --- MOMs etc etc... I think it's very useful to me to keep high-level notes next to actual executable code. But perhaps most importantly is the ease with which I can replicate and reference other notes. While I'm writing out notes on concurrency with Go, I can easily reference or fully copy over my high-level concurrency notes. It's a little bulky, and requires a bit more overhead, but I think for a software engineer it's one of the best ways to keep all your thinking in one place.
• omginternets 6y ago
  I've come to realize that: 1. 80% note-taking value is in writing the info down in *any* form. 2. 19% is in re-reading your notes. Moreover, you'll evolve a loose/informal system if you stick with it long enough. You'll learn to read your past self. That's presumably what Herr Luhmann did. Note-taking changed my life. I urge people to stop chasing perfection and just get started.
  • dhimes 6y ago
    The power of any system comes when you re-organize the information in your own mind. Reviewing might be enough to allow your brain to do it automatically, but you can also force the process with things like concept-maps and, apparently, this system (which seems to be a type of concept map- but I've not used it so I'm not sure).
    • omginternets 6y ago
      Again, from one internet stranger to another, it has been my experience that: 1. Writing & reviewing notes is forcing the process. It is not automatic. 2. Specialized methods don't generalize well. 3. Personalized methods/notations/styles emerge naturally. 4. Nothing beats pencil-and-paper (with a lot of sketches). 5. Chasing "more efficient note-taking" is grossly counter-productive. YMMV.
      • clairity 6y ago
        > "4. Nothing beats pencil-and-paper (with a lot of sketches)." i bought the first ipad pro with pencil to replace paper for this use case, on the promise of search for handwritten notes. i thought it would be the killer app for ipad pro. instead, it's been disappointing. if only apple had improved the notes app, especially OCR/search, over time rather than regressing it.
        • kragen 6y ago
          I think the Newton was actually better at that.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  By the way, what I hate about most of the note-taking apps is they usually require or push you to give every note a title. C'mon, people, do you invent a title for every note you would write on a paper or a sticky? The same is relevant to e-mail subjects: i many cases the subject is wide, volatile or plain lacking. It often happens the actual contents of an email I receive has nothing to do with what's there in the subject field.
  • livesinhel 6y ago
    I share your frustration. However, it makes sense, if you think about it. Having to give a note a title makes you think it through, and with Zettelkasten you can easily split it into many atomic notes, each covering their own thing. As a workaround, you can have one note dedicated to all your random notes, which you can periodically review and reorganize.
• hypertexthero 6y ago
  Creativity is just connecting things together. Consider paper and pencil or ink when away from a computer. Consider the simplest notes application that supports a wiki linking system when on a computer. For the latter I like [nvAlt][n] which lets you write [[this]] to create a link to and a note titled ‘this’, and I hope Simplenote [implements wikilinks functionality][s] at some point. [n]:https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ [s]:https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-macos/issues/185 https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-macos/issues/185
• wendyshu 6y ago
  There's some optimal place between writing nothing down and writing everything down. I don't think this is that optimal place.
