What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month, July 2026?

wjenkins81

The idea: a general chat about what we're working on currently.

This month I'm working through The Odin Project (out of personal interest, I don't want to become a web developer) and early in the curriculum is this interesting section.

Counterproductive note-taking: The Odin Project does not recommend taking a lot of notes throughout your web development educational journey because it can be time-consuming and often leads to wasted effort.

Solution: Instead of taking notes to use as direct references, make notes that can serve as prompts for further research. It is important to get comfortable with reading documentation, which essentially acts as pre-existing notes made by someone else.

I'm taking this to heart, as in the past I have unfortunately wasted time making exactly this mistake... taking notes on things I could look up in a manual or other documentation. Having said that, it might still be faster to look up things that I think would be 'key notes' in my desktop app, but I certainly shouldn't be taking hundreds of notes like that.

As for notes that can serve as prompts for further research, the question is how to do that without going down lots of rabbit holes? I would need to put some kind of limit around it. For example, I'll only take those prompts for further research if I can tie that further research back to what I was trying to do in the first place, or connect it back to my existing notes. I've noticed a few little 'islands' of notes in my ZK which are only connected to each other and not my ZK as a whole. I think I'm not getting the full benefit of a ZK while that is the case. I need to do a better job of connecting fewer notes in a meaningful way.

And how is it going for the rest of you? What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month?