What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month, August 2026?

wjenkins81

The idea: a general chat about what we're working on currently.

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This month I'm doing overdue, but important, reworking.

The big revisit and rewrite

I've had a ZK for over three years now, and there are many groups of notes I always knew I should revisit and rework in some way. Finally, something has pushed me to stop putting it off and really do that.

I've decided to start looking for a new job. I have notes from three years ago that I made from books about cover letters, psychometric testing, and interviewing skills. These are some of the oldest ZK notes I have. They were never well organized or deeply linked, as at the time it was rushed work. But I always put off revisiting them because I didn't need them anymore after finding a job, so they were no longer a priority.

But now that I'm going to search for a new role, they've become some of the most important notes I have.

Today I started reworking them one by one. The main work is rewriting, and synthesizing different sources, but also I'm taking the opportunity to organize them better and have better links. However, some of them need to be updated so much that they actually need to be replaced with notes from completely new sources. Here are two examples of things that have changed a lot in three years:

1. We used to write cover letters and resumes thinking about how the human on the other side would read them. Today, companies use AI to screen applicants, and the AI creates the shortlist for a human to look at. So we need to think about how an AI would interpret our documents.
2. As it's almost always electronic these days, some of the old 'golden tips' are meaningless today. E.g. printing your cover letter and resume on expensive paper and practicing a beautiful ink signature.

Now that I'm getting some momentum on reworking these older notes, I want to keep up that momentum afterwards and revisit all older notes that I haven't looked at for a while.

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And how is it going for the rest of you? What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month?

KChousos

I'm clearing up the boundaries of my slipbox against other methods.

One of the main reasons I had for starting a slipbox was that I felt I had a lot of thoughts that were fleeting and ultimately lost, as well as knowledge nuggets from different sources that I couldn't remember. Thus I wanted a way to organize those and track/archive them. The problem I faced is that a lot of these thoughts and/or tidbits of information did not deserve the full processing pipeline of the ZK Method and resulted in busy work. I realized that some type of journaling system was more appropriate for that stuff.

After taking a turn towards analog paper systems—only keeping the slipbox digital, as Org files in Emacs—I ended with an overall system that I think works for me.

An overview diagram generated by ChatGPT follows:

• The notebooks 3-5 are inserts in my traveler's notebook and are grouped together.
• General quotes, facts etc. that I find a medium level of "interesting" will stay in the commonplace book.
• The slipbox will host only high-interest notes, mainly related to my academic research and mostly communicating only with the lab notebook.
• Thoughts and reflections will go to my journal or my intentions journal (kinda experimenting with the last one, don't know yet if it'll prove useful or not).

A correction is that not everything will go through the pocket notebook first, it's just a catch-all for when I don't have access to the corresponding notebook.

I believe this system will allow the slipbox to shine through on what it does best, i.e. connections between atomic ideas for writing and research, while the rest of the system will deal with more low-effort/low-process stuff and personal reflections.

wjenkins81

@KChousos said:
I'm clearing up the boundaries of my slipbox against other methods.

Probably like others on this forum, I've run various experiments on what could go into my ZK, but like you I've concluded that not everything fits in there. Sometimes a paper notebook for temporary notes is just what you need in the moment. A journal can be very private, so it might be better to keep it separate (I encrypt mine, as I'm a very private person).

But the main thing is that we have a system, and it looks like you've worked out your system quite well.

There will be other things in the future where I'll have to figure out how to handle them, but I feel like my ZK gives me a strong basis, and we can learn a lot from others here on the forum.

I believe this system will allow the slipbox to shine through on what it does best, i.e. connections between atomic ideas for writing and research, while the rest of the system will deal with more low-effort/low-process stuff and personal reflections.

That was my main problem when I was really excited about the ZK method at the beginning, I was adding all kinds of things, including low-effort/low-process stuff. But I've learned to focus on the essentials a lot more.

Good luck with your evolving system.

KChousos

@wjenkins81 Thanks a lot! You as well!

ctietze

I continue to build out my knowledge about "house", how they are built, but also how multiple layers overlap everywhere.

Feels like SimCity 2000, sometimes, I think of construction, and of the pipes running underneath; electricity; but then there's also pollution (noise between rooms; smell from kitchen; overall unpleasantness of toilets in view); there's ergonomic considerations like work triangles in kitchen, logistics, traveling through rooms; light and shade, heating and cooling.

As a software systems engineer, it feels like I have prepared all my life for this