• chadlavi 6y ago
  It's completely possible to achieve the same connection with a git repo of simple markdown files if you make sure: * each file has a descriptive name that starts with an iso date * each file is on a specific topic or idea * you are using a text editor/IDE like vscode that has good search tools You can search a keyword across your whole notes database and you can see immediately when the note was written to get some chronological context and see, of course, the note itself. You can scroll through the list of results to see other places where you're using that keyword. The visual graph part the author is using is just a toy. TLDR: any full-text-search notes database is functionally a Zettelkasten, don't stress about it, just start taking notes
• madballster 6y ago
  I don't think one should suggest Zettelkasten to anyone who is looking for a simple to-do list or note taking implementation. Regular notes are perfectly fine if one wants to take regular notes. Luhman's zettels weren't random thoughts or casual ideas that popped into his head during a stroll with the dog., but rather full, jargon-laden sentences that were close to publication-ready in quality, sometimes highly abstract in nature. He would take a couple dozen related zettels, arrange them on a table in sequence, rearrange them and eventually have a rough outline for an article or the chapter of a book. Here's a random zettel from Luhmann's archive, translated by deepl.com. This is 1 out of 90,000 total: 1.6c1 "About an activity, at one time, central and centralization." -- In some ways comparable to the view of Mary Parker Follett, Dynamic Administration, p. 183ff., e.g. p. 195: "Unity is always a process, not a product." -- But she confuses unity and unifying, and says below quite correctly (p. 195): "Business unifying must be understood as a process, not as a product." -- Except, of course, that the word unity does not mean process, this dynamic view is that the process can be described as valuable and characterizes the organizational view, from the finished fake unit to the unification unit process. Source: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_1_NB_1-6c1_V https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
  • christiangenco 6y ago
    Goodness, that random zettel is hard to grep. My own zettelkasten of random thoughts and casual ideas that pop into my head certainly aren't going to be compiled into a chapter of a sociology book, but I still find value in being able to connect ideas from HN posts and YouTube videos. The products of those types of notes for me are just blog posts and interesting dinner conversations.
• jimothyhalpert7 6y ago
  How is this different to - making a note for every idea in an article - putting a hashtag of the article name and the idea name in the note ?
• pmdulaney 6y ago
  I started using the Zettelkasten approach for a side project (using The Archive) and it has a lot going for it, but one big minus: It felt like work rather than something fun. I've reverted just to a combination of handwritten notes and notes files written in vim (which I find enjoyable).
• kentosi 6y ago
  I'm finding this a concept a little hard to understand, but it vaguely sounds like a system involving hyperlinkable notes. Wouldn't vimwiki basically accomplish this?
• goktugk97 6y ago
  I would say if your workflow is not research-centric where you only implement software, these kinds of methods are not necessary. Only simple note-taking would suffice to ease your brain. On the contrary, if you are reading papers and doing research, taking notes in a meaningful way is more helpful than you would realize. The human brain tends to skip information while reading and you only realize you didn't actually understand that part when you try to write it yourself. The note-taking part doesn't actually take that much brain resources. I am not a native English speaker but I am taking my notes in English. While taking my notes I don't care about grammar or anything, I just read and write what I understood. When I finish the paper and I am comfortable with the topic, I return to my notes, fix grammars and, link them with my other notes. For example, sometimes I come up with a research idea, I make a note about it. In the future, while reading a paper, I realize some of the techniques that are described in the paper might be beneficial to that idea so I link them together. In conclusion, it really depends on your area of work whether to take regular notes or Zettelkasten notes. Forcing your workflow to these methods might hurt your productivity but if you are a researcher I can say, it will be beneficial. I recommend reading "How to take smart notes" book if you are interested in the topic. I am using https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam to take my notes, https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server to visualize it.
• potas 6y ago
  It looks like a simple tagging system with extra steps. Pretty much all modern blogs and social networks have tags/hashtags. You can also refer to other posts with links. Here the same idea is applied to notes, and I'm pretty sure it's already been explored before (e.g. Bear app). I feel like someone is trying to give a fancy name to an ordinary thing, so it would look like a fancy, innovative thing.
• Welaa 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
• keyle 6y ago
  Isn't this how everyone takes notes? Apple notes is geared towards this without the linking but you can hashtag the topics as you write notes and the search is very good.
• bowmessage 6y ago
  Roam looks neat. I wonder if anyone has tips on how one could use org-mode to achieve some similar results?
  • kornish 6y ago
    Look no further: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
  • ssivark 6y ago
    There's already an Emacs package which has become quite popular over the last few months! :-) See "org-roam" [1,2] (and several blog posts and youtube videos by now) [1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam [2]: https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/ https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/introducing_org_roam/
    • dangirsh 6y ago
      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 RoamResearch has yet to implement a useful graph view, PDF annotation, or reference management. OTOH, tending to a setup like this in Emacs can easily become a time-sink, and it's single-player only. [1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server [2]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex [3]: https://youtu.be/Wy9WvF5gWYg https://youtu.be/Wy9WvF5gWYg
      • nanna 6y ago
        > 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.
