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

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.