Example Zettels?

pinkhurricanegown

Hello! I was talking to someone about Personal Information Management recently, and they recommended I take a look at the Zettelkasten system to solve some of my problems. I did the homework, a bit. I read through How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens -- since it was in English -- and then, of course, found my way to this site, and have read a lot of what's in the blog.

I've been trying out the Zettelkasten approach for a couple months now, but I still don't think I fully get it. What I need is some examples of how this looks in practice -- not just a video tutorial, but, like, a handful of example zettels. Is anyone willing to share some individual entries from their Zettelkasten?

I know the system is supposed to be extremely individualized to each person, and how the zettels look depends a lot on what the user is trying to capture and store -- but, at the same time, I'm starting from zero here, and don't know how any of this might work, so it's hard to figure out how I want it to work.

ctietze

Hey! The next best thing I have for you is a public Evernote notebook where you can see notes and outlines: https://www.evernote.com/pub/divinedominion/zettelkastenjusticeforhedgehogs

Does that help?

Will

I use my Zettelkasten for processing and integrating my reading. I'm not a university student currently but 'just' a life long learner. Looking through posts here will reveal actual post. Here is a couple of mine.
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/2355/#Comment_2355
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/2393/#Comment_2393
Mine mixed with others.
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/394/sample-note-open-to-suggestion-for-improvements
Other examples
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/2365/#Comment_2365
Blog post
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/

mediapathic

I'm hearing this sort of request from a number of places. It seems to be a common sticking point for people getting started, it certainly was for me. @ctietze your example files are fantastic, but Evernote has again broken their web viewer and I (using most recent chrome) can only see file names until I scroll down .

Might it be a good idea to create a zip of .txt files of this example zettel and link it somewhere more public than this thread? I don't want to put you on the hook for more work, but it seems that the Hedgehog Papers (as I insist on calling it) is probably a very good example of the way one "traditionally" would use a ZK (as opposed to, say, my rather more random fragmentary and not particularly academic usage).

pinkhurricanegown

@ctietze @Will Thank you both! Those were all perfect. I guess I'm more or less doing it right.

ctietze

@mediapathic Ok, you won.

Here's a plain text export:
https://github.com/Zettelkasten-Method/ba-zettelkasten-justice-for-hedgehogs

mediapathic

@ctietze said:
@mediapathic Ok, you won.

Hooray!

Thanks very much. Now I have something to point people to when they are confused as to why I send them documents with things like 201902200146 in them.

mediapathic

@ctietze quick form question: you have several lines beginning with :. Does this indicate anything other than an alternate form of list like -?

ctietze

It's a MultiMarkdown definition list. It's supposed to specify a term and turns into a HTML <dl>, for example, that can have terms/titles (<dt>) paired with definitiond (<dd>). But apart from semantic differences, it's just like any other list.

pinkhurricanegown

@ctietze -- THANK YOU SO MUCH for the plaintext examples. It's been super enlightening to poke around in there and see how you wire up all the links and stuff.