[martin-adams]

For anyone who wants the gist of Zettelkasten, I've just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

Here's my rather brief summary of the process:

* You create fleeting notes to capture ideas as they happen. They should be short lived notes that don't become the main store of your knowledge.

* You create literature notes as your read material. These should include your own thoughts on highlighted passages, not just quotes and highlights on their own.

* You organise your fleeting notes as permanent notes into your 'Slip Box' (taken from the original use index cards). Each note should contain a single idea and should be understandable when reading in isolation.

* You want to avoid burying knowledge in large notes as it makes it hard to glance at and link to other notes in a concise way.

* Notes are linked to other notes which support your ideas. This also help the discovery of new ideas.

* You use your slip box to help you do your thinking. You want to ask it questions, find the related notes that support/oppose the arguments and find gaps or newly related information.

* You can create index notes that help you find your way around.

* Part of the process is to help your understanding by writing. With a well maintained slip box, you'll never be starting from a blank sheet. You decide what insight/question/knowledge you want to explore, and pull together the notes that give you the body of research to get you started. You shouldn't need to start a new blog post by researching, that happens prior by taking smart notes as you naturally read what you're interested in.

Hope that's somewhat helpful. I'm still experimenting with it to find out what I understand correctly and what I don't.

[inakarmacoma]

You can give it a try with obsidian.md

[shakezula]

+1 for Obsidian. It’s the best note taking app I’ve yet found, and I’ve tried almost all of them at this point.

[Zuider]

Do you have an opinion on Zettlr, which was specifically designed to accommodate the Zettelkasten note-taking technique? Discussed previously on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723775

[shakezula]

I do! Obsidian is a little more polished and stable and has Zettel plugins that you can add that makes it feature equal to Zettlr imo.

[whimsicalism]

Definitely the best - I only wish it could sync with my ipad!

[chadk]

1Writer has totally worked for me. It isn't a clone of Obsidian, but it is good enough for me to work on notes, do my daily journaling, and link things together. Also, the fact that you can have multiple windows stacked on iPad helps.

[wellthisisgreat]

You can do it by using 1Writer and storing the Obsidian vault on iCloud.

I think it works with Dropbox too but you’d have to use something other than 1writer but not sure what

[StavrosK]

Have you tried Joplin? I tried Obsidian for a bit but I found that I liked Joplin better (though I'm not sure I could tell you why at this point).

[derekja]

wow, is that web site ever broken on mobile. Thanks for mentioning, though, I’ve been hunting for something like that.

[znpy]

the publish function is interesting, it'd be cool if there was also an "export" publish (i can host the website myself).

[bohrious]

Foam and Dendron Extensions for Vscode offer this functionality So you can publish your notes to github pages or any other static site hosting platform.

[TeMPOraL]

> Each note should contain a single idea and should be understandable when reading in isolation.

This is the part that I can't get my head around. How do you make such short notes, particularly with enough context to make it understandable in isolation?

[bohrious]

I relate. There is no universally valid way to measure understandability and any note can be subdivided so many different ways.

> Each note should contain a single idea and should be understandable when reading in isolation.

It's really a guiding principle. Unlike index cards in filing drawers, markdown with wikilinks allows for infinitely long notes and a low cost for context switching. you can choose whatever balance of note size/quantity you want.

In my markdown-based second brain built originally in Obsidian and now in Dendron, I have around 350 notes with what is probably a Poisson distribution of sizes. The important thing is that jumping from note to note costs very little.

further, if a note warrants splitting, now you can do it as fast as you can think it. The founder of Dendron aptly describes this as a part of the amoeba pattern: https://dendron.so/notes/e780000d-c784-4945-8e42-35218a3ecf1...

[spences10]

This is a great summary, thanks

[tin7in]

Thanks for the summary! Does it work in a team / collaborative environment?

[sanarothe]

I've been adapting ZK ideas to my work flow. I am in med devices working on CE mark regulatory filings, and so ZK kinda fits well with my job, which is essentially to find product/process information, know stuff, and communicate it.

I think ZK works very well in team environment. I make "issue logs" - when something goes wrong, or there is a particular detail to understand, I force myself to write out the issue and resolution into ZK. (Force, because it is so much easier to just solve and move on without documenting)

If you can maintain some discipline in writing summaries and updating for yourself, this solves "we discussed x issue 2 months ago, but don't remember {some, all} details now"

I keep sublime text open to my Kasten at all times so using full text search in a database of curated notes is so much quicker than trying to find the right project folder, or searching outlook.

I don't worry about one file - one idea, I just break things up how they make sense to me. The "rules" for ZK don't entirely make sense for engineering work and must be bent to your needs.

My only lament with plain text is difficulty in using figures / images in discussions with myself.

[martin-adams]

I think so. I’ve been using it to document 3 types of things for the projects.

1. Code guidelines, which anyone can contribute to and we can discuss/review them via PRs. As each note is a small rule or idea, it’s easy to reason about. It aids discovery for new team members, but early days to test that bit out.

2. Application implementation patterns. I’ve added small notes in the codebase to outline how concept work, state management, styling, types, etc. Relevant to the codebase, but not specific to any individual code file.

3. DevOps playbook. I’ve been working on this in the past week and having it in a Zettelkasten format has been very beneficial to fill it out with the most important aspects. The set of markdown files covers how to do deployment, how we do security, backups, etc. Would love to turn that into a blog/video series when I’m done - which probably shows the power of having knowledge that is very reusable.

[anandb143]

For your third bullet point, should that be literature notes ? doesn't sound like fleeting notes should be a permanent record.

[martin-adams]

Sorry, I think I poorly explained that. Both fleeting and literature notes need to be ‘organised’ into the slip box as permanent notes.

By organised, this means to filter, rewrite, conclude, etc into permanent notes. You don’t want to put in book extracts, or disjointed ideas without putting it in your own words.