Comments

• KillerWhale

  February 10

  I keep thinking about the tags / links distinction regarding my Obsidian use. Just an age-old conundrum, nothing to see, move along 😆

  "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway

  PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
• sjm

  February 10

  I'm just starting to think about my zettelkasten again after some time away, where I struggled to think creatively and multiples of my habits failed me. The habits that brought my life joy and depth fell away to a degree I didn't realise until later on.

  Some of my thinking is now going on how to be more resillient to change and difficult times. The primary reason I lost these habits was because multiple stressful things happened all at once - big work projects, my wife had health problems, and we moved house twice in a year.

  I don't blame myself for dropping things in the midst of all that, but I am interested in understanding if there is more I can do. Any suggested reading would be much appreciated.

  I'm starting gently again with my zettelkasten, I'm keeping a pocket notebook with my thoughts and reading notes, and I'm keeping a little index in the back of it. I always struggled with processing my notes in order of writing, but I'm now finding success in browsing my index, finding one or two keywords that spark my attention, and reading the notes around those keywords. That leads to thinking, which leads to searching and writing.
• Will

  February 11

  @sjm said:
  I'm just starting to think about my zettelkasten again after some time away, where I struggled to think creatively and multiples of my habits failed me. The habits that brought my life joy and depth fell away to a degree I didn't realise until later on.

  Given what you've had to deal with, it's understandable that you might feel overwhelmed. That is a significant amount of stress to manage. Take a gentle attitude, restart, and let your zettelkasting help evolve your thinking. Don't think of it as restarting. Think of it as a renewal. Habits don’t form overnight; consistency is more important than perfection. Just keep going, or if all else fails, bribe yourself with snacks.

  Will Simpson
  My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
• GeoEng51

  February 11

  Hello everyone - I'm at the end of writing a personal history on Storyworth, with help from my Zettelkasten. I now have 52 posts, varying in length from around 1000 to 3000 words, written a week at a time over the past year. I wrote the posts in response to questions received from Storyworth, also one week at a time. My total word count is now around 85,000.

  Now, I'm going through the weekly posts again, editing and re-arranging a bit, and adding images. The next step will be to "publish" all the posts together in one book.

  Some reflections on what I have learned from the process:

  1. I found my ZK a wonderful and valuable source of ideas and information. Previously, I had been building my ZK for about 3 years, gathering and adding ideas and memories (as zettels), tagging, cross-referencing, etc., with the intent of one day turning all that into a personal history. I had about 500 zettels dealing with the personal history topic, which I could easily access, review, and incorporate into different Storyworth posts.
  2. I don't know if I would ever have built up the steam to write a coherent personal history from scratch. Perhaps I would have, but the combined process of a) building a ZK, and b) responding to Storyworth questions, made things painless. Thanks to one daughter who knew what I was doing in the ZK and gifted me the Storyworth "subscription".
  3. I am not as good a writer as I thought, from the perspective of grammar and sentence structure. I started off using Grammarly to check my posts and then switched to ProWritingAid. They were both helpful, although I found the latter to be more so than the former. Being an engineer, I regularly write using a passive voice, which is not as enjoyable to read as an active voice. It took some "training" to switch modes.
  4. Time will tell if the content is worth the reading. I hope my kids will get something out of it. I attempted to add in some humour and enough photos and images to sweeten the experience.
  5. I started the project thinking it would benefit my children and grandchildren, but found the greatest benefit probably came right back to me. Pondering different events, trying to describe those events and my feelings accurately, and then re-reading the posts all caused me to gain deeper insights into family relationships and past activities, and sometimes to start or increase the healing process (in relation to past traumas).
  6. I was unsure about whether to write each Storyworth post as one file in my ZK. After the first few posts, I decided to do so, and that turned out to be an excellent decision. Now all 52 posts are incorporated into the ZK, having their own tags, cross-references (to many previous zettels), etc. Each Storyworth post is not truly a zettel, in the "pure" sense of the word (i.e., short, one idea, pithy) but I am nevertheless happy that I structured it that way.

