What if I have two differents points of interest
Hello,
Here's my first question, I have to different points of interest :
- Nature (forest, permaculture, ...)
- Computer (coding, opensource, ...)
Do I make one single Zettelkasten including both topics ? or two separate ?
First thought was to make two distincts, because mixing will be chaos
But it should be easier to have only one, and maybe (I said maybe) it would have some connections between the two
(network of fungi / tree structure / ...)
In case of merging the two, how tagging could prevent the mess ?
Do you have any feedback ?
Thanks
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
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
but in my personal implementation of Zettelkasten I definitely prefer:
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.
@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/
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.
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.
Thank you for all, you've help me a lot !
Mastodon @glin76
GiHub
@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.
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.
I don't think there is a benefit to having several Zettelkastens, or is there? If you don't know how to maintain order in one Zettelkasten, having two of them doesn't solve the problem.
There really is no benefit in having more than one.
But for the sake of argument, let's say you have more than one Zettelkasten. Let's say you have 4 of them, or better yet 5 Zettelkastens!
Now, if all of your Zettelkastens are real Zettelkasten ie. atomic, UID, etc…
…then how many Zettelkastens do you have?
One. Because you can link from any Zettel in any of the Zettelkastens to any other Zettel in any other Zettelkasten.
In other words, it is actually impossible to have more than one true Zettelkasten.
This is my reasoning, too. (System) Functionally speaking, the elements of your Zettelkasten are the nods that can be linked.
But having boundaries by linking method, folders and such you introduce inefficiencies that act as if you have multiple Zettelkastens.
I am a Zettler
@Glin76: Let me answer your question with a "Zettelkasten Exploration Map":
More about: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/3289/zettelkasten-exploration-maps/
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.