Comments

• andang76

  June 8 edited June 8

  One single zettelkasten
  Having one environment promotes chance and opportunity of connecting ideas and reflections between all contexts, and this is one of the factors that often generates some of the highest values ​​of a zettelkasten: brilliant thoughts, originality and creativity

  Zettelkasten benefits from chaos, that can be managed using simple techniques.

  The "classic" techniques are

  • using an index system
  • using folgezettel

  but in my personal implementation of Zettelkasten I definitely prefer:

  • use of structure notes/map of contents or higher order notes in general for emerging structures and cluster from the flat set of notes
  • use of train of thoughts (bullet lists, in the end) instead of folgezettel in which I develop my stream of thoughts and I collect the notes as they emerge
  • using linking instead of tagging. instead of macrophotography tag, I have a macrophotography note that easily become a structure note over time.
• mlbrandt

  June 8

  I have many, many points of entry! I used the wikipedia outline of academic disciplines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines) to set up the bare minimum for my numbering system i.e. 1000s - Humanities, 2000s - Social Sciences, 3000s Natural Sciences etc. You can choose to set up these systems to more layers (I've attached how I actually set it up to start with) and then use links to connect ideas... but in retrospect, I think I it would be better to use only the bare minimum.
• ctietze

  June 8

  @Glin76 You'll find plenty of comments on this topic and @andang76 repeated my personal advice, too -- so I'll limit myself to this:

  The Zettelkasten is a personal productivity tool, and you should have as many as you have persons.

  (For publications, maybe don't mix topics too much, or the text will get cumbersome to read )

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

  June 8

  My current approach is to structure notes so that information retrieval functions as if using a single Zettelkasten, while storing notes and formatting their UIDs to allow separation if desired in the future.

  In practice, I maintain one Zettelkasten for technical topics, with permanent notes’ UIDs postfixed with “-tech,” and another for everything else as my thinking partner, with UIDs postfixed with “-zk.” Each Zettelkasten is stored in its own Git repository for version control and backup. I use Org Roam, which doesn’t natively support multiple repositories, but I work around this by structuring multiple Zettelkastens as Git submodules, making them appear as simple subdirectories.

  In terms of general workflow, I see no strong reason to separate these notes. This aligns with responses in this thread favoring a single repository while using categorization like tags, indexes, structure notes, or numbering systems.

  I still keep mine in two Zettelkastens for personal reasons. I write technical notes in English and personal ones in Japanese, my native language. I want the option to make the technical Zettelkasten fully public for sharing, but I’m hesitant to do so with my personal one, as I don’t want to self-censor under public scrutiny.
• zettelsan

  June 8 edited June 8

  I also create a separate Zettelkasten for everything related to my role at a company. This can include notes on company-specific details, daily engineering logs, projects, tasks, progress tracking, team communications, bugs and their resolutions, discussions with teammates, one-on-ones, and more. When I leave that job, much of this information may become irrelevant or need to be separated from my future work (e.g., due to an NDA). Keeping it in a distinct repository makes this easier—I can simply archive the employment-specific repository and remove it from my main Zettelkasten while retaining access to the archive without actively engaging with it.
• Glin76

  June 9

  Thank you for all, you've help me a lot !

  Mastodon @glin76
  GiHub
• qqq

  June 10 edited June 10

  @Glin76, currently my notes span widely disparate topics, e.g., psychology, philosophy, STEM, programming, linguistics, and language learning.

  I have no way to even begin separating them, partly because terms often have different meanings in different disciplines. A core example is "information". This is used in a vey narrow manner in mathematics and computer science. This particular operationalisation is sometimes referred to in computational psychology, but not so much in for example social psychology. I thus explicitly have notes on whatever topic, branch out and link. Because I tend to work on particular topics during a particular time in my life I do not really have to explicitly separate those topics any further.

  In fact my current area of intense interest is in "logic, reasoning, and inquiry" which inherently spans topics from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics.
• wjenkins81

  June 17 edited June 17

  @mlbrandt said:
  I have many, many points of entry! I used the wikipedia outline of academic disciplines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines) to set up the bare minimum for my numbering system i.e. 1000s - Humanities, 2000s - Social Sciences, 3000s Natural Sciences etc. You can choose to set up these systems to more layers (I've attached how I actually set it up to start with) and then use links to connect ideas... but in retrospect, I think I it would be better to use only the bare minimum.

  I do something similar, but using a simplified form of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) for overall organization. I just round off the numbers to the nearest integer.

  

  It automatically gives me a place to put notes, because I only need to get the DDC code from the book (or a similar book on the topic when it's not a book), and I already know where to group the notes.

  It's worked pretty well so far and I'm happy with it.

  @Glin76 it's a single Zettelkasten for everything. I tried have separate ones, but I found that having one helps me keep the overview, and there can even be connections that I wouldn't have realized if I kept them separate.