Remindered: A New Term for Cognitive Architecture - And Why UIDs Enable Cognitive Breadcrumbing
I scratched out a new musing exploring of a new verb that (I think) I made up. I'm calling I it "remindered"—the architectural act of being triggered back into a cognitive context at exactly the right moment, not just reminded of a task.
chrisokeefe.io/remindered
We have reminders. We have remembering. But we don't have a word for when a carefully placed breadcrumb triggers memory and additional context at precisely the right time and place. This is what I'm calling being "remindered"—contextual re-entry that reconstructs not just information, but your cognitive state.
I've been explorign this as I've been building out my own personal AI system using VS code and claude code, overlaied on top of my zettelkasten (using it as a knowledge base, NOT to create content in it. I do create thinking and research with AI, but I store it elswhere, as my Zettelkasten is for my thinking alone.)
Luhmann understood that UIDs weren't just identifiers—they were navigational breadcrumbs marking the trail of thought itself. But I think there's something even more powerful we haven't fully articulated, but which has been discussed extensively in this forum at various locations.
UIDs allow us to identify various times and places for cognitive locations at a point in time.
This means UIDs aren't just organizing notes—they're creating addressable cognitive waypoints. When you reference 202510221031, you're not just pointing to a note. You're creating a breadcrumb back to a specific cognitive position in time and space—a point in your thinking that can be revisited, linked from, and used to reconstruct the chain of thought.
I'm particularly interested in exploring how UIDs enable what I'm calling "cognitive breadcrumbing"—the ability to trace chains of thought across time by marking cognitive locations with temporal precision. I'm approaching this from my work as a geopolitical intelligence and finance analyst.
Questions I'm wrestling with:
- How do temporal UIDs create different affordances than hierarchical systems?
- What makes a breadcrumb "active" rather than passive?
- Can we design trigger architectures that make being remindered inevitable rather than effortful?
- How does this relate to Luhmann's concept of finding "your way there and back, somehow"?
The power of UIDs as cognitive coordinate systems is profound, and I am just now scratching the surface of my awaress of it and its applications. I know this community understands the power of structural identifiers better than anywhere else.
As we decide more tools for thinking, I'm blown away thus far by the power of AI combined with UIDs in my existing zettelkasten structure.
Thoughts?
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Comments
I think this is just a matter of semantics. UID stands for Unique IDentifier. As such, if you are using UIDs purely for its strict sense of the term, the only requirement is that a UID has to be unique within your collection, such that each resource can be uniquely, unambiguously identified within it.
If you want to let UIDs include other meaningful info, then that's up to your use case, but the same thing can typically be achieved by having metadata associated with each resource. Usually, decoupling UIDs and metadata may be a better design, since then you will have a leeway to expand or shrink dimensions when you come up with new ways to sort information. By consolidating that information into UIDs, you'd lose that flexibility and future-proofness.
Combining UIDs and metadata probably made sense in the days of analog Zettelkasten, as you cannot easily change UID or add/remove metadata. But these are relatively easy to do nowadays with digital note-taking.
I think the (U)UID @kneedeepat is referring to is the one generated from a timestamp. This is conventional in zettelkasten practice and has the twofold process of simply creating a Unique ID as well as automatically carrying with it the metadata of the timestamp without alteration. I think this is the simplest, most flexible, most cross platform, and most future-proof of zettelaksten techniques in general.
And I do think it is interesting how that method in particular produces a twofold connection. While Luhmann ID's were relative to the position in the zettelkasten (5,a,2,d ... etc.) , these UUID's are relative in time. They share a relative position in the zettelkasten based on the creation of other notes (with similar time stamps) as well as what you do with those notes in structure notes etc. The timestamp has the potential to coordinate with both the contents of the zettelkasten as well as what is outside of the zettelkasten, given the date and circumstances of the world at that date, potentially revealing patterns not in the zettelkasten that ought to be included.
All interesting commentary. Luhmann felt the UID was completely meaningless. Just a means to know where to place and find a slip in the slip box. Not to say each user cannot assign their own meanings.
