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by aftoprokrustes
1118 days ago
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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. |
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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".