Does your ZK have any "Home" notes? If so, how do you maintain it?

jellis

Like dashboards or something. Do you have a place where you go back to if you feel too lost in your archive or anything? I feel like I might need to have one to keep myself focused each day. What are your thoughts on them? If you have one, how do you maintain yours?

zk_1000

You can use structure notes to facilitate access to multiple notes. Does this help?

Will

@jellis said:
Like dashboards or something.

Dashboards are slightly different from "home notes," but yes, use two different types of "home notes." I use different terminology, but I get what you mean.

I use 'hub notes' to congregate 'structure notes' containing mostly 'atomic notes.' Then I link them together.

Hub notes have emerged out of the content of my archive. Starting, you would have many or any hubs, but they will naturally emerge as time progresses. Start one hub note and hang a note on it, and your off and running.
These are the main area of focus of my intellectual life. I bare myself naked by showing you this.

Structure notes in this example are notes on specific reading, lectures, video, etc.

Do you have a place where you go back to if you feel too lost in your archive or anything?

Yes, I look back at my hub, structure, and inbox saved searches.

I feel like I might need to have one to keep myself focused each day. What are your thoughts on them? If you have one, how do you maintain yours?

Not just one note, but I think of my archive in terms of collections or threads. I look back at threads if I get lost or mixed up.

As part of my 'monk mornings,' I review yesterday's creations and edits in my archive each morning. That and having an index helps with developing the habit of zettelkasting. The habit of maintaining your archive is like any other habit. There is a multitude of techniques or hacks that may or may not work for you. I'd suggest asking @Sascha for techniques on developing the zettelkasting habit.

GeoEng51

@Will Are your hub notes like "super-structure" notes, i.e., one level up from structure notes? So on your hub notes, are the connections all to structure notes?

Thanks for sharing your list of hub notes, by the way.

Will

Each hub is a bit different, but most are like this.

Most of the links on each are structure notes. It makes it easier to find where to hang an idea. For example, if I get an insight sparked by reading on sentence structure, I can come to the writing hub and see that I already have a structure note on a book I read about sentences, and I can look there for an appropriate place to hang this new note.

These 17 intellectual domains cover 97% of my archive.

The [[202004020722]] • Coding Hub is different. It is a glorified structure note. I consider it a knowledge domain, so I maintain it at this level. All the hubs are what I consider knowledge domains. Maybe this is a bit too much structure, but we'll see.

Nick

I have an index file, where I list top level departments of my notes. So far I have around 23 departments. I link to a hub note for that department and include a short description of why I'm interested in the topic.

Than below the departments I have a more traditional index, that has links to popular topics that don't have their own department. For example I link to a note on learning which is situated in my knowledge work department.

The traditional index isn't really necessary because you have a search function, but I find that creating one helps me with tracking my thinking, which is nice when I like to bounce around diverse topics.

GeoEng51

@Nick @Will Thanks for your descriptions; I'm going to take some time over the holidays and contemplate using one or several of these approaches on my own ZK.

Thinking about what you said, I realize that I use my tags to perform a similar service - I have a few tags that are connected to 50+ zettels, and in a way act as a hub, and others connected to 20+ that act sort of as structure notes, (I also have a few structure notes as well). But most of my tags connect to only a few zettels and I use my tag list as an index of sorts to my ZK.

Perhaps it is time (and my ZK is getting sufficiently large) to introduce some of the organizational concepts you are discussing. I'm going to play around with what you have mentioned and see if I can find something that appeals to where I am with a ZK right now.

ctietze

I did, experimentally, to see if this would be useful to drive The Archive without a note list -- solely relying on links. That showed me how bad some of my links were.

I collected most of my more recent project notes on there. I named it zzz Dashboard to "pin" it to the top of the note list (with my settings, sort by file name descending).

Something cool in respect to laying out the dashboard I found in an Emacs package that comes with a marked-up help file. It hides the syntax characters like * for emphasis, so it looks a bit cleaner. I have quite the affection for the look and feel of this, though

(Source: https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs/)

Sascha

@jellis said:
Like dashboards or something. Do you have a place where you go back to if you feel too lost in your archive or anything? I feel like I might need to have one to keep myself focused each day. What are your thoughts on them? If you have one, how do you maintain yours?

I created it and then never used it. I just go to the topics/departments I am working on and that's it. There is no method to it but just regular practice.

IvanFerrero

Not strictly a Home page, but I have Overview pages, one per each mega-project or others.

i.e.: I have a "Video Ideas Overview": here I reference the single zettels where I write scripts and other brainstorming for the single next to come video.
Project X Overview: if the Project X is so big and complex that I need more than one note (maybe because it involves webinars to the adults, workshop for their kids, etc...)

And so on...

GeoEng51

@Nick @Will I want to "report back" on my over-Christmas plans to review the information in this thread and implement whatever made sense. I read and reread the posts, trying to understand why and how various high-level organizational tools could help my ZK. Not that there is one right answer, of course, but for myself, I'm trying the following:

1. Distinguishing between structure notes and hub notes. I had some structure notes previously; now I'm going to introduce a couple of hub notes and use more structure notes. Some of the (new) hub notes have been created by looking at my list of tags and finding topics referred to on a large number of zettels.
2. I like the idea that the listing of zettels on either a structure note or a hub can be organized under sub-headings (on the note itself).
3. Using an index (which lists all hub notes and structure notes).

I found creating this high-level structure to be oddly comforting. That may be because I've used hierarchical structures all my life and having a ZK with little of it (up until now) was disconcerting. I love making connections between zettels and tagging, both of which are new practises to me and both of which build an organic network, but putting the index and hub notes in place reduced low-level stress that I didn't even know I was feeling.

I also like the concept of starting the generation and writing of zettels from a structure note or hub. I've hardly done this in the past, but in organizing my first hub (on Personal History, which contains about 15 zettels), I found all sorts of gaps in what I had already written, that I wanted to fill with more zettels - a task for the next few weeks. In that way, a structure note or a hub can become a planning tool for what you want to bring into your ZK.

It only took me 6 months to glean that insight