  I haven't limited my ZK to just personal history; I have many other zettels on other topics of interest. But the personal history was the main and driving purpose for the past 4 years. I'll have to reflect on where to go next
• ctietze

  February 11

  Thanks for the community effort again, @Will! Hope you get something from that book. It's not super dense, I find, but then again I'm not that far into it

  @GeoEng51 Wow, it's been a year already? Congrats on finishing what's essentially a book-writing marathon! I'm curious how many things you'll add as you go through your notes, edit and revise. I bet there'll pop up more associations with everything still so fresh.

  @KillerWhale On some level of abstraction, is there really a difference between tags and links?

  Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
• jbz

  February 11

  Hi fellow zettlers,

  My worflow is slowly building and last week was my most interesting week, zettels added, linked and ideas created from them.

  I switched acme editor for helix editor and uses the lsp function with a small program called zk.

  I also tried to have better structures for my writing, and so I ditched inline links for end of line links.
  It allows me to focus on the core idea of the sentence, splitting it if two ideas or more are found.

  Topics:

  • Nutrition and going meatless
  • life and degrowth
• adilhassan

  February 11

  Thanks for providing this value-able information! This is truly a well written piece of information!
• KillerWhale

  February 11

  @ctietze said:

  @KillerWhale On some level of abstraction, is there really a difference between tags and links?

  No, there's absolutely not, you’re totally right! It boils down to habit and personal approach, I guess. I had started linking everything, including to "tag pages" (topics) but it feels… wrong? Especially when using back linking for this and Obsidian makes it so easy to just create the relevant page and link in the correct direction.

  Strictly speaking, there's no difference and I totally get why people eschew tags completely in favour of linking. Practically though, your own aesthetics and habits of use come into play and to me that looks… wrong. 😆

  "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway

  PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
• qalliope

  February 12

  @KillerWhale said:
  No, there's absolutely not, you’re totally right! It boils down to habit and personal approach, I guess. I had started linking everything, including to "tag pages" (topics) but it feels… wrong? Especially when using back linking for this and Obsidian makes it so easy to just create the relevant page and link in the correct direction.

  Strictly speaking, there's no difference and I totally get why people eschew tags completely in favour of linking. Practically though, your own aesthetics and habits of use come into play and to me that looks… wrong. 😆

  My general rule of thumb is tags are for types of notes while links are for connections.

  Because I have folders in my Obsidian, it makes it easier for me to query for note types across different folders. Therefore, I can store different note types within specific project folders while also having an overall view of my system.
• scottiegazelle

  February 12 edited February 12

  Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

  Hi all! I'm brand new, been working on my ZK since mid-January and slowly figuring out what I want. So half of my ZK notes are pulled from...ZK notes lol. However, I am also using it for my work material (I'm a science journalist, so I read a LOT of papers), general nonfiction (self-improvement and history), and scripture study.

  Last week (3 Feb) was my first attempt to work in my ZK daily. It was also a pretty hectic week for work, as I had four articles and a talk to produce lol.

  Books I'm reading or read this week:
  (I usually read over 100 books/year, fiction and nonfiction)

  The Presidents and the People, Corey Brettschnieder (US History, moving slowly through it)
  Restoration: God's Call to the 21st Century world, Patrick Mason (spiritual)
  I started Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy last week only to find it was the find it was the FIFTH book in a series. So I stopped midway through to get the other four books._
  several fiction novels
  and I think it's 5 research papers in full, plus several reviewed

  I don't really listen to music, it distracts me (even instrumental), so no playlist.

  From 5 Feb to 12 Feb I have 31 zettels? Part of me feels like that is so many comparatively, but I also have a lot of input (plus various ZK articles gleaned from Readwise).

  Most of my zettels are rehashing to some degree but I've started to feel comfortable enough to move into my own thoughts. I'm starting to get some subject crossover (a good thing):

  202502082141 Wrestling with notes by breaking them down helps us better imprint them in our brain.

  is followed by

  202502082150 Wrestling with scriptures like Jacob did helps me to wring out ideas and understanding via restating with atomicity.