• kirbysayshi 6y ago
  Fuck anyone that uses Jordan Peterson as an example
  • self_awareness 6y ago
    Care to elaborate why?
    • exmadscientist 6y ago
      Whether you agree with any particular Controversial Political Figure or not, using one as an example will annoy about 50% of your audience (variable, of course, with your audience's current politicization and self-selection). Using neutral examples will help keep the focus on your message rather than incidental politics.
      • ARandomerDude 6y ago
        > will annoy about 50% Why? I'm conservative but I've taken tips from Obama and Bill Clinton. A good idea is a good idea. That Obama and Clinton are successful is all the more reason to pay attention when they give productivity advice, even though I disagree with several of their policies.
        • exmadscientist 6y ago
          Learning from your opposition is one thing. "Here is a look at how John Smith furthered his goals" is a fine article. An article about another topic with an "I <3 John Smith" banner is just going to annoy people who hate him, to no end; it's completely disconnected from the article and therefore shows poor judgement on the author's part.
        • kn0where 6y ago
          Many people find certain opinions of JP’s fall beyond the spectrum of reasonably debatable points of view, and cross the line into the unacceptable. You may disagree on whether JP is too extreme to be part of reasonable discourse, but everyone has a line somewhere. I would find it distracting if the article randomly showed a screenshot of quotes from Chairman Mao, and regardless of the rest of the article, it would unavoidably have some influence on my perception of the author. That’s an extreme example chosen because it is broadly relatable to most people on HN, but I’m sure there are far less controversial people than Mao that you would think are over the line of good taste for inclusion in such a blog post. It should be understandable that for some people JP is over their line.
• tasogare 6y ago
  > Though it’s still early days, adopting a Zettelkasten has been one of my most productive habits. If productivity is measured against the volume of notes taken, sure. Otherwise probably not. Notes are an intermediate step to build something else, which is the real output on which productivity is usually measured.
  • usrme 6y ago
    Your comment pretty much perfectly captures what I haven't been able to articulate when it comes to how productivity and the methods by which to achieve it are constantly fetishized. It really makes me wonder if every Joe Shmoe touting the benefits of method X or tool Y really is productive in the "classical sense" or just seems that way because in their own microcosm the only way to measure it is by the volume of notes.
  • Swizec 6y ago
    The only note taking approach that's ever worked for me: 1. Read/listen/absorb 2. Write down (or tweet) ideas it creates while you're absorbing 3. Wait 4. Create Your mind (or at least mine) finds connections you aren't even aware of and when the time comes, when the right prompt sparks, there it is. The knowledge is ready to be used. Use search and half remembered stuff to find direct citations and brush up on details when necessary. The internet-as-extended-noosphere metaphor works great here.
    • sooheon 6y ago
      Zettelkasten is exactly what you wrote here, with one addition. It not only offloads querying for detail (i.e. search) to the machine, it also offloads some connection-making. Search and lookup is internet-as-extended-memory, links and backlinks are internet-as-serendipitous-thought.
      • Swizec 6y ago
        Ah I thought you had to explicitly create connections. That part seems like a lot of work that my subconscious seems great at on its own
• tagh 6y ago
  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 much from these large 'connectionist' note-taking systems. For example, if your goal is to learn a new programming language, I don't see Zettelkasten being particularly helpful: you've already grokked a a for loop in other languages, and you gain nothing by creating a new linked note under the 'for loop construct' heading. Just do some practice problems instead! But if your goal is to compare and contrast features across many languages, or to identify where certain software architectures are lacking, Zettelkasten would work just fine.
