Hello from Germany

[Deleted User]

Hi everyone,

I realised there's an 'Introduce Yourself' category in the forum, so I thought I'd say hello.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't remember how I discovered the Zettelkasten system. I only know that I somehow found it online a few months ago, while researching note-taking and study skills. I'm not originally from Germany, but I live here now, so the German-sounding name 'Zettelkasten' piqued my curiosity when I first saw it.

The reason I was researching in the first place, is because I knew I would start studying for a Masters in October of this year. My Bachelors experience was way too ad-hoc. I just didn't have a good system. Knowing that I wanted to have a much better experience studying for a Masters, I was determined to get a good note-taking and connection-building system in place before my studies started. After some reasearch, I realized that the Zettelkasten method was what I needed, and I've been using it actively for about a month now.

It's still too early yet to have many links between notes, but I'm starting to build a nice network, one note at a time.

The forum history has already helped me, both to understand the method and to get ideas for my own personal implementation. I look forward to future learning with you.

GeoEng51

@TheIrishEuropean Welcome to the forum! It’s a great place to garner useful information and tips, or just to “hang out”. I wish you the best with your MSc - I did many years of graduate studies and took mountains of notes - wish I’d known about Zettelkasten back then.

Sascha

Welcome to the forum!

A little tipp for your studies: Asign each note if connected to a class a tag that is build like this: hashtag + Semester + course + session

"#SS2012SoziTheo12" means "Sommer Semester 20212, Soziale Theorien, Woche 12" translated: "Summer Semester 2012, Social Theory, Week 12"

Like this you can very quickly gather all the notes connected to each course and/or session. This comes in handy if you have to brute force a test (traditional learning) instead of trusting the depth of processing encouraged by the Zettelkasten Method.

[Deleted User]

@Sascha said:
Welcome to the forum!

A little tipp for your studies: Asign each note if connected to a class a tag that is build like this: hashtag + Semester + course + session

"#SS2012SoziTheo12" means "Sommer Semester 20212, Soziale Theorien, Woche 12" translated: "Summer Semester 2012, Social Theory, Week 12"

Thanks for the tip. At the moment I'm using my note-taking software to assign the semester and course identity, via 'section groups' and 'sections,' (1st Semester/Economics etc.). I'm date-stamping my notes directly, but I could think about including something for the semester/course directly in the note too, in case I ever move to a different software.

@GeoEng51 said: wish I’d known about Zettelkasten back then.

I too wish I'd known about it for my Bachelors, and countless books since then! Thanks for the welcome.

Will

@TheIrishEuropean, I take a slightly different approach. Tagging is one way in, but I create a structure note for the course work that leads to a course-specific zettel, a structure note. This way, I can quickly notice office visits separate from class notes from recommended reading sourced from the same class. Yes, each note associated with a class gets tagged with the course signifier to help with the search.