9 ms·

A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters

207 points by tslmy 5y ago

kiba 5y ago
I would be interested in the random sample of these notes. It felt like the author gave a guided tour of the house without somehow showing the rooms.
- tslmy 5y ago
  Good idea, kiba! I might do that for my next post.
- justusthane 5y ago
  Likewise. I've tried and failed to pick up Zettelkasten, mostly because I can't really grok the idea of atomic notes and what they're supposed to look like. I'd love to see someone else's.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    This one usually gets thrown around as a good example: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes Here if you want more: https://github.com/KasperZutterman/Second-Brain https://github.com/KasperZutterman/Second-Brain
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    I've read "Taking Smart Notes", and Zettelkasten seems like an amazing solution for a problem I don't have. It seems to be geared around writing longer works out of notes you collect, and if I were doing that, I think I'd be all-in on Zettelkasten. But I'm not. A wiki-like setup is far more valuable to me. I have a daily note with "Work" and "Personal" sections. As I go through the day, I add entries in those sections: - Worked on the [[Foo project]] with [[Joe]] - Called [[Mom]] and asked her about the [[Meatloaf recipe]] - Helped [[Jane]] with the [[Qux problem]] This morning it's very easy to see what I was doing yesterday, and have the context for all the mischief I was up to. Also, when I open "Foo project" and look at its backlinks, I get a timeline of when I'd worked on it, and can see what other things I was working on at the same time. Being able to instantly recreate that context is incredibly valuable, and it's very lightweight for me. I'm not going out of my way to associate "Foo project" with "Joe", but still end up with a graph view that has a lot of notes linking to both of those notes.
  - mtsolitary 5y ago
    Here's mine: https://www.mtsolitary.com https://www.mtsolitary.com
choward 5y ago
A little of topic but I tried Obsidian out even though it isn't "free" software. I could still use it without the paid features. Then one day I went looking for the source and discovered it wasn't open source. That's when I stopped using it. There was discussion on open sourcing it but I'm not holding my breath. Does anyone have any additional info on this? https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/144 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598
- tslmy 5y ago
  I am completely unaware of that. Thanks for bringing it up! This may tilt my decision in choosing a note-taking platform.
- lornajane 5y ago
  This is a really good point, I am using Obsidian but I feel OK about the proprietary-ness of it because at the end of the day, it's a nice tool to read my well-organised folder of markup files with. It's possible I live to regret this ...
- kstrauser 5y ago
  That bothers me, too. On the other hand, I haven’t found a good Free replacement for it, and there’s zero lock-in: its database is just a folder of Markdown files. If it stopped working tomorrow, I’d still have all of my content in a convenient format, ready to start using with another app.
  - npretto 5y ago
    There's also obsidian-export[1] that converts the few things that are not plain markdown (`[[links]` and `![[links]]`). To be honest, obsidian not being open source doesn't bother me too much, what is important to me is that I own the data and that it is in a fairly common format so i can move it to another software in 10 years. An open source software with a weird binary format to save the data will probably do more harm in the long term [1] https://crates.io/crates/obsidian-export https://crates.io/crates/obsidian-export
lornajane 5y ago
I'm a big fan of the evergreen note-taking approach, but my diagram is nothing like as pretty as this one. Apparently I don't link between pages much.
- ar_lan 5y ago
  Aren't Evergreen notes effectively just the Zettelkasten?
- tslmy 5y ago
  There’s no such thing as “pretty diagrams”, lornajane. I believe you simply has boarder interests in life which inherently make inter-links less realistic.
chaoz_ 5y ago
Interesting idea with "Personal CRM". Do you feel like it helped to improve your relationship with close friends or family?
bikingbismuth 5y ago
This reminds me of my personal Wiki that I use to keep track of information at work (I also use Obsidian for this). I start a daily note in the morning and write everything in there until the end of the day, where I have some time set aside to chopping up the information into the appropriate pages. It took a bit for this system to pay off, but when I was writing employee reviews and co-worker feedback, it was almost effortless. I have started to accumulate a critical mass of information that is giving me little hints of insights I hope to be able to leverage this year. I am still working on actually implementing a personal ZK system in Obsidian or on paper (I am looking forward to Scott Scheper's book about Antinets). I manage people and write software for a living, but I don't really write articles or papers (which ZK seems a good fit for). I just finished "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens, and it has inspired me to take another pass at starting a ZK for the benefits of greater understanding and insight about the variety of topics I read about.
- nja 5y ago
  > until the end of the day, where I have some time set aside to chopping up the information into the appropriate pages Your way of working sounds wonderful, but I find that I would probably struggle with this part. How are you able to define the end of your day and ensure you have such time marked off? I have tried this but always end up getting sucked into endless other issues/problems/etc and basically passing out at some point, only to wake up the next day to dive right in -- no time to be able to do that sort of retrospective note-munging... (this is not exclusive to trying to find retrospective time; it applies to things like finding time for food/dinner, blocking out vacation time, or other things, too. work never ends!!)
  - pseudoramble 5y ago
