Zettelkasten Analytics keeps me focused

Edmund

Today my Zettelkasten is 6 month old. When I started note-taking in March 2022, I didn‘t expect a number of nearly 1000 notes in such a short time.

It was not easy to learn how put things away slowly, so that I‘ll be ready quickly when needed. Investing time now for time later. It means changing my personal workflow I‘ve trained over years.

And I‘m happy with the results. In the „Project Notes“ section of my Zettelkasten I now can find 73 smart sketchnotes I’ve already published here on LinkedIn, on Twitter or Instagram.

When did you start with your Zettelkasten? What‘s your learning experience?

p.s.
Tree map with PowerBI. Data from Obsidian with Dataview plugin.

[Deleted User]

I'm only starting now. It's still fairly new for me, so I'm working through the articles on this site. The plan is to test it for 2 years, as I've recently enrolled in a 2-year Masters program. I wish I'd tested it out beforehand, but I'll learn as I go along.

GeoEng51

@Edmund I have been at it for 2 years now and have 250 zettels. That might seem low, but I am not working on a specific project that requires an accumulation of knowledge - no PhD or Masters, no other schooling, and no work project (I have separate ZKs for collaborative work projects with thousands of more zettels, but I don't consider those "mine").

I would say, rather, that I am trying to document and perhaps even consolidate what I have learned over the years. I still read and consider new ideas, but I don't feel compelled to get all of those into my ZK. What I'm really doing is trying to capture life memories, experiences and lessons, and build that into a coherent gestalt. Whether or not I make it and whether it is of interest to my kids/grandkids, only time will tell.

It raises an interesting question - how many zettels does it take to capture a person's essence?

@TheIrishEuropean You have a good attitude towards this - educate yourself, start small, test things out, learn as you go along, and develop your own way of building a ZK. You will find there are no hard and fast rules (despite what some posts here might suggest), but only rules that work for you. There was some good advice in that song by The Band (The Night they Drove old Dixie Down): "You take what you need....And you leave the rest...".

Edmund

@GeoEng51 said:
I have been at it for 2 years now and have 250 zettels.

I am trying to document and perhaps even consolidate what I have learned over the years. I still read and consider new ideas, but I don't feel compelled to get all of those into my ZK.

What I'm really doing is trying to capture life memories, experiences and lessons, and build that into a coherent gestalt.

It raises an interesting question - how many zettels does it take to capture a person's essence?

A fascinating question and it seams to be a good objective working with my Zettelkasten. My first thoughts: Less is more. For me it would mean to review my notes, delete most of them, rewrite old once and add a few missing notes to a build a consistent logic.

While thinking about this new process there‘s already a starting point for me: I‘m using the tag #insight right from the beginning. Let me have a look at the numbers. 4 notes in total. One of the key insights of my life ? 🥴😉

GeoEng51

@Edmund said:
While thinking about this new process there‘s already a starting point for me: I‘m using the tag #insight right from the beginning. Let me have a look at the numbers. 4 notes in total. One of the key insights of my life ? 🥴😉

Haha! Sounds like you have a plan, though. Everyone is going to have a different purpose and different goals for their ZK from other people, so number of zettels doesn't really tell much of a story, outside of context.

Edmund

1 year and 205 days: that's the age of my Zettelkasten today. Permanent Notes are the core of my Zettelkasten (100%), Project Notes are the stuff for publishing ideas (20%).

Within that category of Permanent Notes I found notes I tagged as #insights (1,4%) also high value notes with a visual representation tagged as #sketchnotes (29%). Reference Notes (45%) support my later work with my Permanent Notes, Structure Notes (37%) are defining clusters of ideas. They are intensively using automated searches to revisit important notes.

A simple funnel chart, but for me a surprising view on my Zettelkasten:

5 Permanent Notes are needed to create 1 Project Note as an output from Zettelkasten.

Will

Here is a look into my ZK. The total notes are 3423. I'm surprised that class notes represent 15% of my ZK! There appears to be a metaphorical void at the core.

Edmund

Thank you @Will for sharing your personal doughnut chart. You are using a slightly different structure, but may be it’s possible to find some similarities:

• The biggest part is a “Other ZK Notes” element, may be my “Permanent Notes”.
• “Hubs- and Subhubs” may be my “Structure Notes”.
• “Books Processed” are part of my “Reference Notes” tagged with #type/book (121 notes).
• “Notes w/Definitions” are part of my “Reference Notes” tagged with #type/term (228 notes).
• “Articles processed” correspond to my “Project Notes”. 100/54.5*8.1=15.4%.

As I can learn from my analytics, most ideas I collected came from Internet sources. But sometimes books are needed to better understand all this “crazy stuff” from posts and web pages. ;-)

One final thought I learned from Cassie Kozyrkov:

Analytics does not give you the answer, but it improves the quality of your questions.

Let’s give it a try: Which of these numbers are helpful as indicators to improve Zettelkasten workflow?