Share your main structure note
The more I use Zettelkasten, the more I realize how important structure is. In particular, I’ve come to understand that as the number of structure notes grows, it becomes essential to keep the main (top-level) structure note well-organized.
Since a main structure note serves not just as an entry point, but also as an opportunity to establish relationships with other structure notes, I’ve become curious about how others approach this.
I haven’t come across any threads in this forum where people share their main structure notes. Sharing our structures could be a great source of mutual inspiration. And sharing Zettelkasten structures is a valuable benefit of being part of this forum.
Please share your main structure note!
P.S. In Korea, there is a saying: "Even if you have 54 liters of beads, they only become a treasure when strung together."
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Comments
I had an equivalent of a main structure note. I had a saved search for a number of buffer notes and central structure notes that I checked with a similar reasoning as the Feynman's Darlings.
However, as my Zettelkasten and especially its complexity grew, the idea of checking this collection didn't stand the test of practice.
I could've currated the list tightly. However, I found myself to have plenty of invitations to connect each new idea. So, I didn't saw the need for it.
I am a Zettler
My collection of structure notes is constantly growing. For this reason, I have started to organise my structure notes:
Ever since I read Duncan’s book Index: A History of, my Index Notes have been my favourite.
Edmund Gröpl — 100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
I also don't have a main structure note for everything.
I have seen a few cases online where people have a main structure note as a kind of 'homepage' for their note-taking app. Depending on which app they use, they have this note pinned so that it's there whenever they open the app. I'd consider it in the future, although right now it's more convenient that the app opens on whatever I was last working on.
The idea of a main structure note suggests that someone has a single way to summarise everything... maybe a list of 'Map of Content' notes or similar. Right now, there's so much crossover between different areas in my ZK that I'm not sure how I would even do a top level. I think I'll just let it evolve naturally.
Interesting how you have 'Atlas' as an overview and 'Maps' within that. I thought of doing something similar, maybe calling mini-structure notes something like 'signposts' or 'paths'. But at the same time I don't want to over-prescribe and make it more complicated than it needs to be. But it's definitely good to try these things out as ideas.
Actually, I don't have a main structure note. I have many well-established starting points first in my head (e.g. Atomicity, Morning Runs, Serendipity, What to Eat Before a Morning Run, that problem X, that project Y — the list goes on) and that I know exist as notes into Zettelkasten.
These starting points are often regular notes that contain both body text and a structure-note-like section. I use them as entry points: when I need to navigate to a specific area of my Zettelkasten, I try to recall the closest existing note and retrieve it through search or by following links from another connected note.
For example, if I have a new idea about morning running, or need to retrieve something I wrote about it, I'll remember that I have a "Morning Runs" note. The idea I'm looking for is almost certainly attached to that note, or somewhere nearby.
What works particularly well for me is densely interconnecting these notes with one another.
One important detail: initially, I maintained a strict separation between structure notes and Zettels. Over time, however, virtually every Zettel started functioning as a kind of micro-structure note for its own specific, smaller domain. Eventually, I stopped making an explicit distinction between the two types.
As a result, connections between Zettels also serve as connections between structures, supporting navigation throughout the Zettelkasten.
In essence, I no longer distinguish structure notes as a separate note type. Any Zettel containing enough relevant links can function as a structure note, and I can reach the area I'm looking for by following a path from the closest note I remember having.
Of course, some notes are much more general than others and tend to function as proper structure notes (e.g. "Running") . In practice, though, I rarely go through them to get where I want to go. Almost always, I can remember something closer to the specific point I'm looking for.
It is interesting that my experience is similar to yours. As I used Zettelkasten more, I also stopped accessing the central structure notes. I go straight to where ideas come to me and work. Unlike my personal experience, I expected that organizing the main structure notes well was essential, but after reading your comments, I realized that it is not.
On the other hand, because I wanted an organized structure overall and was worried that new structure notes would become orphaned, I managed them by dividing them into sections, much like the menu window in RPG Maker XP.
Main structure note A
1. Practice
2. Perspective
3. Mental model
4. Knowledge Work
5. RPG mode
@Edmund Your visualizations are a work of art! Are there any benefits to writing main structure notes and visualizing them?
@iylock That's actually a very good sign. The main structure notes is based on the assumption that the Zettelkasten is rather opaque to you, so you need a tool that is designed for dealing with such opacity.
I consider the point of redundancy of the main structure note a threshold of becoming familiar enough with one's Zettelkasten, so you unlock another level of fluidity.
I am a Zettler
Some people design a "dashboard" for their digital zettelkasten with todos, links, statistics, progress reports, …
Thank you. What are my benefits? My visual structures help me practise visual and non-linear thinking. I use maps to explore foreign cities, but not my hometown. I use an index when reading non-fiction, but not fiction.