    Not OP, but I feel compelled to answer. I have lots of my own thoughts and feelings on the topic. I'll leave it at two framing thoughts: If you literally can't find time to eat, how will you even be able to function to execute work, let alone anything higher level than that? I know you probably didn't mean literally no time to eat, but my broad point is how can you work hard indefinitely without caring about your physical self reliably? If your workload will never end, what exactly are you racing against by working as hard as you can every day? Even if you 100% everything for one day, you're guaranteed to have just as much or more the next day, right? What are you gaining by battling every day until you give out?
xenodium 5y ago
Org mode is very dear in this space (to us Emacs users anyway). I'm an iPhone user and was missing quick access to my content (view/add/edit) while on the go. Org is a rich markup, but I've been slowly chipping at my own iOS app with https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com. Compared to markdown, our non-Emacs org options are few but here are others I know about: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com (I author this one too) https://organice.200ok.ch https://organice.200ok.ch https://orgro.org https://orgro.org http://orgzly.com http://orgzly.com Karl Voit also has a great effort going to advocate org outside of Emacs and documents some of the tools at https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool... edit: formatting
- tconfrey 5y ago
  Worth mentioning here that LogSeq can work with markdown or org-mode files. In my personal setup one of my LogSeq nodes points to my BrainTool.org file which holds all my bookmarks, web-resource pointers and associated notes. This way I can bounce between working in Chrome, emacs and LogSeq all referencing the same underlying data model. (With Orgzly for a read-only view on my phone.) See also org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/) - an emacs-native bidirectional linking PKM solution.
  - sp33der89 5y ago
    Love the org support in LogSeq! Probably the deciding factor why I chose it over Dendron(which is great as well). LogSeq also has experimental Android support: https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/0.5.8 https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/0.5.8
    - 1MachineElf 5y ago
      Thank you so much for pointing out upcoming Android support! That's a huge factor for me. Which of those downloads is an Android app? I didn't see an APK, which is usually how they come. Edit: Nevermind. I see they link to the nightly release where a working version can be obtained[0]. Running it now. [0] https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/nightly https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/nightly
uptownfunk 5y ago
Capturing notes in a decent UI seems to be a solved problem and there are a lot of tools out there for the job. Searching through a lot of notes also seems to be a solved problem. However, the structured organization of a large collection of notes (think thousands to tens of thousands of notecards in boxes..) as well as the finding connections between seemingly unrelated notes doesn't seem to be a solved problem. Does anyone know of any solutions in this space? Zettelkasten (per my understanding) seems to make this manual on part of the note-taker, but (1) this is super time consuming and (2) very hard to keep track of all the note cards as the collection grows over time.
- etherio 5y ago
  I'm trying to do that with a new project that uses Natural Language Processing. (see gif at https://twitter.com/uzpg_/status/1483140905943146502 https://twitter.com/uzpg_/status/1483140905943146502) Basically it generates an automated graph of relations between your notes and tries to find which "ideas" group them. I'll probably post the Show HN soon once I make it public!
  - uptownfunk 5y ago
    Cool! I really think this could be huge. Finding connections between ideas is basically the genesis of innovation. Would be very interested to see/learn about your approach.
  - h0p3 5y ago
    I'm looking forward to it!
- stephendause 5y ago
  I think part of the point of Zettelkasten is that by manually making the links yourself, you are forming the associations in your brain, which is part of the learning, thinking, and remembering process. I am just now learning about it from the book How to Take Smart Notes, so I could be off, but that's part of the idea. With that said, I think what you suggest could possibly be a cool supplement or replacement.
hadjian 5y ago
I use org-mode, just FYI. I was wondering however: everyone shares how they store things, but how often or even how do you query your knowledge base? There are often tips for creating habit to write down things „at the end of the day“ or such. But can anyone describe some habits when to consume this stuff? I‘d be interested. Thx.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  I'm using PouchDB to query the small stuff that comes at me during the day like tasks, links, reminders, etc. One simple html file plus a little Javascript (even I can write that) is all it takes. I've tried more elaborate approaches, but they never lasted.
- galfarragem 5y ago
  I'll bite. My answer to the "Million dollar question": How to make useful notes? - Notes are not "write-only": progressively summarize and tree-shake your notes each time you iterate them. You'll leverage your excitement instead of forcing discipline. - Ideally, notes are organized by project, not by category. It can be a catalyst for action and reviews. - Only store things that surprise you, not stuff you already know.
  - programmer_dude 5y ago
    Some things you "know" today may surprise you "tomorrow". I have a massive collection of notes. I am constantly surprised by what I used to know and how much I have forgotten. Such is life I guess.
- tconfrey 5y ago
  I've also been a plain emacs then org-mode note taker for a number of years. I keep a log.org file with dated items containing notes from meetings and major project actions of the day. I generally have my laptop open during meetings making notes in realtime. After a meeting, or whenever, I'll tag things and note any follow ups, TODOs or things to remember. I have a terrible memory for proper nouns but I can generally remember enough context so that a quick backward search in my notes buffer can get me back to the name of the person, team, customer, project, action item etc that I'm looking for. (EG it probably has this tag, or it came up during my meeting with Riley, or last Monday, or during the sprint planning meeting etc). I'm now fast enough at this that I can often start talking and do a search in time to mention the 'thing' by the time I need to refer to it. I see this model as somewhat different than the more reflective, bi-directional link driven, PKM tools being discussed here. Its a great feeder into such a system (IMO) where more active curation can take place. Plus even if there's never any curation I still have all my todo's, calendaring etc accessible to org's agenda features!
softwarebeware 5y ago
Thanks for the article! It's interesting to see how your notes cluster and what you can glean from them. I have a single file, people.md, that I keep important notes about 1-on-1's I've had with others in. Also: I'm a big fan of customized personal note-taking using open standards. I didn't intend to do this, but somehow over time I ended up rolling my own note-taking approach and "software" (if you can call a shell script that) which is too lightweight to have any kind of visualization piece. If you're interested in reading about that journey, it's found at https://dev.to/scottshipp/an-amazing-note-taking-system-with-markdown-and-git-part-1-48b1 https://dev.to/scottshipp/an-amazing-note-taking-system-with...
supperburg 5y ago
- smegsicle 5y ago
  In the US, karaoke exists as a form of standup comedy.
- tslmy 5y ago
  I'm very confused. Karaoke definitely exists in China. Maybe they go by a different name: KTVs. Yes. Stand-up comedies are also huge in China: - "Single-standing Comedy" in Beijing: http://www.danlirencomedy.cn/ http://www.danlirencomedy.cn/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeN0myzkjm2BDjaBZ5C3Qng https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeN0myzkjm2BDjaBZ5C3Qng - "No-name Comedy" in Nanjing: https://www.wumingxiju.com/ https://www.wumingxiju.com/ - Fun Factory in Shanghai: https://www.linkedin.com/company/%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E7%AC%91%E6%9E%9C%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E4%BC%A0%E5%AA%92%E6%9C%89%E9%99%90%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E7%AC%91... Cunningham's law at work.
  - supperburg 5y ago
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  - supperburg 5y ago
tomerbd 5y ago
Do you actually read the notes you write in obsidian or is it just a waste of time?
- tslmy 5y ago
  I do. Many posts on my blog (https://lmy.medium.com/ https://lmy.medium.com/) are brainchildren from those notes.
oxff 5y ago
I will always run into these threads to state that: these tools will not help you until you yourself have organized your thoughts! You can't have messy idea of a subject topic or some category of ideas and "just" use Zettelkasten or some other method or tool to unfuck it. And now when that's done, I just use a set of markdown files and some kind of Zettelkasten indexing system. e. also this graph understanding of ZK is misunderstood way to do ZK.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  They're just a better form of writing, and writing can help you organize your thoughts. Sometimes the line between writing and meditation can even blur.
drcode 5y ago
How useful to people find these "cluster graphs" to be, which are so popular in zettelkasten/pkms systems? It seems to me it would, instead, be more helpful to just have a table of the most connected nodes, sorted by # of connections.
imjared 5y ago
This is cool. I'm looking to level up my Obsidian usage and I really like the author's thoughtfulness and optimism in their daily notes. My favorite thing so far has been using Daily Notes to track a morning score and an evening score in the markdown's frontmatter. The score is just a "how I'm feeling" and can encompass really any aspect of my wellbeing. I'm working on a project to parse the data out of my daily notes so I can try to visualize trends. Eventually I want to mash in more data (listening history, Strava activity level, steps from Garmin, etc.) to see what kinds of things have, or seem to have, effects on my well-being. screenshot of last april: https://share.getcloudapp.com/8Lupb7LX https://share.getcloudapp.com/8Lupb7LX
fortylove 5y ago
Power to the OP, but does anyone else find this knowledge mapping exercise mildly depressing, especially as it pertains to notes about friendships? I can’t quite find the words to describe how I feel about it, but I don’t particularly like the idea of reducing all my thoughts and emotions into text and links between texts. Maybe forcing text makes me aware of details more consciously, but I feel like it might reduce the rawness of life, reducing the resolution to fit into text space. When in reality, maybe the raw emotions are more human? Again, not really sure how to describe my feelings here. Am I alone with this view?
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  > reducing ... into text. Are you though? You can just view the text as memories. Same as taking pictures on vacations: "reducing vacations to pictures" sounds like a pretty bad vacation/more like photography work. "Taking pictures of cherished moments and places" sounds like something you might look at again from time to time to fondly remember.
- sooheon 5y ago
  You should only note things you find noteworthy.
- MarkMarine 5y ago
  Nope. Using a CRM to keep in touch also rubs me the wrong way.
- bakul 5y ago
  This is just an additional tool. Use it if it works for you. For years I used to dump my interesting product/research ideas in individual files - now I moved them in obsidian. Even before then I used to put them in a computation notebook with light green graph paper pages. Writing, sketching, drawing pictures on paper is certainly more creative and freeing (for me) but searching through old notes is harder. Now with Apple pencil (or equivalent) you can get some features of both worlds in one place, with OCR and such. There is a recent free app called collanote that seems quite promising. Still, I’d prefer a cross platform app.
- 5y ago
throwaway89374 5y ago
"org-roam" package of emacs is amazing. It integrates with other org packages like bookmarking pdf storing images etc.

