Types of notes

denismaier

Hi everyone,

first post here. I'm thinking about starting a zettelkasten, but I have a few questions about best practices. How do you deal with different types of notes? How do you indicate hub/structure notes, unfinished notes, literature notes, and outlines? Do you keep them in special directories? Or do add an indicator to the title? Or special tags?

Best,
Denis

GeoEng51

@denismaier said:
Hi everyone,

first post here. I'm thinking about starting a zettelkasten, but I have a few questions about best practices. How do you deal with different types of notes? How do you indicate hub/structure notes, unfinished notes, literature notes, and outlines? Do you keep them in special directories? Or do add an indicator to the title? Or special tags?

Best,
Denis

Personal opinion, but I think tags do a good job and keep your ZK unstructured. I use #unfinished for zettels that are not yet complete (I don't mean "perfect", I just mean there is still substance to add), #unlinked for zettels that are not yet linked (or have less than 2 links), #structure for "structure notes", etc. You can make up some tags of your own devising. If you then create some saved searches, you can quickly find these items (without having to type the tags in the search bar). You can even use Boolean logic to combine tags in a search, like looking for zettels that are both #unfinished and #unlinked.

Welcome to the forum, by the way! There's always a lot of good advice floating around here.

Will

@denismaier said:
How do you deal with different types of notes? How do you indicate hub/structure notes, unfinished notes, literature notes, and outlines? Do you keep them in special directories? Or do add an indicator to the title? Or special tags?

I'm not sure what the best practices are but this is how I've evolved to dealing with different types of notes. I like to see at a glance if a note is a structure note or not. I like that it is not too complicated or fancy.

Others on the forum, who are more thoughtful, more experienced, and better able to communicate, use different marks and some use a finer granularity in their categorization of their notes.

1. Hub/structure notes
   These get an • indicator in their title.

2. Unfinished notes
   I use the #inbox tag for unfinished notes in the sense I think you are reffereing to but I see all my notes as "unfinished".

3. Literature notes
   I'm not sure what these are? When I read literature, I create a structure note for the reading and I link all my notes that I create from the reading as individual notes and add the links to the structure note with annotations.

4. Outlines
   I'm not sure I know what you mean by outlines. I have an outline of a current project and that is tagged #inbox. I have a outline of a coding procedure which is a note on my • Coding Hub. So it depends on the context of the outline as to how I deal with it.

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Here is screen shot of my most current note list. You can see symbols and short acronyms prepended onto some notes and this gives me a clear picture as to what I'm looking at and help focus my attention. This list is sorted by most resent modified.

Hope this helps.