  I've set up a basic note format. I'm using Notion, so I spent a little time figuring out how to put my notes into a table so I can see, among other things, how many links are in my zettels. In addition to just needing to add links after (and do a bit of polish) to my earlier notes, I'd also like to keep an eye on notes that are 'solitary' and unlinked. This is pretty much at the bottom of my priority list but if something ends up a one-off, I want it to be by choice, not by neglect.
• KillerWhale

  February 12

  @qalliope said:

  My general rule of thumb is tags are for types of notes

  That seems logical but I ended up doing that in the note title itself as I'm tracking the maturity levels of my ideas, which helps me to see immediately the solidity of the ground I'm treading on. My workflow (fiction writing) relies heavily on this, so that's certainly not for everyone.

  A lifetime of tagging subjects is hard to shake.

  "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway

  PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
• qalliope

  February 13

  @KillerWhale said:
  That seems logical but I ended up doing that in the note title itself as I'm tracking the maturity levels of my ideas, which helps me to see immediately the solidity of the ground I'm treading on. My workflow (fiction writing) relies heavily on this, so that's certainly not for everyone.

  A lifetime of tagging subjects is hard to shake.

  In reality, there are some redundancies such as prepending titles with "P -" for project notes with tags #projects and "B-" for book notes with tags #literature. I find that they make it easier to identify when browsing and searching. But these are generally exceptions to the rule.

  OTOH, I have felt an urge to try tagging by topics, which have been said to be inefficient. But I also found it tiring to always update my Maps of Content/Hub notes/structure notes based on the topic. Feels like my life would be so much easier just tagging it as such and just search for the tag. Oh well.
• KillerWhale

  February 14 edited February 14

  @qalliope said:

  OTOH, I have felt an urge to try tagging by topics, which have been said to be inefficient. But I also found it tiring to always update my Maps of Content/Hub notes/structure notes based on the topic. Feels like my life would be so much easier just tagging it as such and just search for the tag. Oh well.

  It's been my thinking as well. Which is why I've currently landed on a Zettelkasten-ish solution, suited to how Obsidian works, and which I think follows the spirit of the method, despite the letter.

  I believe MOC's strengths lie in the fact that they are not just dumb indexes (and doing so adds a ton of overhead anyway) but reasoned argumentations built around your content – you could have two MOCs with the same notes exactly arranged in a different way to tell a different story.

  Therefore, MOCs should be oriented towards a purpose or argument, and they should link to notes with the same care as we link individual Zettels.

  Therefore, linking any and all Zettels defeats the purpose. However, Zettels can link to one another the way they always did – MOCs are just entry points.

  So my workflow is currently this:

  • Create Zettels, tag them according to subject
  • Link them if it makes sense: from parent or to children, or from MOCs if relevant to a current purpose
  • If I don't know how or what to do with them, just leave them unlinked – and then I can find them on the graph very easily and with tags (which play the role of index)

  Helps a ton with overhead and organic growth – things of little importance just die alone, but can also find their place much later without me having to figure things I may not yet know about them. Looking at the graph is fun so I do this quite often, and I am always curious about the lonely satellites that I can often link after some time has passed.

  "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway

  PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
• ctietze

  February 14 edited February 14

  I deliberately spent a couple hours here and there in my Zettelkasten to test the stability of new features. Some notes were reworked, a couple were created, and I made progress on older writing projects. I usually don't have that much time in my Zettelkasten to reconnect and explore

  Rough, imprecise translations from a couple of German notes sprinkled in:

  • 202502131525 Consumer identity not fitting participatory de* mocracy
  • 202502131514 Society is only trade-offs
  • 202502131512 Absolute freedom ready to face consequences
  • 202502131443 Burkeman - Meditations for Mortals burkeman2024medi
  • 202502081513 Augstein's early criticism party democracy
  • 202502081458 Futurology driver, resistance, access, phase
  • 202502081122 Ambsheets are ambiguous spreadsheets with multuple cell values
  • 202502071334 Wood working from your apartment
  • 202502051043 LLDB exit function with thread return
  • 202502050537 Effective problem statement in scientific writing
  • 202502050528 Timeline apps show feeds like social media timelines
  • 202502041802 Abstract in scientific writing
  • 202502041800 Structure of research articles
  • 202502040832 Schulz von Thun 4 sides model of communication
  • 202502040822 Devil's Advocate feedback
  • 202502040803 How to ask for feedback
  • 202502040756 Reasons to share Zettel
  • 202502040749 Intellectual honesty
  • 202502040712 Academicity degree of need for attribution
  • 202502040710 Front matter in Zettel
  • 202502031016 Cary's law of immutability by default
  • 202502030528 Workholding on low Roman workbench
  • 202502021331 Frame saw is ergonomic for straight rip cuts
  • 202502020811 Performance vs product value in value judgement
  • 202502020753 Atedai - Japanese planing board

  I formalized a couple of notes about the Zettelkasten to better organize what I have. That's why I only now created 202502040710 Front matter in Zettel to tie together the concept that is mentioned in notes about Zettel "anatomy" here and there.

  Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
• zettelsan

  February 17

  The past week or so, I have continued my tinkering with my development of a Folgezettel mode for Emacs's Org.

  I intend to make the package public once it gets polished enough, but while revisiting Bob Doto's Folgezettel ID scheme and the Luhmann's original ID scheme (e.g., both would look like alternating alphanumeric characters like "12.3a13b4"), I found out that their numbering schemes are actually orthogonal in terms of in which dimension the ID grows. I'll save the detail for another occasion when the issue comes up, but basically, Luhmann's original ID scheme can build binary trees but not generic trees in which a node have more than two childs. Doto's scheme allows the latter and therefore more flexible, though a potential issue is that a Folgezettel ID will be at least as long as the number of notes in that train of notes. That seems like bad aesthetics, but maybe people don't really creates long trains of notes...

  I started out implementing Doto's scheme and was exploring if my package should accommodate wider use cases including Luhmann's original scheme. But I now find Luhmann's scheme a bit lacking in generality. I'm not sure why this limitation of not being able to cleanly connect more than two follow-up notes to a single note has not been discussed much.

  Anyways, on my Zettelkasten reading side, I'm on the way to finish another book by John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. I'm gotten very interested in Gray's brand of pessimism that I've also listened to several podcast episodes in which he was the guest. I enjoy learning from his viewpoints immensely. I've also finished a couple of graphic novels/manga, but they'll remain unnamed as they are written in my mother language, not English.
• c4lvorias

  February 17 edited February 17

  Months of starting over, finally I internalized the ZKM process. I have 51 structure notes right now and they don't even encapsulate intermediary stuff. They are all topic notes. And I have 113 zettels that are waiting to be processed. My natural next steps are:

  • Balancing top-down (structure notes) and bottom-up idea development (zettels)
  • Figuring out how to deal with the information overload.

  My themes:

  1. I do brain-based coaching and performance consultancy. I'm trying to build a solution manual for possible problems. For instance, I have a note named "Cognitive Flexibility", and there are 10-15 of them. I want it to be a catalogue of theories, models related to cognitive flexibility, main problems occur among people and how to solve them.
  2. I'm working on a start-up idea which is centered around change in psychotherapy. There are DL libraries across the internet but the product's system architecture needs to be built. So I have to scan a significant amount of papers related to therapeutic change, affective and linguistic computing etc.
  3. Third pillar of my work is related to socio-technical systems engineering. This will revolve around exploration of the area.
  4. Coaching needs a lot of bussiness knowledge, but I don't have enough time to specialize in such topics.

  To deal with everything I have to divide myself into pieces I guess. So learning to switch between different modes of work and planning of it is also important. Since I've just started using the method properly I don't have experience in working with 10 things at a time.

