Best Practice for Zettel length
I use Tiddlywiki for my Zettelkaten and some of my Tiddlers (aka Zettels) are quite long. I title the Tiddler with a unique piece of information, in my own words, and then I include a description and resources. Some of my Tiddlers get very long...maybe too long. Is there a best practice for length?
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There was discussion on this topic at the beginning of this year, which you can find at:
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1651/how-long-a-zettel-is-too-long
It seems most people, as they focus on capturing that atomic idea, end up with 50 to say 200 words (without metadata). I find mine are a bit longer, in the 100 to 400 word range. But those who graphed their zettle lengths and showed their full range (in the previous post) had a few which were much longer - perhaps several thousand words.
It all depends on the thought you are trying to capture. Sometimes long zettels can and should be broken down into smaller, linked zettels, but sometimes they resist further division and end up being longer.
So there's no hard and fast rule, but the general idea seems to be to aim for shorter rather than longer, forcing ourselves to think clearly about an idea and capture its essence.
@rikasukenik
Could you share some of the long Zettels? That'd be very useful to pinpoint your exact problem. Otherwise, we can only provide general advice.
To share your Zettels, make a
.zipor the like out of the Zettel files, attach the.zipto a comment, and presto! Mini-Zettelkasten shared.The lenght of my zettels ranges from less than ten words to several hundreds of them, and I don't worry about that in the slightest. The point is the atomicity. It's irrelevant how many words that takes.