Useful friction or arbitrary separation?
Over the years I’ve experimented with a number of different workflows for managing ideas at different levels of maturity.
I’ve tried keeping inbox notes, research and early working notes outside my Zettelkasten (Evernote/PARA, TaskPaper, and more recently a Notion database), only promoting ideas into the Zettelkasten once they’d surfaced enough to “earn” promotion.
Lately, though, I’ve been questioning whether that separation makes sense at all.
If we accept that:
- a Zettelkasten is a place to think in writing,
- rewriting is thinking, and
- a flat hierarchy largely removes the cost of scale,
…then I fail to see why early working notes, half-formed ideas and exploratory thinking shouldn’t simply live inside the Zettelkasten from the start.
My workflow increasingly begins with a curiosity-driven question. I’ll explore it through reading, writing and (these days) LLM conversations, gradually accumulating notes and hypotheses in a single canvas.
Eventually I notice several distinct ideas emerging, split them into atomic notes, and perhaps the original note becomes a structure note—or perhaps it disappears entirely after refactoring.
Conceptually, this feels no different from starting with a large structure note and progressively extracting permanent notes from it.
So my question is this:
For those of you who’ve used a Zettelkasten for a long time and experimented with different workflows, do you see any principled or practical reason to keep early working notes and exploratory thinking in a separate system before they enter the Zettelkasten? If so, what problems does that separation solve that are difficult to solve within the Zettelkasten itself?
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Comments
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I just addressed this to some degree in a comment to another post, so I'm all set to pontificate. I think the answer to your question lies to a large degree in how your ZK system works. It may fight you or help you work with temporary material. So your approach needs to take the system's workings into account.
Let's take browser bookmarks as being at one extreme of a continuum. Most of the value of bookmarks is that they have been curated - they may let you avoid repeating a search for which you might not even have a good search term were you to start again. But otherwise there is usually not much thought involved. They might turn out to be good starting points for some researching or thinking in the future.
I keep mine in my own implementation of a bookmarks manager. It works much like a ZK with a few specializations for URLs, and I don't create links between the bookmarks. However, the system is based on an outliner and the way the outline structure has evolved provides some implicit lining and grouping, somewhat like compound keywords.
The other extreme would be your "early working notes, half-formed ideas and exploratory thinking". My ZK, which is also based on an outliner, makes it easy to create separate areas for these kinds of things and even group them by their "projects" (that is probably too strong a word here). The search system clusters hits by outline area so this kind of note doesn't really clutter up the system.
So I do keep some number of unrefined notes in my ZK. So far I only keep such notes if they touch areas I know I'm interested in pursuing in the future. I definitely need reminders of what I've been thinking about so this practice helps me a great deal. I may even link some of these notes to the more permanent parts of my ZK. I make sure not to create notes that link into these exploratory cards in case I remove them or change my thinking about them later on.
If your system makes it hard to recognize which notes are provisional or exploratory, or if those notes mostly add clutter, then they should probably be put somewhere else. I don't think it's a philosophical or theoretical issue, just a practical one involving system design.
If I understood correctly what you wrote (I read through it very quickly), it’s an experience similar to mine. In my conception of Zettelkasten, I’ve integrated the model of notes that "grow/mature", sometimes starting from a draft or even just a title.
In this, I was inspired by the idea of the digital garden, where notes/ideas can be compared to little plants that have a life cycle, and can very well be part of the system even if they’ve simply been "seeded".
In light of this, I don't have any separation between mature and immature notes. I simply realize their status when I revisit them, and eventually further develop those that need it
One of the big advantages of this approach of mine is that I don't have the friction of deciding where an idea goes based on its degree of maturity. That's very often not a binary choice: I run into many intermediate situations, so where would I place a half-developed thought if I had two watertight compartments?
I completely agree. IMO, lowering cognitive friction should be an important goal of one's ZK system and practices, and being forced to make an unnecessary binary choice is not beneficial.
I do find it helpful to be able to look at a search result and be able to tell at a glance if a hit is in a "provisional" region or not. But there is always a spectrum of maturity, as you say.