Another possible view is that: They might help me to overcome my fear of losing control over my Zettelkasten.
Edmund Gröpl — 100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
I see. Right now, there are quite a few overlapping points in my structure notes. Also, since I already have multiple points in my head, I’ve become able to flexibly arrange the structure notes of my structure notes. Reaching this point feels like a comfortable home. And it seems like note-taking is finally having an impact on my mind. It’s really fun
That's right. On the other hand, since I am more drawn to color and visuals, I tried those things, but they didn't help with the Zettelkasten. (Meaning I failed at everything, haha). I am good at visually designing and creating Excel dashboards for data processing and management, so I have no idea why I couldn't succeed with my Zettelkasten
Oh, thank you for sharing your experience
I have a single point of entry for my zettelkasten. Its main purpose is to enable reaching every single note starting from this entry point, so that few orphan notes remain. With software, we can easily perform search on any notes (sensibly titled or keyed), so this isn't strictly a requirement for avoiding orphans these days. But given the importance of liking in the zettelkasten method, I consider it a nice habit to keep.
In a sense, I consider this entry point my main structure note about the (entire) structure of my zettelkasten. Each structure note typically builds around a theme/topic. Then, I want the main structure note to provide me with a meta structure of my zettelkasten in its entirety.
In practice, this note currently has sections like personal projects at varying phases (on-going, research, ideation, open-source software contributions, blog articles, etc.); books and reading that I am doing and want to do next in what context; long-term learning topics, etc. This is more than just loosely connecting individual structure notes, but it provides me with an opportunity to glance at all my note-taking activities at varying phases of progress and relationships. This note is also a good place to establish relationships between individual structure notes and other related resources.
In my outliner-based system, the outline itself plays that role.
Does your outline-based system enforce your texts to exist only in outlines? Or can you also create header/body structures, for example?
I use Org mode in Emacs, which I believe was initially designed as an outline mode but is flexible enough that it can be used as general text editing mode, like Markdown.
Logseq (which I haven't actually used) seems to be outline-based. I wonder what pros and cons are for enforcing a structure like this.
The outliner, called the Leo Editor, is a More-style outliner written in Python. Each node in the outline has a "headline" - a title - and a "body" - a text part - along with a permanent ID. When a node is selected, its body is made visible in a text editor panel alongside the tree view. The text editor handles text. If you want to use Markdown, Asciidoc, or ReStructuredText (which I use), there a viewer to see it rendered.
Each node has a single text instance, and you can structure that into headers and body as you like.
The outline view structure is up to you, and I let it grow as needed according to how I understand the material I'm working with. Nodes can be cloned (a clone includes clones of its child nodes) and you can put a clone anywhere else you like in the outline.
My zettelkasten is driven by a small number of scripts that access the outline and its nodes. They provide navigation, search, inserting backlinks as wanted, etc. The outliner's code itself has a rich selection of objects and methods, all of which are accessible to scripts.
The outline with all its data reside in memory, so operations are very fast. The outline is saved by serializing to a text file, which can be either XML or JSON. I have written a script to serialize the ZK contents to a plain text file that would be very simple to parse and convert to some other ZK format, like one Markdown file per note, if that's what someone wants. I have made it a point to avoid lock-in from the start of the project.
For my zettelkasten, I have nodes that are notes and nodes that are "organizers" - they are headings in the structure but do not contain any note content. The search routine displays hits on organizer nodes and note nodes separately, which turns out to be very helpful. Note search hits are displayed grouped by their organizing nodes, which can also be clicked on to navigate directly to them.
I'm not sure what you mean by "create header/body structures" if they are not in the outline, but you could probably simulate something like them by creating a top-level section in the outline (maybe titled "Generic" or "Not In ZK Outline") and putting such nodes there. I haven't felt the need so far.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. As a Linux user "more" means more like this and cannot intuitively see what the style means, but your description is clear and a couple screen casts cleared things up.
As far as I can tell, the outlines in your editor works fairly similarly to the Org mode in Emacs. What I meant by "header" and "body" is as follows.
In an Org document, showing just headers looks like displaying an outline of the document:
When there is some text content under a header (here, it is "Civilization as Death-Denial"), it can be expanded to show the text body under it:
So, the header text, e.g., "Civilization as Death-Denial", corresponds to a headline in an outline node in Leo, and all the text under the header corresponds to the body text in Leo.
Just clearing things up.
That does seem somewhat similar but the text of a node is shown in a separate panel. This allows one to scroll around the tree while keeping the same node in the viewing/editing pane.