[ChanderG]

I strongly recommend everyone read Luhmann's original paper [1] on Zettelkasten.

What I got from it is that, the process is less about storing/retrieving information, but more about building a system that can surprise you - the way ideas emerge when you brainstorm with others. These others being people with the same level of knowledge as you - so, not the kind of information flow that happens between an expert and a beginner, but between peers who have access to the same kind of information, but simply look at things differently.

For some reason, every Zettelkasten system out there focuses on the mechanics, and in my opinion, not enabling the original intent of the approach. Not that I have a solution to the problem.

[1] https://daily.scottscheper.com/zettelkasten/

[aftoprokrustes]

I used the Zettelkasten idea for a bit more than a year, and it was truly a joy to use. Unimportant idea get naturally forgotten, while important/relevant ones get reinforced and revisited a lot. Building the links feels like having a deep discussion with a knowledgeable friend, and, once in a while, you get that surprising insight when a note from a book about a completely different topic you forgot you read pops up and sheds a new light on your current reading.

But the main weakness of that system is what makes it so powerful: it is, by nature, extremely time consuming. It is so powerful because, in order to add the smallest note, you need to sift through dozens of them, amend them, thinks about connections, create notes for those connections... In a sense, it is the exact opposite of what the article describe: the system _prevents you_ to just jote a quick note and forget about it. I does make it very powerful as a "second brain", but I ended up finding that the joy and insights I got out were not worth the time investment. I guess this is a reason app builders do not emphasize the process: "get more out of your reading by spending a few more hours per day organizing your thoughts" is not super sexy.

I now see that system as relevant only to people whose _main_ focus is to collect information and extract new insights from them: philosophers, anthropologists, some types of sociologists... But if you just want to remember a blog post about weird CSS tricks, this is probably overkill.

[bluechar]

> In a sense, it is the exact opposite of what the article describe: the system _prevents you_ to just jote a quick note and forget about it

Create daily notes (tied to the day you wrote them) or transient notes (tied to a concept) as scratch areas to quickly dump your thoughts onto the page.

Then return later when you have the time and focus to explicitly process your notes - either discarding daily/transient notes that are no longer interesting, or growing them into evergreen notes with sufficient detail and linking. Make sure it's easy to list all your daily and transient notes in an "inbox".

[theycameback]

> For some reason, every Zettelkasten system out there focuses on the mechanics

Yes. The Zettelkasten system is not equivalent to an unstructured wiki. It's more than just docs with links. I'm no expert, but I think of Zettelkasten as describing a way to work with your collection of notes over time.

Thanks for the link!

[PurpleRamen]

> For some reason, every Zettelkasten system out there focuses on the mechanics, and in my opinion, not enabling the original intent of the approach.

Probably because most people don't learn the intent. Most people don't even seem to understand what a Zettelkasten actually is, and take it for the name of the system. It's a very common problem with most of those systems and tools. GTD and Bullet Journals have the same problems. I think it's because people only learn the culminating result, the system, but not the way that lead to the system and tool, and reasons why the system and tools are the way they are. And then they start the cargo cult and praise the name.