  • qznc 6y ago
    I mostly agree. Recently I started with the Zettelkasten approach (120 notes now), so not much experience yet. I did not use something like this for my phd thesis. Thinking back, I don't think it would have helped significantly because computer science works differently than the humanities. What works very well is to use Zettelkasten as the next step after taking notes from reading book, blog posts, and articles to collect your personal insights. Probably also from movies, podcasts, whatever. I believe Zettelkasten will help me with writing for my own blog and when I'm collecting information for personal projects. In both cases, I have lots of ideas which are not fully formed yet to be published or implemented. With a job and a family there is little time to pursue it, so I have to work in little steps. Externalizing this ideas is essential and a very-hyperlinked style like Zettelkasten seems to fit well. For learning little facts about programming languages, spaced repetition is probably more suitable.
  • ZainRiz 6y ago
    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 Zettelkasten and Build a Second Brain (aka P.A.R.A) note taking methods. They share some core principles but BASB seems much more practical for most people I compared the two here: https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelkasten-vs-para/ https://zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelka...
• M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
  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 journal entries into subject categories. Example: let’s say I learn something about investing. I write something brief about it in my \journal folder, tag it under investing, then maybe save a .pdf of the source to my \investing\temp folder. Next, I add the new info to a note under the relevant category, such as \investing\ETFs.txt Or, I create a new .txt/.rtf (depending my needs) I believe tags are saved as metadata, so it should be cross-compatible. For books, I’ll structure it as \library\broad_category \book_name\chapter_n.txt, add the relevant folder tag, and maybe add an alias/shortcut in the relevant folder. I summarize key points under relevant files such as \investing\ETFs.txt This seems like the best method to me, but I’m open to other strategies.
  • Maha-pudma 6y ago
    You seem to be half way to implementing Zim Wiki. It deals in text files and folders structured the way you describe. Cross platform and simple with some powerful plugins. It has integrated tagging, journal, to-dos. I have tried vim-wiki but keep coming back to Zim every time.
  • kbenson 6y ago
    I'm confused as to why you find Obsidian not matching most those criteria. I heard about it here last week, and just installed it finally tonight, but as I understand it. It's just a bunch of markdown files in a folder on the local disk. That seems.pretty easy to access/convert, is private, is lightweight, and is future proof (I could write something in Perl to generate the graph in a night most likely). I don't know anything about the others, since I haven't really used a note system before, so I can't comment on them. Your system seems to violate a few of your stated concerns though (is it cross compatible?), so I'm confused as to why you find it better.
    • 6y ago
• meagher 6y ago
  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.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    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 writing ADR's (Architecture Decision Records) in my application about technology and architecture choices I've made, so I can look them up later, use it to train new people, and have a basis to challenge a decision on as well. That's more practical for my personal situation. But maybe one day I'll be doing something more academic and will need a way to collate research and the like.
    • fishmaster 6y ago
      You could still benefit from a Zettelkasten just by distilling knowledge in note form. Even if you don't actually have to go back very often.
    • lukevp 6y ago
      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!
      • athenot 6y ago
        This is why I always come back to Apple's humble Notes app after trying the others. It's simple and dumb enough that it gets out of the way and just lets me write notes on my mac or my phone and everything is quietly synced for offline use. Once I start thinking about how I'm going to use the note, I go down a rabbit hole of style / format considerations and it gets in the way of the idea I was trying to capture. So now I give myself permission to just write a note and if it does need to morph into something more structured, it's only a copy-paste away to a fancier tool.
• Gatsky 6y ago
  This looks interesting, but one potential problem with this method is that you start treating the number of notes or the size of the graph as a success metric. The author even notes how it is 'pleasing' to see their note graph grow in size. This could be a perverse incentive.
  • rhythmofrest 6y ago
    I've recently got into using https://kinopio.club https://kinopio.club for noting down these kinds of interconnected thoughts, which encourages combing and refining thoughts down to the root issues. But, some may find it too minimal compared to the tools linked in the article.
  • marvinblum 6y ago
    I had the same thought. I see these graphs more as a gimmick that look nice but don't provide much insight as soon as they grow to a certain size. The first roam research graphs I saw where completely useless. Only when you zoom in and look at an individual note the connections become clearer.
