10 reactions on “Zettelkasten and Threading Cards”

1. Have you seen roam? They claim to have zettlecasting as a core principle and I’ve enjoyed playing with it so far…

   https://roamresearch.com/

   • I was coming here to mention Roam as well 😉

     Also, depending on what you use Evernote for, the open source Joplin might work for you https://joplinapp.org/

2. You should have a look at Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/).

3. I actually also stumbled upon Roam by accident yesterday. It looks interesting, and (more importantly) offers note export to Markdown or JSON. As they put it:

   “Roam is pretty similar to tree based online tools like Workflowy or Dynalist — but it is specifically designed to help you connect thoughts together and group together related bits of information– without copy/pasting or trying to remember where you put things all the time.”

   Joplin doesn’t have the connecting links feature, it seems. But Joplin:
   – is open source,
   – supports importing Evernote .enex files,
   – stores notes in Markdown,
   – E2E encryption (option?),
   – Sync via Nextcloud and WebDAV (and Dropbox and OneDrive)
   – already offers apps fo different platforms.

   Interesting. 🙂

   • > Joplin doesn’t have the connecting links feature

     It doesn’t have wiki style auto links but you can copy and paste a unique note link which actually is a GUID.

4. This Article was mentioned on roel.io

5. Yesterday I participated in, or more accurately listened in on, a IndieWeb conversation on wikis and their relationship to blogs (session notes).
   I didn’t feel like saying much so kept quiet, other than at the start during a (too long) intro round where I described how I’ve looked at and used wiki personally in the past. That past is almost as long as this blog is old. Blogs and wikis were to me the original social software tools.

   Between 2004 and 2010 I kept a wiki as the main screen on my desktop, sort of like how I used The Brain in years before that. In it I kept conversation notes, kept track of who’s who in the projects I worked on etc. This after a gap in turn got replaced by Evernote in 201210
   Between 2004 and 2013 I had a public wiki alongside this blog (first WakkaWiki, then WikkaWiki). In those years at one or two points I recreated it from scratch after particular intensive waves of automated spam and vandalism
   Between 2004 and 2010 I had a wiki covering all the BlogWalk Salons I co-organised from 2004-2008
   I had a script that let me crosspost from this blog to the wiki alongside it, so I could potentially rework it there. I don’t think that happened much really.
   At one point I glued blogs, wiki and forum software together as a ‘Patchwork Portal‘ for a group I worked with. Elmine and presented about this together on BlogTalk Reloaded in 2006, showing the co-evolution of a budding community of practice and the patchwork portal as the group’s toolset. Afterwards it was used for a while in a ‘wiki on a stick’ project for education material by one of the group’s members.
   Two years ago I re-added a wiki style section of sorts to this blog. As I’m the only one editing anyway, I simply use WordPress pages, as when I’m logged in everything has an edit button already. The purpose is to have a place for more static content, so I can refer to notions or overviews more easily, and don’t need to provide people with a range of various blogposts and let them dig out my meaning by themselves. In practice it is a rather empty wiki, consisting mostly of lists of blogposts, much less of content. A plus is that Webmentions work on my pages too, so bidirectional links between my and someone else’s blog and my wiki are easy.
   With clients and colleagues over the years I’ve used Atlassian as a collaborative tool, and once created a wiki for a client that contained their organisation’s glossary. Current items were not editable, but showed sections directly below that which were. Colleagues could add remarks, examples and propose new terms, and from that periodically the glossary would be changed.
   Stock versus flow, gardening and streamsNeil Mather, who has a really intriguing wiki as commonplace book since last fall, mentioned he writes ‘stream first’. This stock (wiki) and flow (blog) perspective is an important one in personal knowledge management. Zettelkasten tools and e.g. Tiddlywiki focus on singular thoughts, crumbs of content as building block, and as such fall somewhere in between that stock and flow notion, as blogging is often a river of these crumbs (bookmarks, likes, an image, a quote etc.) Others mentioned that they blogged as a result of working in their wiki, so the flow originated in the stock. This likely fits when blog posts are articles more than short posts. One of the participants said his blog used to show the things from his wiki he marked as public (which is the flip side of how I used to push blog posts to the wiki if they were marked ‘wikify’).
   Another participant mentioned she thinks of blogs as having a ‘first published’ date, and wiki items a ‘last edited’ date. This was a useful remark to me, as that last edited date in combination with e.g. tags or topics, provides a good way to figure out where gardening might be in order.
   Ultimately blogs and wikis are not either stock or flow to me but can do both. Wikis also create streams, through recent changes feeds etc. Over the years I had many RSS feeds in my reader alerting me to changes in wikis. I feel both hemmed in by how my blog in its setup puts flow above stock, and how a wiki assumes stock more than flow. But that can all be altered. In the end it’s all just a database, putting different emphasis on different pivots for navigation and exploration.
   Capturing crumbs, Zettelkasten
   I often struggle with the assumed path of small elements to slightly more reworked content to articles. It smacks of the DIKW pyramid which has no theoretical or practical merit in my eyes. Starting from small crumbs doesn’t work for me as most thoughts are not crumbs but rather like Gestalts. Not that stuff is born from my mind as a fully grown and armed Athena, but notes, ideas and thoughts are mostly not a single thing but a constellation of notions, examples, existing connections and intuited connections. In those constellations, the connections and relations are a key piece for me to express. In wiki those connections are links, but while still key, they are less tangible, not treated as actual content and not annotated. Teasing out the crumbs of such a constellation routinely constitutes a lot of overhead I feel, and to me the primary interest is in those small or big constellations, not the crumbs. The only exception to this is having a way of visualising links between crumbs, based on how wiki pages link to each other, because such visualisations may point to novel constellations for me, emerging from the collection and jumble of stuff in the wiki. That I think is powerful.
   Personal and public material
   During the conversation I realised that I don’t really have a clear mental image of my wiki section. I refer to it as my personal wiki, but my imagined readership does not include me and only consists of ‘others’. I think that is precisely what feels off with it.
   I run a webserver on my laptop, and on it I have a locally hosted blog where very infrequently I write some personal stuff (e.g. I kept a log there in the final weeks of my father’s life) or stream of consciousness style stuff. In my still never meaningfully acted upon notion of leaving Evernote a personal blog/wiki combo for note taking, bookmarking etc might be useful. Also for logging things. One of the remarks that got my interest was the notion of starting a daily note in which over the course of the day you log stuff, and that is then available to later mine for additional expansion, linking and branching off more wiki-items.
   A question that came up for me, musing about the conversation is what it is I am trying to automate or reduce friction for? If I am trying to automate curation (getting from crumbs to articles automagically) then that would be undesirable. Only I should curate, as it is my learning and agency that is involved. Having sensemaking aids that surface patterns, visualise links etc would be very helpful. Also in terms of timelines, and in terms of shifting vocabulary (tags) for similar content.
   First follow-ups

