Types of permanent notes

Lechaz

What are your permanent notes about? From what I've read so far about the ZK system, it seems that most people note down "points" or "thesis" i.e. elaborate ideas about a topic.

I'd like my ZK to receive "notions" (= definitions of concepts) and "facts" (= proven pieces of information) as well, but it seems this approach is not exactly what the ZK is about for most users. Am I wrong?

zk_1000

You could find a trade-off between collecting facts and putting them to good use.

Usually you don't know what to do with this new information and just write it down. Some facts don't need to be written down, others can be looked up in the web.

The Zettelkasten helps you making associations between facts. Over time, you'll find examples, anecdotes, analogies and other forms of use.

I recommend this article to read more on this.

Will

There has been a lot of discussion about "permanent notes" here on the forums.

@zk_1000 has pointed us to a golden article about making notes personal and active. How to be bold and interact with the note-making process.

In my practice, there is a spectrum between notes with more "proven pieces of information" and those where I change my frame of mind and interrogate text for its meaning. This latter end of the spectrum is my goal which I stretch myself toward not getting hung up on notes that don't quite make it. Notes are proxies for ideas. Some ideas are more developed than others. We have many, many ideas, and they all can't be #1, perfect and permanent.

@Lechaz said:
I'd like my ZK to receive "notions" (= definitions of concepts) and "facts" (= proven pieces of information) as well, but it seems this approach is not exactly what the ZK is about for most users. Am I wrong?

If what you mean by "notions" is personal definitions of concepts, you are at the starting gate. Your zettelkasten is about what you think, not about what others think. Your thinking has to be referenced to reality, to "proven pieces of information." Your ZK doesn't have to have the "proven pieces of information" in it, just a reference to it.

Sascha

I, still, follow my six-item-inventory: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/reading-is-searching/

However, for fiction I use different entry types.

Sometimes, I have recommendations (last entry of this type: "Always check for sustainability if you think about nutrition")

But to be honest, those kinds of typologies are useful for teaching but not really for the actual work.

Edmund

Thank you for these helpful insights. For me it was an opportunity to inspect my tagging for types of notes. A long list. Personally I often used #type/sketchnote and #type/question. But I will spend a little time and effort to build up an improved architecture for tagging.

chrisaldrich

@Edmund since I don't do such a thing myself, I'm curious what sort of affordance your #type/NoteName tagging provides you with (especially if you're using more than just those two)? Do you use them regularly for search or filtering, and if so for what reason? How does it help?

To me it look likes extra metadata/work, but without a lot of direct long term value in exchange. Does doing this for long periods of time provide you with outsized emergent value of some sort that's not easy to see from the start?

Edmund

@chrisaldrich said: I'm curious what sort of affordance your #type/Note Name tagging provides you with (especially if you're using more than just those two)? Do you use them regularly for search or filtering, and if so for what reason? How does it help?

Yes I use my tags for searching. In Obsidian I have tools like Dataview and Graph View, where tags make it easy to filter special note clusters. One example: #type/term helps me to generate a glossary with terms and definitions from my Zettelkasten. A Dataview query needs 5 simple lines of code to do this job automatically. A filter like #theme/zettelkasten then shows a glossary only for Zettelkasten. If there is a special type of searching I repeatedly want to use, I build up a special type of tagging. To do this systematically I had to build up a tagging architecture.

Automated search for creating various lists and also graphical views of my connected notes massively reduces time for searching. So for me tagging is time well spent.

More about my way of tagging:

• https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/15091/#Comment_15091
• https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates#how-to-use-tags