  • ssivark 6y ago
    Yes, and what I find even more worrying about a densely connected graph is that it is not easy to extract information! Lack of connections (factorizing knowledge) is as important as noticing connections. Otherwise you'll be swimming in connections of marginal relevance (i.e. distractions). IMHO a sprinkling of connections, resulting in a relatively sparse graph is quite easy to make sense of. It's not easy to foresee where the optimum might be.
    • sooheon 6y ago
      You're absolutely correct, that is the dominant hyperparameter for a tool like this. If every word was hyperlinked, it would be nonsense. The good news is we don't need to analyze and forecast what the optimum is, we just need to ride the bike and learn to balance.
  • kranner 6y ago
• Mizza 6y ago
  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).
  • Normille 6y ago
    >reduces the lookup times from O(all of the internet) to O(just my notes). This ^^ I use a combo of Pinboard [1] to save URLs I think I'll want to refer to in future, plus NValt [2] stored on my Jottacloud [3] for recording snppets of info and more free-form notes and for making that info available from any of my devices. Nine times out of ten [if not 99 out of 100] however, I'll just StartPage or DDG whatever info I'm looking for, since I always have a browser open anyway. It's also quite common that, having thus found such a nugget of info, I go to add it to my Pinboard or NValt notes for future reference, only to find it was already stored there [often years ago], if only I'd thought to "shop locally" in the first place. [1] https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in [2] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt [3] http://jottacloud.no http://jottacloud.no
    • Normille 6y ago
      I do sometimes wonder though; if there's an inverse correlation between "complexity of ideas preparation" and "actually getting stuff done" and if all these systems are the procrastinator's equivalent of the instant weight-loss diet. Many's the time I've been about to embark on some actual "thing" I need to do [producing a piece of art, writing an article, building a web page, fixing something round the house] only to get completely sidetracked by the thought that if I just; tweak some software settings... re-organise some folders of files... dismantle and clean some piece of equipment.. first, I'll get the job done so much more efficiently. And, of course, I then spend the rest of the day doing that, instead of actually accomplishing the "thing" I set out to do, in the first place.
  • sjy 6y ago
    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.
• sharker8 6y ago
  This is not a cure-all. I started one, and much like a todo list, it stressed me out to look at the pile of cards.
• xseparator 6y ago
  This reminds me of a piece Stephen Johnson once wrote for the New York Times called "Tool for Thought", which described his process using DEVONthink software. (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-thought.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-tho...) "The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me[...]Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me." That process eventually turned into a startup around 2010 I helped found in NYC. Good times.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  Use a system that lets you add tags to your notes for quick indexing.
• sandGorgon 6y ago
  In terms of an actual product, this is a note with clickable hashtags ? This seems like an evolution of an idea that originated in the days before free text search. If you have a personal diary which supports free text search (most hug trackers), why would you need to build structure?
  • elbear 6y ago
    You could see each entry as a function in a programming language. You don't want to repeat yourself. Instead, you implement that function and reuse it where you need.
  • BeetleB 6y ago
    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.
    • sandGorgon 6y ago
      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.
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        If you have full text search you still have to know what to search for. With links the connection will still be there even if you forget about it.
      • BeetleB 6y ago
        > 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 https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam
• Normille 6y ago
  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.
  • Lucent 6y ago
    Feels more like viral marketing for Roam than anything.
    • theon144 6y ago
      Honestly I'm just glad that "Zettelkasten" as a concept is getting more exposure and it's being called what it is, instead of getting eaten up as "a part of Roam". The literal cult surrounding it certainly doesn't make it easy.
  • raindropm 6y ago
    Part of it because there is new hot notetaking/KM app called Obsidian, post on Show HN* about a week ago and people seems super interested. Also posted a just little while further back was another service called Roam which similar in principle. *(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598)
  • slightwinder 6y ago
    It's not really new, but finally the years of spreading the cargo-cult is paying. There is now roam, a new fancy tool which does nothing new, but spreads hard with the new generation and connects well with the zettelkasten-terms. And there recently was was a book about smart notetaking, which sold somewhat well with people who seek some solution but don't know much about this space.
