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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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.
This the section of the atomic note-taking guide that deals with this: https://zettelkasten.de/atomicity/guide/#what-about-unfinished-notes
(This also makes "literature notes" redundant as a practice)
Short answer: I brought everything into the Zettelkasten.
I am a Zettler
That then poses the question of whether that makes the Rumen redundant in your workflow, @Sascha , and if not, what you consider to be the relevant "idea maturity boundary" that distinguishes "nascent idea that lives in the Rumen" from "incomplete idea that lives in the zettelkasten".
The separation between the Rumen is whether I actually started a thinking process or not. I have a lot of ideas on specific religions and vertical farming (no connection, just two separate "passions"). But I just have random ideas and random captures. I don't want to put in the word to even provide the minimal organization and writing (to think) effort needed.
I go in my Zettelkasten when I actually think. With no such threshold, the areas in the Zettelkasten become super messy, too messy for me. And I am a pretty messy person, yet.
I am a Zettler
Ah yes, @Sascha’s new religion of vertical farming.
Ok, that's clarifying. So it would effectively be the distinction between
.> @jameslongley said:
Reminds me of columns in a kanban board:
That's a plausible way of thinking about it. However, in practice, you need to intuit it.
I am a Zettler
i think the separation people reach for is usually a proxy for something narrower than maturity: protecting the link graph. the risk with a half-formed note isn't that it's immature, it's that if you weave it into the graph early you create links that never get revisited, and those dead-end stubs quietly degrade the signal of the whole web. so the useful line isn't a place, it's whether a note makes a claim you'd actually defend. before that it's a prompt, and prompts can sit right next to everything else, they just don't earn links yet. that fits the "has thinking started" framing, but it locates the cost in the graph rather than the note.
I think there can be plenty of notes that are linked in but can profit by more work. And notes in progress may want to link to other existing notes for one reason or another. IMO, as long as you don't create inbound links from other notes, you can delete a note without harming the rest of the collection.
I use my system to help me evolve and extend ideas, and useful but not "finished" notes have definite part to play.
the thing that clarified this for me: the friction people credit to promotion is almost never the moving, it's the reformulation that happens to coincide with it. if promoting a note means rewriting the idea in your own words and wiring it to what it touches, that friction is doing real work. if it's just relabeling or dragging it to another app, the boundary is arbitrary and you feel it. so the useful version isn't a separate inbox, it's making "maturing" mean actually restating and linking, wherever the note lives.
the quieter cost of a separate system is that a connection can only fire between things sharing a space. an idea sitting in a Notion inbox can't collide with the note it belongs next to, because your linking surface never sees it until you've already decided it matters. you lose the serendipity exactly when it's cheapest.
That prompts the question: What are your quality criteria for the graph?
I'm not sure that these are useful criteria.
How do you predict what links will be revisited? And why does revisiting matter?
Links are not the only way to navigate a digital zettelkasten. I access notes mostly by search. I can revisit a note repeatedly without ever revisiting links from or to the note. Nevertheless those links are still valuable, because they provide context for a note.
I know the term "stub" from Wikipedia, where authors can endlessly discuss the proper size of an article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub). I find stubs useful precisely because I can't predict how often I will revisit a note. A stub is a good place to collect the information I already have, so that I can find it again and connect it with other notes. I prefer stubs in my ZK over an endlessly growing todo list.
I don't know what you mean by "signal of the whole web". How do you determine that it "degrade[s]"?
Are claims your only note type?
And do you mean "defend" in terms of agreement or in properly representing the quality of your knowledge?
For example: I would title a note "the earth is flat". I don't believe in that claim and I wouldn't defend it. The title would only be a shortcut for the claim "some people believe that the earth is flat", which I can defend.
I consider links integral to thinking in writing. (I got this idea from Luhmann; he uses the word "anschlussfähig". More generally I believe that understanding and learning something requires making connections.)
Why should a note have to "earn" a link? I have a different policy. I add only notes and prompts that I can link. Having a link is a prerequisite for adding a note.
Not being able to find a link is a strong signal for me. It can mean that I'm too lazy or too tired to throw away something useless. Making decisions costs energy. It can point to a missing note. Those previously missing notes tend to be the most valuable, because they often connect to more than one relevant other note.
What "cost" do you have in mind?
Yes. Adding useful stubs costs little effort, if you prioritize linking over writing. In my experience a well-connected empty note is more valuable in the long term than a disconnected almost perfect draft buried in a separate tool.
My search routine clusters hits on card titles under their "location" (for me, with my outliner-based system, such cards will be under nodes in the outline that might be named, e.g., "Placeholders"). So I instantly know that those hits aren't ready for prime time yet. They can and often do link to other cards but I don't create any inbound links to them.