   I think I need to return to my 2005 thinking about information strategies, specifically at the collecting, filtering stage and the actions that result from it. and look again at how my blog and wiki can play a bigger role for currently underveloped steps.
   Playing more purposefully with how I tie the local blog on my laptop to the publlic one sounds like a good experiment.
   Using logging as a starting point for personal notetaking is an easy experiment to start (I see various other obvious starting points, such as bookmarks or conversations that play that role in my Evernotes currently). Logging also is a good notion for things like the garden and other stuff around the home. I remember how my grandmother kept daily notes about various things, groceries bought, deliveries received, harvest brought in. Her cupboard full of notebooks as a corpus likely would have been a socio-economic research treasure

6. I’ve been exploring my note taking, trying to shape it as a more deliberate practice. As part of that exploration I’ve been reading Sönke Ahrens ‘How to take smart notes’ on Luhmann‘s Zettelkasten (now digitised). More later on that book. What stands out in all things I find about note taking is the importance of taking time to process. Going through notes iteratively, at least once after you created them first.
   My own main issue with a lot of the stuff I collect, is just that, it’s a collection. They’re not notes, so the collection mostly never gets used. Of course I also have a heap of written notes, from conversations, presentations I attended etc. There too a second step is missing, that of going through it to really digest it and lift the things out that are of interest to myself and taking note of that. Putting it into the context of the things I’m interested in. The thing I regularly do is marking elements in notes I took afterwards (e.g. marking them as an idea, an action, or something to blog), but that is not lifting them out of the original notes into a place and form where they might get re-used. Ahrens/Luhmann suggest to daily take time for a first step of processing rough notes (the thinking about the notes and capturing the results). Tiago Forte describes a process of progressive summarisation, every time you happen to go back to something you captured (often other’s content), for up to 4 iterations.
   There are different steps to shape in such a process. There is how material gets collected / ends up in my inbox, and there’s the second stage of capturing things from it.
   I started with looking at reading non-fiction books. With my new e-ink reader, it is easy to export any notes / markings I make in or alongside a book. Zotero is a good tool to capture bibliographic references, and allows me to add those exported notes easily. This covers the first step of getting material in a place I can process it.
   The second step, creating notes based on me digesting my reading, I’m now experimenting which form that should take. There are several note apps that might be useful, but some assume too much about the usage process, which is a form of lock-in itself, or store it in a way that might create a hurdle further down the line. So, to get a feel for how I want to make those notes I am first doing it in tools I already use, to see how that feels in terms of low barrier to entry and low friction while doing it. Those two tools are a) Evernote (yes I know, I want to ditch Evernote, but using it now is a way of seeing what is process friction, what is tool friction), and b) my local WordPress instance, that basically works as a Wiki for me. I’m adding key board shortcuts using TextExpander to help easily adding structure to my notes. I’ll do that for a few days to be able to compare.
   I made 7 note cards in the past 2 days, and as the number grows, it will get easier to build links between them, threading them, which is part of what I want to experience.