  • metasyn 6y ago
    I got interested in building one about 6 months ago after finding Devine Lu Linvega's memex: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html
• alexashka 6y ago
  I think it's important to identify what your goal is, before deciding which note taking system works for you. Regular notes are a spoon, this method may be a fork. Until you know what type of dish you're going to be eating, it's hard to advocate one utensil over another, although when in doubt, a spoon is a pretty decent universal.
• Siddharth_joshi 6y ago
  I have followed a somewhat similar technique to zettelkasten-technique for cross-referencing information, and it has really helped deriving substantial perspective on the information presented. Hence, I believe this approach helps relate/recall conceptual relationships while re-visiting those notes at a later time.
• BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Isn't what hypertext links are for ?
• zez 6y ago
  Interesting, I keep coming across the technique but have yet to give a a try, I enjoy the thought of linking notes especially cross concept/domain which I can imagine aids in learning and saving to both short/long term memory But rather than fumbling with cards it seems like an interesting use case for AR/VR I always thought VR/AR would be very interesting in the studying/notetaking space, are any of you working on something similar?
• dang 6y ago
  See also, for your Zettelkästen needs: 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196 Definitely a trend, as 2/3 of the posts have been in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=zettelkasten&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• entha_saava 6y ago
  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.
• danboarder 6y ago
  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 https://tiddlywiki.com for example.
  • vvillena 6y ago
    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.
  • BeetleB 6y ago
    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.
• codeisawesome 6y ago
  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.
  • jasonv 6y ago
    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.
• slightwinder 6y ago
  > Zettelkasten is German for “slip-box”. It originates from German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Should this implicate that Luhmann invented Noteboxes? Because this is absolute not the case. There are many famous Zettelkaesten from famous people. The most famous might be the Mundaneum, a kind of wikipedia in noteboxes, from around 1900. What Luhmann did was adding basic hypertext-principles to a common note-taking-tool.
  • qznc 6y ago
    Wikipedia says it was Conrad Gessner in the 16th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
  • Tomte 6y ago
    "Zettelkasten" is a terminus technicus for the specific method Luhmann used. Nobody claims that Luhmann invented rectangular paper. That word isn't in general use in German, and it's certainly not in general use in English. So I don't see any confusion.
    • slightwinder 6y ago
      > 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.
      • Tomte 6y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system was pushed by just about every teacher. The usual word is "Karteikasten", "(Lern-)Kartei" oder "Vokabelbox".
        • slightwinder 6y ago
          > 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 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.
• knzhou 6y ago
  I've taken 3000 pages of notes in a linear, bullet-point fashion, and I also keep up with education research. As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes intentional thought. With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?"). Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes time.
  • ErikBjare 6y ago
    >But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?"). Isn't that exactly what the point of a memex-like system is? Instead of simple X-Y links, you get 3-tuples such as (X, "can cause", Y).
  • estoniandwarf 6y ago
    For Academic writing like the creator of zettelkasten was, web method is much preferred. For linear notes, the remedy is not really feasible, you'd have to go through everything thoroughly fixing unlinked notes. For the 2nd, the 'failure mode' of the web note taker as you describe, that isn't really a problem. Notes are just tools/building blocks to writing or coming up with cohesive ideas/arguments. If you don't know what Y was for, its either irrelevant or you've found a gap in your knowledge you need to plug.
  • jbd0 6y ago
    Zettelkasten can handle this. Create a note called "My Theory" with the contents "X causes Y if Z", where X, Y, and Z are links to the relevant notes.
• cheschire 6y ago
  I make sure to link my OneNote pages together by simply right clicking on a page and copying the link, then pasting it into another page. When I want to find things, I use the search. If I was diligent about my taxonomy, then it's effective. Is there anything else to this system that I'm missing?