207 points by tslmy 5y ago

kiba 5y ago

I would be interested in the random sample of these notes. It felt like the author gave a guided tour of the house without somehow showing the rooms.

tslmy 5y ago
Good idea, kiba! I might do that for my next post.
justusthane 5y ago
Likewise. I've tried and failed to pick up Zettelkasten, mostly because I can't really grok the idea of atomic notes and what they're supposed to look like. I'd love to see someone else's.
- input_sh 5y ago
  This one usually gets thrown around as a good example: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes Here if you want more: https://github.com/KasperZutterman/Second-Brain https://github.com/KasperZutterman/Second-Brain
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I've read "Taking Smart Notes", and Zettelkasten seems like an amazing solution for a problem I don't have. It seems to be geared around writing longer works out of notes you collect, and if I were doing that, I think I'd be all-in on Zettelkasten. But I'm not. A wiki-like setup is far more valuable to me. I have a daily note with "Work" and "Personal" sections. As I go through the day, I add entries in those sections: - Worked on the [[Foo project]] with [[Joe]] - Called [[Mom]] and asked her about the [[Meatloaf recipe]] - Helped [[Jane]] with the [[Qux problem]] This morning it's very easy to see what I was doing yesterday, and have the context for all the mischief I was up to. Also, when I open "Foo project" and look at its backlinks, I get a timeline of when I'd worked on it, and can see what other things I was working on at the same time. Being able to instantly recreate that context is incredibly valuable, and it's very lightweight for me. I'm not going out of my way to associate "Foo project" with "Joe", but still end up with a graph view that has a lot of notes linking to both of those notes.
- mtsolitary 5y ago
  Here's mine: https://www.mtsolitary.com https://www.mtsolitary.com

choward 5y ago

A little of topic but I tried Obsidian out even though it isn't "free" software. I could still use it without the paid features. Then one day I went looking for the source and discovered it wasn't open source. That's when I stopped using it. There was discussion on open sourcing it but I'm not holding my breath. Does anyone have any additional info on this? https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/144 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598

