A few questions about the folgezettel and zettelkasten
Hello, I'm a new user here. I have a few questions I'm unsure about, and I hope you can help. I've decided to use the folgezettel, which is more suitable for me.
- If I have, for example, 6 notes on a given day that I want to enter into the zettelkasten as part of the folgezettel, do I insert them in random order, from oldest to newest (or vice versa), or e.g. from the most general to the most detailed? I'm curious how you do it (especially people using folgezettel), or how Luhmann did it.
- When using the notes, if I have, for example, existing note 1/a, the next note associated with it is 1/b, the next one is 1/a1, the next one is 1/a2, 1/a3, 1/a4, etc.? Am I understanding this correctly? And probably linking directly to 1/a for these subsequent notes.
- Furthermore, if I create, for example, a 1/a4 note, and thanks to it I come up with an idea for a new note that's not particularly related to it, should I still set it as 1/a5 and hyperlink to a closely related note (e.g., 2/c8) since it's a "thought chain"? Or should I place it close to the note it's closely related to (i.e., place it as 2/c9), and just link to 1/a4 there? 4. Furthermore, in Luhmann's notes (on this website https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht#ZK_2_editor_I_23-2), I've seen more than once a jump, for example, from 3414/3b to 3414/3b3. The notes (3414/3b1 and 3414/3b2) weren't cataloged? Or was there another reason?
- If you have a note from the literature, I assume you simply provide a link from it to the permanent/main note you're creating based on it?
- Furthermore, in Bob Doto's book, I saw information not to include old notes from before the creation of the zettelkasten in the zettelkasten, only new ones. I admit this doesn't make sense to me. Is there a specific reason I'm not aware of?
Thank you in advance for any help. I like to be prepared before doing something like this. To clarify, I only recently learned about zettelkasten and really liked the idea of this note-taking system. So far, I've read Sonke Ahrens's book "How to Take Smart Notes," Sascha's blog posts, some discussions on this forum, and Bob Doto's book "A System for Writing." Unfortunately, I haven't read Sascha's book because German is too challenging for me (maybe someday).
So far, I haven't taken any specific notes for zettelkasten (though I have many notes I've taken previously in files). I only prepared some test notes on Greek mythology (30 notes) to test zettelkasten and folgezettel.
I apologize for any grammatical errors; English is not my first language, so I'm using a translator.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
Welcome to the forum
There are many experts here, so you'll find them helpful.
There are also many articles about Folgezettel on this forum and blog, which you might find helpful.
By the way, I'm curious why you think Folgezettel is more suitable for you. If you're planning on doing digital Zettelkasten, I recommend the Structure Note suggested by Sascha.
I first tried Zettelkasten on paper for about two years, using Folgezettel. However, Folgezettel doesn't allow for flexible changes to the structure, which makes it difficult to maintain the system in the long term. Once you create a structure, you can't change it.
Rather, you can create a separate space for creating structures, write only the structure there, and assign individual notes a unique ID for reference. In other words, create a structure note and then create the structure of each individual note there. This allows you to maintain the benefits of Folgezettel while also making it easier to change the structure. As your thinking expands, there will naturally come a time when your structure needs to change, and that's when Folgezettel becomes a disadvantage.
Furthermore, I don't think there's any reason to use Folgezettel in a digital environment unless you're using paper. My experience aligns perfectly with what Sascha said.
In my personal opinion, I recommend the Structure Note suggested by Sascha.
Nevertheless, you'll find a variety of helpful opinions about Folgezettel in this forum.
I'm curious here, if you think folgezettel is a different kind of system, when it's actually referring to a note that can be considered an interesting 'next note' to consider. Folgezettel can be translated as 'follow-on note'. It means that a note would come after an earlier note as a kind of extension of the idea.
For example, say I'm making notes about computer programming. I might have a general note about why it's good to write comments in a piece of code to help myself and others to understand it later. At some other time, I've made a note about a recommended style to write comments for a particular programming language.
In this example, it doesn't matter which note was written first. The language-specific note is a natural extension, or 'follow-on' to the more general note about commenting. So I would link the 'recommended style' note as a 'Folgezettel' to the general one, i.e. continuing from a general idea to a more specific idea.
The Luhmann way of doing it was affected by him using paper notes in boxes. But if you're using a digital system, you can be much more flexible about it with links and not worry about the note ID.
I'm not aware of this. Do you have a page number or heading/section name for that? I still have his book and would like to check what he said.
But in fact, I didn't move any old notes into my Zettelkasten. It was such an old way of thinking that I struggled to convert my old notes to the new interlinked-notes method the Zettelkasten uses.
The articles and topics I saw weren't entirely clear to me regarding the questions I described, so I figured it was worth asking
I have a feeling I'll either gain a lot from folgezettel or lose nothing. That's why I decided this would be the right method for me, due to:
-Increasing friction in note-taking, which improves my retention of this information and increases its importance.
-The ability to intuitively find complex topics without any additional tools (graphs, structure notes, etc.).
-This adds another layer of complexity based on thought processes, which works well with structured notes (after all, Luhmann himself used hub notes) and which I prefer. I only suspect some advantages here, but this needs to be tested.
-The ease of searching for notes from a specific tree branch based on Fogelzettel is also an additional advantage.
I'll probably only know for sure what the advantages and disadvantages of this numbering method are after several thousand notes.
In any case, I like the idea, although I admit that initially I was more inclined to use identifiers based on time and structured notes, but ultimately I decided to test Folgezettel. I don't want to debate the superiority of one method or the other; I'm curious about these questions 
Well, once I've taken a few thousand notes, I'll be able to determine whether the Fogelzettel is working for me or not
It would be best to conduct at least two Zettelkasten (one with Fogelzettel and the other with only structured notes) for a test, but I'm not really up for that, haha.
So, since you've used the Folgezettel, maybe you could answer questions 2 and 3?