Nature of your Structure Notes

Nick

I'm curious for people using the Archives. How big do your structure notes tend to get (e.g. how many bullet points)? Also how deep does it typically get for you (tabs)? How big are your biggest structure notes?

GeoEng51

@Nick

I have 10 structure notes, in length from 200 to 500 words, and with 6 to 12 links to zettels. I tend to be "light" on the use of structure notes, so even this many surprised me.

Sascha

I can't tell you. I have 1294 structure notes with a very huge range in individual scope.

Nick

@Sasha I should have thought a bit more before writing my initial post. The problem I'm trying to figure out is how large should I let a structure note get before spinning parts of it off into their own structure notes. I feel that if I let one get too large than it starts to become overwhelming in terms of navigation.

Will

@Nick, your initial question sent me down a rabbit hole of scripting to quantitate my word count and links per structure note. Tangentially I switched my default shell to zsh and spent too much time reading about the differences and twiddling with peripheral stuff.

I don't have as many structure notes as @Sascha, but maybe a similar percentage? 122 officially declared structure notes which represent 6% of my zettelkasten.

Now that you reframed the question, I'll jump in not having the quantitative data from my zettelkasten complete. I'm still going to create a script to help with how big and how many links each structure note has because I think it will lead to interesting knowledge.

When refactoring a structure note, I think the things that trigger any note refactoring apply.
1. more than one context
2. difficulty navigating ideas
3. emotion, mood, muse, time, interest

There are a few things that can help with navigating a structure note.
1. Good old fashion search - ⌘F
2. Header mapping
3. Header folding - @Nick, I think you use a different app than I do, but I think some do have this feature. @ctietze, correct me if I'm wrong, but The Archive is slated to get this feature.

Sascha

@Nick said:
@Sasha I should have thought a bit more before writing my initial post. The problem I'm trying to figure out is how large should I let a structure note get before spinning parts of it off into their own structure notes. I feel that if I let one get too large than it starts to become overwhelming in terms of navigation.

I don't think that there is a general rule for structure notes. Different structure notes serve different purposes. My recommendation is to put a comment in the beginning of the structure note and make it 100% clear what the purpose of this structure note is. When your review this structure note you can review the effectiveness of the structure note to serve this purpose.

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@Will I have more structure notes per total note count that you: 12,6% (10247 notes in total). However, I am using structure notes for a variety of purposes and have quiet some different patterns (and hybrid patterns) for them.