tslmy 5y ago
I am completely unaware of that. Thanks for bringing it up! This may tilt my decision in choosing a note-taking platform.
lornajane 5y ago
This is a really good point, I am using Obsidian but I feel OK about the proprietary-ness of it because at the end of the day, it's a nice tool to read my well-organised folder of markup files with. It's possible I live to regret this ...
kstrauser 5y ago
That bothers me, too. On the other hand, I haven’t found a good Free replacement for it, and there’s zero lock-in: its database is just a folder of Markdown files. If it stopped working tomorrow, I’d still have all of my content in a convenient format, ready to start using with another app.
- npretto 5y ago
  There's also obsidian-export[1] that converts the few things that are not plain markdown (`[[links]` and `![[links]]`). To be honest, obsidian not being open source doesn't bother me too much, what is important to me is that I own the data and that it is in a fairly common format so i can move it to another software in 10 years. An open source software with a weird binary format to save the data will probably do more harm in the long term [1] https://crates.io/crates/obsidian-export https://crates.io/crates/obsidian-export

lornajane 5y ago

I'm a big fan of the evergreen note-taking approach, but my diagram is nothing like as pretty as this one. Apparently I don't link between pages much.

ar_lan 5y ago
Aren't Evergreen notes effectively just the Zettelkasten?
tslmy 5y ago
There’s no such thing as “pretty diagrams”, lornajane. I believe you simply has boarder interests in life which inherently make inter-links less realistic.

chaoz_ 5y ago

Interesting idea with "Personal CRM". Do you feel like it helped to improve your relationship with close friends or family?

bikingbismuth 5y ago

This reminds me of my personal Wiki that I use to keep track of information at work (I also use Obsidian for this). I start a daily note in the morning and write everything in there until the end of the day, where I have some time set aside to chopping up the information into the appropriate pages. It took a bit for this system to pay off, but when I was writing employee reviews and co-worker feedback, it was almost effortless. I have started to accumulate a critical mass of information that is giving me little hints of insights I hope to be able to leverage this year. I am still working on actually implementing a personal ZK system in Obsidian or on paper (I am looking forward to Scott Scheper's book about Antinets). I manage people and write software for a living, but I don't really write articles or papers (which ZK seems a good fit for). I just finished "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens, and it has inspired me to take another pass at starting a ZK for the benefits of greater understanding and insight about the variety of topics I read about.

nja 5y ago
> until the end of the day, where I have some time set aside to chopping up the information into the appropriate pages Your way of working sounds wonderful, but I find that I would probably struggle with this part. How are you able to define the end of your day and ensure you have such time marked off? I have tried this but always end up getting sucked into endless other issues/problems/etc and basically passing out at some point, only to wake up the next day to dive right in -- no time to be able to do that sort of retrospective note-munging... (this is not exclusive to trying to find retrospective time; it applies to things like finding time for food/dinner, blocking out vacation time, or other things, too. work never ends!!)
- pseudoramble 5y ago
  Not OP, but I feel compelled to answer. I have lots of my own thoughts and feelings on the topic. I'll leave it at two framing thoughts: If you literally can't find time to eat, how will you even be able to function to execute work, let alone anything higher level than that? I know you probably didn't mean literally no time to eat, but my broad point is how can you work hard indefinitely without caring about your physical self reliably? If your workload will never end, what exactly are you racing against by working as hard as you can every day? Even if you 100% everything for one day, you're guaranteed to have just as much or more the next day, right? What are you gaining by battling every day until you give out?

xenodium 5y ago

Org mode is very dear in this space (to us Emacs users anyway). I'm an iPhone user and was missing quick access to my content (view/add/edit) while on the go. Org is a rich markup, but I've been slowly chipping at my own iOS app with https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com. Compared to markdown, our non-Emacs org options are few but here are others I know about: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com (I author this one too) https://organice.200ok.ch https://organice.200ok.ch https://orgro.org https://orgro.org http://orgzly.com http://orgzly.com Karl Voit also has a great effort going to advocate org outside of Emacs and documents some of the tools at https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool... edit: formatting

tconfrey 5y ago
Worth mentioning here that LogSeq can work with markdown or org-mode files. In my personal setup one of my LogSeq nodes points to my BrainTool.org file which holds all my bookmarks, web-resource pointers and associated notes. This way I can bounce between working in Chrome, emacs and LogSeq all referencing the same underlying data model. (With Orgzly for a read-only view on my phone.) See also org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/) - an emacs-native bidirectional linking PKM solution.
- sp33der89 5y ago
  Love the org support in LogSeq! Probably the deciding factor why I chose it over Dendron(which is great as well). LogSeq also has experimental Android support: https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/0.5.8 https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/0.5.8
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    Thank you so much for pointing out upcoming Android support! That's a huge factor for me. Which of those downloads is an Android app? I didn't see an APK, which is usually how they come. Edit: Nevermind. I see they link to the nightly release where a working version can be obtained[0]. Running it now. [0] https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/nightly https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/nightly

uptownfunk 5y ago

Capturing notes in a decent UI seems to be a solved problem and there are a lot of tools out there for the job. Searching through a lot of notes also seems to be a solved problem. However, the structured organization of a large collection of notes (think thousands to tens of thousands of notecards in boxes..) as well as the finding connections between seemingly unrelated notes doesn't seem to be a solved problem. Does anyone know of any solutions in this space? Zettelkasten (per my understanding) seems to make this manual on part of the note-taker, but (1) this is super time consuming and (2) very hard to keep track of all the note cards as the collection grows over time.

etherio 5y ago
I'm trying to do that with a new project that uses Natural Language Processing. (see gif at https://twitter.com/uzpg_/status/1483140905943146502 https://twitter.com/uzpg_/status/1483140905943146502) Basically it generates an automated graph of relations between your notes and tries to find which "ideas" group them. I'll probably post the Show HN soon once I make it public!
- uptownfunk 5y ago
  Cool! I really think this could be huge. Finding connections between ideas is basically the genesis of innovation. Would be very interested to see/learn about your approach.
- h0p3 5y ago
  I'm looking forward to it!
stephendause 5y ago
I think part of the point of Zettelkasten is that by manually making the links yourself, you are forming the associations in your brain, which is part of the learning, thinking, and remembering process. I am just now learning about it from the book How to Take Smart Notes, so I could be off, but that's part of the idea. With that said, I think what you suggest could possibly be a cool supplement or replacement.

hadjian 5y ago

I use org-mode, just FYI. I was wondering however: everyone shares how they store things, but how often or even how do you query your knowledge base? There are often tips for creating habit to write down things „at the end of the day“ or such. But can anyone describe some habits when to consume this stuff? I‘d be interested. Thx.

bachmeier 5y ago
I'm using PouchDB to query the small stuff that comes at me during the day like tasks, links, reminders, etc. One simple html file plus a little Javascript (even I can write that) is all it takes. I've tried more elaborate approaches, but they never lasted.
galfarragem 5y ago
I'll bite. My answer to the "Million dollar question": How to make useful notes? - Notes are not "write-only": progressively summarize and tree-shake your notes each time you iterate them. You'll leverage your excitement instead of forcing discipline. - Ideally, notes are organized by project, not by category. It can be a catalyst for action and reviews. - Only store things that surprise you, not stuff you already know.
- programmer_dude 5y ago
  Some things you "know" today may surprise you "tomorrow". I have a massive collection of notes. I am constantly surprised by what I used to know and how much I have forgotten. Such is life I guess.
tconfrey 5y ago
I've also been a plain emacs then org-mode note taker for a number of years. I keep a log.org file with dated items containing notes from meetings and major project actions of the day. I generally have my laptop open during meetings making notes in realtime. After a meeting, or whenever, I'll tag things and note any follow ups, TODOs or things to remember. I have a terrible memory for proper nouns but I can generally remember enough context so that a quick backward search in my notes buffer can get me back to the name of the person, team, customer, project, action item etc that I'm looking for. (EG it probably has this tag, or it came up during my meeting with Riley, or last Monday, or during the sprint planning meeting etc). I'm now fast enough at this that I can often start talking and do a search in time to mention the 'thing' by the time I need to refer to it. I see this model as somewhat different than the more reflective, bi-directional link driven, PKM tools being discussed here. Its a great feeder into such a system (IMO) where more active curation can take place. Plus even if there's never any curation I still have all my todo's, calendaring etc accessible to org's agenda features!

softwarebeware 5y ago

Thanks for the article! It's interesting to see how your notes cluster and what you can glean from them. I have a single file, people.md, that I keep important notes about 1-on-1's I've had with others in. Also: I'm a big fan of customized personal note-taking using open standards. I didn't intend to do this, but somehow over time I ended up rolling my own note-taking approach and "software" (if you can call a shell script that) which is too lightweight to have any kind of visualization piece. If you're interested in reading about that journey, it's found at https://dev.to/scottshipp/an-amazing-note-taking-system-with-markdown-and-git-part-1-48b1 https://dev.to/scottshipp/an-amazing-note-taking-system-with...