  Books of this week:

  I couldn't really decide if I should go with incremental reading or not. The best solution (came to my mind now) can be reading dozens of books at once but processing one at a time. (Not sure) I have my collection piled up, so it won't be a problem really.

  • Socio-Technical Systems Engineering Handbook
  • Yanılgının İcadı (The Invention of Delusion) -- Turkish
  • and papers... lots of papers...

  Edit: One more thing... I preferred writing in my own native language over English since in English I think before I write, in Turkish my writing surprises me. But the usage of technical or conceptual terms degraded.

  Post edited by c4lvorias on February 17

  Selen. Psychology freak. https://twitter.com/neuro__flow

  “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

  ― Ursula K. Le Guin
• Will

  February 19

  @ctietze, I love seeing so many cool themes in your notes. The woodworking theme especially speaks to me. I spend up to ten hours a week in my workshop, which I absolutely love. Right now, I'm working on an art project and tackling the construction of a coffee table. After 35 years in a large, dedicated shop, I’m now facing the challenge of moving to town and downsizing.

  What woodworking projects do you have in mind?

  Will Simpson
  My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
• ctietze

  February 19

  @Will I built our bed frame last year and used a dowel jig to connect pieces without screws for the first time. I researched how people build bed frames to understand what's necessary and what's overkill. (As a teenager, I also had a self-made bed, but it was holding together butt-joint construction lumber with many, many screws, and was quite noisy)

  The little bit of research for that project showed me what a little bit of tight, wooden joinery can to, and how to spread the load evenly.

  

  It's built so that I can take off the 140cm front and back panels and replace them with wider ones. For 180cm+ I would replace the old metal IKEA support beam with a wooden one that has a foot on the ground.

  I then learned about joinery a bit (in the early weeks of being a father, I had time with the baby on me to watch videos, but nothing too complicated because of lack of sleep, and woodworking was interesting enough ). So around Christmas I ended up making a Moravian-inspired high stool for my wife who couldn't sit on low, soft surfaces without pain for a while (some aftermath or other of child-bearing and hormones):

  

  No screws involved! The wedges in the round tenons should ideally be rotated 90º (I mis-marked my wood on this very last step), but it won't split the top because of battens underneath:

  

  This is all made from scrap wood, including construction lumber from my teenage bed -- wood with old screw holes that's >20 years old by now

  Took me 20mins in the late afternoons here and there -- didn't have more time per session. (That was before I discovered the magic of waking up at 4 a.m., and how in the early afternoon, the work day can already be over )

  The surfaces are still very rough because I had no reliable way to hold the wood for planing, and also no skill, so there's tear out.

  Since then I got better at sharpening the old wooden hand-plane from my aunt's basement. It's not even a smoothing plane, with a too-wide-open mouth and no chip breaker. And my father-in-law brought over his large jointer's plane to help keeping surfaces flat. Which makes work-holding harder. So I used it to connect two other scrap pieces of lumber for an atedai-style planing surface where I could sit on top of wood to hold it down while planing.

  

  That's helping so much already!

  And it's quite mobile. Here it is with a low saw horse visible in the corner, on which I can place the 'bench' to not actually sit on the floor. The elevation helps to put more weight on the work piece, and to get up more easily

  

  So with all that, in one or two evenings per week with 30min each at most, I want to tackle widening our bed a bit (for co-sleeping with the toddler; she is surprisingly "space intensive"), using old lumber I still have after all of this to provide storage in our built-in kitchen cupboard (adding more shelves, for example), overhead-storage in the hallway maybe, a small stool/bench for putting on shoes and hiding away our biking helmets.

  To me, this all has a very funny parallel to programming; I have a note 202501031059 Bootstrapping wood working workshop, that starts with a hatchet and a block of wood and escalates to high work benches, starting with what you can do with Japanese low saw horses (and pull saws). Like a computer program, or a computer itself, it starts with very little, then builds up complexity with each stage. I didn't expect that, so the discovery was a pleasant surprise as a total newbie to the topic.

  Edit: I have no clue why some pictures rotated themselves, sorry

  Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/