202107272242 The Art of using a Zettelkasten

Using a Zettelkasten is more of an art than a science. It's a personal relationship with an extension of your knowledge. Above all, it's important to just consistently work and think in this system to get the most out of it.

Personal preferences

• 202109091129 Evergreen notes
• 202107272238 When to write a new Zettel
• 202107292312 Project structure notes should answer a question
• 202107292136 The context of a link should give you a reason to follow it
• 202109091133 Notes should associate organically
• 202109091131 Notes should surprise us
• Use a reference manager. The references in the manager should only be ones that have been read and processed, ready to be cited in Zettel as I write them as the last step to processing a source. Don't clutter the reference manager with things I would like to read some day.
• Use a plain text editor and files. This makes everything much more cross-compatible and future proof.

Workflow

There are categories of things that I do regularly, and my Zettelkasten has a specific single place in a broader workflow. It's important to understand how we think and how the processes we use to do that thinking and synthesizing affect your ultimate knowledge (202109080847 As We May Think).

First, there are things that are tasks or projects. These go into whatever task and project managing tools I'm using. I've variously used a lot of tools, but I have always come back to a plain old pen and paper notebook. These are things that have some value in being organized, searchable, accessible, and kept around after they've been done — particularly the projects and all their related materials, outputs, and notes. Ultimately though, these could be discarded over time. Knowing the tasks that I did years ago might be interesting or sentimentally valuable but not objectively valuable for knowledge work. This gives me freedom and flexibility to change workflows with the times and what's working for me without having to migrate the pieces of knowledge I want to keep.

Second, there's my Zettelkasten which is where pieces of knowledge go to find a forever home. I take my time to meticulously build and maintain this system so that it's a living partner of mine that has deep value. It's a simple format that should be cross-compatible anywhere that digital text can be edited.

Thirdly, there's a reference manager. This is used as an accompaniment for the Zettelkasten just as a tool that makes collecting and formatting citations easier. Importantly though, the full citations live in the Zettelkasten so the tools used here can be transient.

Lastly, I have a website that I maintain as a place for publishing the output of my personal knowledge work that's enabled by this workflow. This includes blog posts, programming projects, photography, and whatever else I want to share with the world. I feel it's very important to have a place to publish your work in order to motivate you to see the knowledge work all the way through the phases of 202109061250 See, do, teach in order to completely know something.

What makes a good Zettelkasten editing tool

• Plain text, simple editing.
• Search for anything as the primary navigation.
  • Show context on results
  • Clickable searches for links, tags, etc.
• Easy linking
  • Full featured autocomplete search but inline while typing.
• Available anywhere I am on any device.
  • Ideally a plain-text file format that doesn't even need an "export" functionality.
• (Nice to have, not critical) some decent editor stuff: auto list continuation on Enter, syntax highlighting, auto-indent, etc.

The winning tool for me given the above constraintes is Obsidian. I also used and enjoyed The Archive. I still occasionally use other editors like VS Code and Neovim for editing these files. I have also heard great things about emacs and the extensible ways you can maintain a Zettelkasten in that, but I haven't ever taken the plunge and used it for any real amount of time.