supperburg 5y ago

smegsicle 5y ago
In the US, karaoke exists as a form of standup comedy.
tslmy 5y ago
I'm very confused. Karaoke definitely exists in China. Maybe they go by a different name: KTVs. Yes. Stand-up comedies are also huge in China: - "Single-standing Comedy" in Beijing: http://www.danlirencomedy.cn/ http://www.danlirencomedy.cn/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeN0myzkjm2BDjaBZ5C3Qng https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeN0myzkjm2BDjaBZ5C3Qng - "No-name Comedy" in Nanjing: https://www.wumingxiju.com/ https://www.wumingxiju.com/ - Fun Factory in Shanghai: https://www.linkedin.com/company/%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E7%AC%91%E6%9E%9C%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E4%BC%A0%E5%AA%92%E6%9C%89%E9%99%90%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E7%AC%91... Cunningham's law at work.
- supperburg 5y ago
beepbooptheory 5y ago
- supperburg 5y ago

tomerbd 5y ago

Do you actually read the notes you write in obsidian or is it just a waste of time?

tslmy 5y ago
I do. Many posts on my blog (https://lmy.medium.com/ https://lmy.medium.com/) are brainchildren from those notes.

oxff 5y ago

I will always run into these threads to state that: these tools will not help you until you yourself have organized your thoughts! You can't have messy idea of a subject topic or some category of ideas and "just" use Zettelkasten or some other method or tool to unfuck it. And now when that's done, I just use a set of markdown files and some kind of Zettelkasten indexing system. e. also this graph understanding of ZK is misunderstood way to do ZK.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
They're just a better form of writing, and writing can help you organize your thoughts. Sometimes the line between writing and meditation can even blur.

drcode 5y ago

How useful to people find these "cluster graphs" to be, which are so popular in zettelkasten/pkms systems? It seems to me it would, instead, be more helpful to just have a table of the most connected nodes, sorted by # of connections.

imjared 5y ago

This is cool. I'm looking to level up my Obsidian usage and I really like the author's thoughtfulness and optimism in their daily notes. My favorite thing so far has been using Daily Notes to track a morning score and an evening score in the markdown's frontmatter. The score is just a "how I'm feeling" and can encompass really any aspect of my wellbeing. I'm working on a project to parse the data out of my daily notes so I can try to visualize trends. Eventually I want to mash in more data (listening history, Strava activity level, steps from Garmin, etc.) to see what kinds of things have, or seem to have, effects on my well-being. screenshot of last april: https://share.getcloudapp.com/8Lupb7LX https://share.getcloudapp.com/8Lupb7LX

fortylove 5y ago

Power to the OP, but does anyone else find this knowledge mapping exercise mildly depressing, especially as it pertains to notes about friendships? I can’t quite find the words to describe how I feel about it, but I don’t particularly like the idea of reducing all my thoughts and emotions into text and links between texts. Maybe forcing text makes me aware of details more consciously, but I feel like it might reduce the rawness of life, reducing the resolution to fit into text space. When in reality, maybe the raw emotions are more human? Again, not really sure how to describe my feelings here. Am I alone with this view?

diffeomorphism 5y ago
> reducing ... into text. Are you though? You can just view the text as memories. Same as taking pictures on vacations: "reducing vacations to pictures" sounds like a pretty bad vacation/more like photography work. "Taking pictures of cherished moments and places" sounds like something you might look at again from time to time to fondly remember.
sooheon 5y ago
You should only note things you find noteworthy.
MarkMarine 5y ago
Nope. Using a CRM to keep in touch also rubs me the wrong way.
bakul 5y ago
This is just an additional tool. Use it if it works for you. For years I used to dump my interesting product/research ideas in individual files - now I moved them in obsidian. Even before then I used to put them in a computation notebook with light green graph paper pages. Writing, sketching, drawing pictures on paper is certainly more creative and freeing (for me) but searching through old notes is harder. Now with Apple pencil (or equivalent) you can get some features of both worlds in one place, with OCR and such. There is a recent free app called collanote that seems quite promising. Still, I’d prefer a cross platform app.
5y ago

throwaway89374 5y ago

"org-roam" package of emacs is amazing. It integrates with other org packages like bookmarking pdf storing images etc.