Personally, I don’t use IDs, but your suggestion reminds me of some of my practices with bullet writing (bullet journaling, interstitial journaling), where I record thoughts and reflections according to a kind of “progress,” and I have the ability to return to points of interruption. Some of the dynamics from those contexts might be useful to you.
@kneedeepat: I think what you said is important, but I would separate more clearly two processes that you talked about:
It's important to separate these because your cognitive state at a point in time (by "point in time" I mean not a tiny interval of time that is too small to be meaningful, but a meaningful interval of work in your note system) may involve reading multiple sources, working on multiple projects, and/or adding to multiple chains of thought.
In 2015 Dan Sheffler, inspired by a discussion on the zettelkasten.de blog before this forum had started, wrote his own blog post titled "Git for Zettelkasten" (original URL) that described how he used the version control system Git to "make intentional commits with brief, descriptive messages that log what you have done at logical intervals in your work". The changes made, in one or more notes, since the last commit are summarized in the commit message, which stands as the summary of your cognitive state at that point in time (together with the actual changes to the note system). Dan called the type of relationship established by such a commit "chronological nearness", constitutive of process number 1 above.
For those of us who don't use a version control system for our notes, chronological nearness can be established by liberal use of timestamps, as you pointed out in the original post above. (This is easy to do in my own note system, which is relatively immutable: I generally don't change existing notes, only add to them with timestamps.) All that we lose are the commit messages, but these can be stored separately in a timestamped work/time-use log. If you are especially interested in process 1, you may want some kind of global work log like this, specifically focused on summarizing your cognitive state.
Like Dan, I have found chronological nearness relations to be very important and useful, and as @pseudoevagrius pointed out above, timestamps establish such relations truly "universally" with whatever else is happening in the world.
What @zettelsan said is very important too: think of both processes 1 and 2 above as working with different types of metadata (among other possible metadata). Turning to process 2, it is facilitated by a set of link types (metadata for links). You can think of Luhmann-style folgezettel numbering as specifying least one type of link.
I'll just add a piece of info for clarity. What I mentioned about the merit of decoupling UIDs and metadata like timestamps is essentially what you learn when you deal with relational database schema, so-called database normalization. It's a cross-disciplinary application of knowledge that is pretty standard when you have dealt with (computer) databases.
When you come up with a deviation or extension of an idea, it's often a good idea to re-examine the new approach based on existing knowledge. There usually are valid reasons why things are understood in the ways they are by those with experience. Otherwise, you'd repeat mistakes that people have already made and/or reinvent the wheel, at best.
Not to say embedding timestamps into UIDs doesn't make sense, though. In many cases, it is more than sufficient for personal use. In some sense, labeling your daily journal entry by date is a usage example of UID, so people implicitly understood its merit.
@zettelsan: Thanks for elaborating. It's useful to know about databases, and to think of one's note system as a database, even when keeping notes in plain text files, because there are transferable principles like those you mentioned.
I'm reminded of this discussion with @ZettelDistraction where we talked about how much metadata is encoded in his UIDs. I mentioned there that it not so important where the metadata is encoded, on condition that it is consistently encoded with a schema that can be programmatically converted later, which is easy to do on text files using basic scripting skills. But I agree with you that it's better to decouple UIDs and metadata for various reasons, even though my own UIDs are timestamps.
No longer. Those IDs were wiped out in a cataclysm.† Well, nothing so dramatic--it was too much effort to stick to a Folgezettel system, just as @Sascha pointed out would happen. These days, I assign a keyword and a timestamp and link either in the body or in the SEE ALSO section of my notes. Keywords group related notes together. The ID in my system is also metadata, the title, and the filename, which is a consistency constraint. A macro template in Absurdian‡ handles the metadata and filename assignment.
Perhaps one day I will upload my templates to my Zettel template GitHub repository.
I'm spending more time writing outside of my Zettelkasten. I'll add notes when I feel like doing this--unfathomable biological forces compel me to prioritize projects over the Zettelkasten, against my non-existent free will. The Zettelkasten likely feels neglected.
EDIT (by Sascha): Corrected my name.
† A large asteroid collided with my Zettelkasten.
‡ Obsidian uses properties to record metadata.
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