I hadn’t heard of Zettelkasten until today. I want to give it a go, but I’ll be honest, I feel a bit overwhelmed after reading about it. I’ve never catalogued my notes before or given each one a unique id.
There's basically just two things you need to know:
1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max.
2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc).
It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-discovering some of my thoughts from months or years ago.
> How would you go about storing notes from a book/course so that they fit in this system?
Overall, they don't. Zettelkasten is just one of the folders within my note-taking app (Obsidian), and notes from books go into a separate folder. If there are some titbits that I see being useful outside of the book, I duplicate it into a zettelkasten note.
> Group them together somehow?
I have an "also see" section in my template where I link every other short note that's somehow connected. That's what I meant by "linking them as much as possible". The end goal is to be able to follow the links between similar notes instead of having to search for them. My library isn't big enough at the moment, but once it becomes, I should be able to click on a random note, follow a few links, and have an entire article with sources to back it up with little to no effort, using thoughts I had months or years ago.
> Have an "index" note with just hyperlinks to the rest?
Yeah I also do this. I have a note titled "00 zk" that's an index note for all the zettelkasten notes. I don't fill it out automatically at the moment, but I have a plugin that can do "link all notes within this folder", and I trigger it with a hotkey from time to time. That index note helps me to see similar notes and interlink them, because I never view that folder with a file explorer.
1. Keep your notes short. I do 10 sentences max.
2. Link them as much as possible. Find a program that does that (Obsidian, Roam, Foam, etc).
It truly is a wonderful feeling when you do those two things many, many times. Instead of a YouTube rabbit hole, I can fall down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts just by clicking on a random note, following the links, and re-discovering some of my thoughts from months or years ago.
Unique IDs are easy. For example, Unix timestamp or just YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. Here's a commonly shared public database to get you hooked: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes