What is happening in your ZK journey this week? May 18, 2025
Swimming with Ideas
This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼
Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:
- I'm studying the philosophy of kindness. It's less about the impediments and more about the nuts and bolts of the practical implementation of kindness.
- I'm studying gastropods. I wrote an article featuring the world premiere of a science movie titled "The Snail Hunters," about a research team's expedition to the Galapagos Islands in search of snails. Serendipitously, I got a referral to Elisabeth Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. It's a memoir centered around a particular snail. It's studied by Elisabeth, who is confined to the bed next to the snail's terrarium while she recovers from a strange virus, a mix of science and literature.
- Where has everyone gone? Reddit, Obsidian forums, Facebook? Has the forum devolved into a cross-posting dump?
Books I'm reading or will be reading this week:
- Bailey, Elisabeth Tova. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016.
- Duhigg, Charles. Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. First large print edition, Random House Large Print, 2024.
- Phillips, Adam, and Barbara Taylor. On Kindness. American ed, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
Adrien de la Salle
Alex Kozobolis
★★★★★
This rolling 28-day zettel production is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I use Bear to keep my journaling separate from my knowledge work.
Please let me know if you would like to review, discuss, or critique these notes.
My 28 day zettel production
I hope my contribution is helpful, and you have even better ideas.
Will Simpson
My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
The last couple days I have spent reading more about the short-lived First Spanish Republic (1873-1874). Right now, I am working on the causes for its proclamation. All this information will be used in the next episode of my podcast on Late Modern Spanish History. Since I live and study in Spain, my Zettelkasten is in Spanish (which is also a good exercise). Some of the zettels I have created (rough translations):
Books I am reading:
Josep Fontana, La época del liberalismo, Historia de España (Volumen 6), Crítica/Marcial Pons, Barcelona, 2015 [2007].
Francisco Martí Gilabert, La Primera República Española, 1873-1874 (2nd Edition), Rialp, Madrid, 2017 [2007]
Diario de Sesiones de la Asamblea Nacional, 11th February 1873
"Denken ohne Geländer"
Hannah Arendt
During a hiatus (I hate this), the small 13.5" screen next to my main one went unused. Now, I’ve repurposed it for Zotero.
Over the weekend, I revisited some experimental mathematical results and stumbled onto a sequence of integer invariants apparently not listed in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Now, I’m revising a conjecture which, if true (the evidence is compelling), relies on enumerative combinatorics to avoid directly computing related homology groups. I still want to compute them, though, to check part of a correspondence. The computation blows up rapidly.
I had forgotten that I have a sequence in the OEIS: A028498—the current problem is unrelated. If you follow the links, you might end up at a fascinating GitHub repository that implements many of the sequences published in the OEIS.
@Will asks, "Where has everyone gone?" They've gotten lost in their exchanges with LLMs, perhaps. Or they’ve taken on additional work to cover the tariffs.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hi All, I'm Michael. I've not been active on the forum, rather a lurker for the last 18 months or so. Discovered zettelkasten about 2.5 years ago. I've been 'practicing' since then.
I deeply appreciate the site, and the love and work that's goes into it. It's been a lot of help to me. I'm pretty sure that I'll continue to be a net drain for some time to come, but I'd love to engage a bit and get to know my brothers and sisters who frequent this corner of the world.
I've used Obsidian as my app/tool, and I've managed to resist the siren call to do something other than zettelkasten within the app. Recently, however, I concluded that Obsidian just gets in the way -- at least for me. I'm going to give The Archive a spin. I find in other contexts mono-focused tools that are best in class serve me well. I hope that The Archive turns out to be one for me.
In any case, I'm spending time over the next week or so implementing The Archive. Then I'll shine up my zk method, go through the process of transferring my current notes and zettelkasten to The Archive -- there's some 'de-Obsidian' processes that are needed -- and then we're off to the races with what I hope will be a liberating experience of a tool that enhances the work of notemaking and writing.
Looks like I'll also need to dustoff my Albert, Textexpander and Keyboard Maestro chops to mix up some magic dust to sprinkle over my zk practice with The Archive. It'll be fun.
At the personal level, I've been a writer all of my professional life. Primarily in business, political and nonprofit contexts -- writing for others. I'm now 67 years old and planning the last third of my life. I'm working on a new project that I hope to launch next month in seed form, then build it from the ground up.
I am a father (of 8) and grandfather (of 5). A widower a few years ago, I met my current wife, Susie, and we were married about three years ago. To have had two best friends and soulmates in one lifetime is a blessing that I never would have hoped for, but it happened. We live far to the south in the United States on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay in south Alabama. Neither of us is from here, but Susie chased warmer weather and sunshine from eastern Ohio, and I chased Susie moving from Nashville, Tennessee. At least for us, it's paradise.
I thought that I'd dip my toe in here at this little tributary of the forum. Looked pretty safe as an entry point.
Cheers,
Michael
@MGilstrap Welcome to the forum, Michael, and nice to learn a bit about you.
Can you read your Obsidian vault / text files directly with The Archive? I've never tried that. However, I have switched software for working in my Zettelkasten a couple of times and found there were minor adjustments to make to the text files to get them to work smoothly in the new software. If you can do simple programming (say, Python or similar), to read, make minor changes, and write out your text files, you may find that helpful.
Thanks @GeoEng51. Technically the Archive can read them, but with a good number, there's a properties section up front that I'd like to remove and revise the info recorded there. Further, I think the opportunity to re-think a couple of structural aspects of the Zettelkasten will be helpful long-term. Sascha's idea of a couple of levels of structure notes applies to me. Since I've only been doing this for such a short period of time, I only have about 1,300 notes, maybe a few less. In any case, working with the Archive directly will be of help in working out the kinks, reducing friction, etc. I'm not really very technical although I've been using technology to write since high school. One of the greatest days of my life remains the day I discovered WordPerfect 1.0 and the capacity to renumber footnotes!
If you have questions about Keyboard Maestro as you come up to speed, I'd be happy to serve as a sounding board. I don't have experience with Alfred or TextExpander. Keyboard Maestro makes an excellent replacement for TextExpander. You are in for a lot of fun.
Will Simpson
My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Ah...Wordperfect 1.0 - I loved that program. One of the biggest things was they way you could look at the "raw" version of your text and insert code for formatting and other things. One more item on the heap of "brutally pushed aside by Microsoft" list. I see it is still sort of alive and being sold by Corel (but with a very limited user group and not much in the way of ongoing development).
XyWrite was popular with publishers and newspapers (Conde Nast I recall), but I never seemed to get the hang of it. I don't know if I tried Wordperfect. I was using Epsilon in those days and, for a blast from the past, upgraded to the latest.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
WordPerfect is ... was the only piece of software that caused me to do backflips when I discovered it. I was working for an economist (free market, libertarian) as a beginning writer. Learning the 'real world' of writing. Articles, editing, copywriting to promote books, newsletters, conferences. Whatever was needed. I also had time to work on my own research at the time. My IBM Selectric worked great for most things (pre-IBM PC days; Apple wasn't robust enough). But journal articles and book chapters with footnotes were always the bane of my existence at the end of a project because I would invariably have to re-type the entire article to get the footnotes right within the formatting required.
Then came WordPerfect 1.0 and renumbering of footnotes. I was in heaven.
Thank you, @Will. I'll take you up on that. I'm not really much of a techie, but I've used technology and computers as long as I can remember. I went all-in on digital as soon as I could because it helped me accomplish what I wanted to do -- typically one form of writing or research, or to give me a tool to spend my time well. It's never been a hobby or particularly enjoyable for me. Rather, I deploy technology as tool and anesthesia. When the pain of a task is higher than the pain of learning how to use the tool, then I learn to use the tool to dull and mitigate the pain of the task. I think that I'm at that point with Keyboard Maestro. I've looked at it for years thinking that it would be worth learning and making available in my toolbox, but every time I've turned to do so, the learning curve pain was still higher than my perceived pain at whatever I could do with KM. If that makes sense. It seems pretty clear to me that if I want to make The Archive hum as I need it to then KM is in my immediate future. Albert works as a launcher, and it's workflow functionality suffices for some things. Ditto the strengths and sweetspot of TextExpander. But KeyBoard Maestro seems to be the complete package and then some. I'm looking forward to discovering the magic.
Who are you missing? We can find them at:
But we have many new members here at this forum. And they are open for discussion. :-)
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
@Edmund said:
If people left this forum for those other options (and some did, like Bob Doto and Scott Scheper), they made a big mistake! I salute the proprietors of this forum for hosting the original and best site on the web for Zettelkasten discourse.
The Obsidian forum is fine for Obsidian-specific discourse, but I can't abide the JavaScript monstrosity that is Reddit's default interface, so I don't use it, although alternative front ends are available at other domains. This forum is well enough designed that I don't have to go searching for an alternative front end just to avoid going insane.
Start slow, letting one success build towards more complicated achievements. I'd recommend creating text replacements using the same triggers as you currently use in TexExpander. Here's a Keyboard Maestro macro that creates text replacement macros. Highlight the text, execute the macro, fill in the trigger, and you're all set.
Download and launch to import.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jylraq4fcjqm200sow6kt/Create-Text-Expansion-From-Selection.kmmacros?rlkey=sta5ul0010uek2kl2ufafswk2&dl=1
Will Simpson
My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Bob Doto is or was one of the moderators of r/Zettelkasten on Reddit. But other moderator(s) put the "sub" in "subreddit." I avoid it.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Thanks @Will. I'll give it a whirl. By the way, I stumbled upon an earlier post of yours on structure notes: Will on Structure Notes. It was very helpful to me. Clear and to the point, but what really resonated was your illustration from your own workflow working a book. Sort of a bottom-up approach that I really liked. Thanks for that, too.
I tend to be an architect rather than an archaeologist. It helps to be reminded to go exploring and see what turns up.
So I had "rebooted" my system a few months ago, and the first systems I put in place are now facing roadblocks (which I was sort of expecting, but I knew I needed to conduct my own experiments to understand the things I needed to understand while this new system was still easy to refactor down the line).
Going back to the gospel which is Zettelkasten.de, I will now be conducting the best practices of
I see how these things make a world of difference in the long run. And I also see how this is not really time-consuming as long as you're being diligent about it. I still have a working system, but I need the careful tuning of well honed practices by our Elders to make it scale in the long run.
I have two whole flights from Europe to Australia coming up to have fun with this.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
@KillerWhale What roadblocks exactly?
With regard to structure notes, I still feel like I'm in a phase of astonishment that it works at all to write in the Zettelkasten. With ~2000 notes or so I was trying to work on the 'atoms' first and then see where that takes me. Nowadays I find that starting from a larger molecule and feeling my way forward works really well. I guess 10+ years of experimenting in between also helped
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
It's becoming unwieldy and I feel it's messy in a bad way (not spurring things forward, just messing them up). I am trying to be as quick as possible in filing things, but with the right amount of overhead to pay dividends later.
Things that seemed like good ideas upfront but feel like they max out too quickly:
Using tags for topics instead of structure notes. Lightning fast on creation, but structure notes provide two massive advantages for just a little more overhead: you can create meaning with subsections, and the inventory is always current since you "file" things where they belong as you create them. With tags, the list keeps growing longer and you have no idea what you have processed or not. (Which is also the big disadvantage of devoting meaning to backlinks, because the list sort of grows on its own)
Create placeholder dangling links to uncreated notes to fill out later. These get lost in the noise and are never gotten back to. At the very least, the file needs to be created and also added to a structure note so as to be fleshed out later and not lost.
I sort of knew these seemed too good to be true, too simple to be efficient (otherwise everybody would recommend them), but I wanted to try. Refiling things will be easy at this stage: just flesh things out more and link them diligently to structure notes. I might differentiate between strict "structure notes" (indexes) and MOCs, which tell a story / construct an argument out of notes / provide a subset of notes for a specific end (like "Techniques to start a writing session more easily"), though.
I suppose that, in your case, you already have so much material that you tend to flesh it out more than add completely new notes?
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
@KillerWhale said:
An advantage of topic tags is that the topic is also a property of the atomic notes, not only a property of the topical structure note. This adds affordances such as more search options. It is possible to combine the strengths of topic tags and topical structure notes; one way to do it is with the tagging style that is sometimes called "links as tags" (putting links instead of hashtags in a note's tag metadata; in this case, the topical links-as-tags would point to the topical structure notes). Whether this is worth doing depends in part on your content.
In English Wikipedia, creating dangling links first is sometimes called red-linking, after the red color that such links have in Wikipedia. There's even an essay about it in English Wikipedia, "Write the article first" (WTAF): it says that in the early days of Wikipedia, red-linking "was an important part of jump-starting the encyclopedia project", but now "editors are encouraged to write the article first before adding it to a list". In Wikipedia terms, you're applying a WTAF policy to your Zettelkasten.
Your differentiation of types of structure notes sounds like another example of how people naturally try to enact typed distinctions in their notes. A couple of months ago, @Edmund made a good list of types of structure notes in his Zettelkasten ontology map.
WTAF for me is WTAFOTZ: write the article first outside the Zettelkasten. Its final syllable, homonymous with spontaneous atmospheric contribution, evokes an effortless production that remains aspirational.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Fascinating, @Andy ! Thanks a bunch.
I feel resistant using topical tags as this seems redundant to me with structure notes. Maybe because I'm differentiating in my head the "index" (structure note), which will be acting like a manually ordered, curated "topical tag" and the "MOC" (narrative, argument) which is a curated narrative of notes for a defined use or building an argument. The use I see is, I would enter through my indexes / structure notes as looking for material, like I would with tags anyway.
Thanks for the red linking term! That's exactly what I have been doing. Obsidian is awesome at dealing with those, as they get recognized in the quick switcher and you are offered creation on the fly, but I feel like a better practice is to create the placeholder (even if empty) in order to put it into a structure note. That way, it's in my face, asking to be fleshed out.
The benefits I see to all this are akin to spaced repetition. My long-standing issue with my note system, all the way back to the Evernote days, is the "write-only" aspect of things; you put half-formed stuff in there and it never resurfaces, unless you interact with it, but this creates a "bias of use" and makes you tread the same path again and again instead of fostering exploration and learning. (Which is one of the many reasons I dislike Tiago Forte's BASB methodology.)
One of the reasons I love the Zettelkasten method is that, on the contrary, it gently coaxes you into interacting regularly with your material and you keep rediscovering it, spurring creative linking (as we all know here). One of the most important lessons I've learned from being a novelist for many years now is that creative material needs to be kept alive in your working memory on a daily basis, which is when the most subtle, living details appear instead of just being generic words on the page.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
@ZettelDistraction said:
Usually I just shorten it to WTF...
And @KillerWhale said (thus I have heard, amen):
I'm happy to have given you another opportunity to insightfully explain the benefits of ZKM and warn the youth about the vices of BASB.