7. I’ve been using Obsidian a little over 100 days now. So, with over three months of daily use it’s good to review the experience. I will do this in some detail, and it will span several blogposts. To explain both the evolution over time, as well as how I currently work with Obsidian in practice in a more detailed way, as Frank (rightly!) requested.
   My system leads the use of tools
   First off, a key point to make. I am using a system for myself to plan and do my work, maintain lots of things in parallel, and keep notes. That system consists of several interlocking methods, and those methods are supported by various tools. What I describe in my review of 100 days of using Obsidian, is not about Obsidian’s functionality per se, but more about how the functionality and affordances of Obsidian fit with my system and the methods in that system. With a better fit with my system and methods, I can reduce friction in my methods, and reduce the number of tools I need to use in support of those methods. At the same time, the use of a new tool like Obsidian influences the practical application of methods, it creates a different daily practice. Those shifts are of interest as well.
   What I started with
   The image below shows you how my overall system of work and taking in information looks. It’s a personal knowledge management system, that both takes care of the networked nature of making sense of new information and evolving interests, as well as the more hierarchical nature of working on projects and executing tasks. Both start with my general notion of where I want to be headed (‘goals’).

   I used different tools for different parts of that image:

   Excel (orange) for: listing goals (3-10 yrs out), the 3 month planning cycle I keep (along the lines of ’12 week year’), the habits I want to maintain or introduce, and tracking of those habits and project progress/fulfillment.
   Things (red) for: areas of my life I’m active in, projects within those areas, and tasks in those projects.
   WordPress (darkblue) for: daily logs (which I started keeping end of April this year, on an internal WP instance), week logs (internal draft blogposting), and of course for public blogging itself.
   Evernote (blue) for: a list of all my current interests/favourite topics, all types of note taking, related to my work/projects and my information diet.
   Other tools (grey) come into play for feedreading (Readkit), blocking time (Nextcloud calendar in Thunderbird), book reading (Kindle, Nova2), keeping references (Zotero since June, Evernote before that)
   While evaluating my system, I tried Obsidian
   In the spring I had started evaluating my system. I found I was not keeping up several parts of it, had fallen out of practice with a number of elements, and had changed some of my practices without adapting the flow in my tools. It had therefore suffered in its usefulness. Being at home because of the pandemic allowed me to allocate some time to take a better look, and to start testing some changes. On the tool side of that evaluation, I want to get rid of Evernote (as a silo and single point of failure) since some years.
   One change in my system I was experimenting with, was keeping better atomic notes about the core concepts and key elements in how I work. Late last year I thought a bit about atomic notes, i.e. cards with individual snippets, and bringing those collections of snippets and the process of curating them and threading them into e.g. a blogpost or a line of argumentation. In January I came across Zettelkasten and took a closer look, in the spring I read a book about Zettelkasten and knew I wanted to adopt parts of it into my system (linking notes first and foremost, and storing references in a better way). That’s when I started using Zotero to keep references, and stopped doing that in Evernote (Zotero can take website snapshots and store them locally, something I used Evernote for a lot. On top of it if you give Zotero a reference it will find and store a PDF of a scientific article, very useful to read more deeply).
   I started to keep atomic notes, sometimes called ‘evergreen notes’ which I to myself now call Notions, capturing concepts from my work (so not work related notes, but conceptual notes) first in both WordPress and Evernote simultaneously. WordPress (a local instance on my laptop, not online) because I already used it for day logs since April, and it allows relatively easy linking, and Evernote because it is much easier to keep notes there than WP, but linking in Evernote is much harder. I also played with some note taking tools, and that’s when I came across Obsidian. It immediately felt comfortable to use it.
   How after 100 days Obsidian has covered my system
   After over 100 days of Obsidian my use of it has expanded to include a much larger part of my system. Along the way it made my use within that system of Things, Evernote and almost Excel obsolete. It also means I sharpened my system and practice of using it again. This is how the tool use within my system, with the use of Obsidian in green, now looks

   Obsidian now contains some 1200 mark down files. 500 are Notions, atomic notes almost exclusively about my own concepts and other core concepts in my work, in my own words. Mostly taken from my own blogposts, reports, and presentations over the years. The other 700 are some 115 day log / week log / month maps, about 100 proto-notions and notes that contain conceptual info to keep from other sources, and some 500 work and project related notes from conversations and work in progress. This sounds as a very quantitative take, and it is. I have in the past months definitely focused on the volume of ‘production’, to ensure I could quickly experience whether the tool helped me as intended. I think that monitoring the pace of production, which I’ve done in the past months, will no longer be relevant by the end of this year. I used the quantity as a lead indicator basically, but have been on the lookout for the lag indicators: is building a collection of linked notes leading to new connections, to more easily creating output like blogposts and presentations, having concepts concisely worded at hand in conversations to re-use? And it did. One very important thing, central to the Zettelkasten method, I haven’t really tried yet however, which is to use the current collection as a thinking tool. Because I was more focused on creating notions first.
   On Obsidian as a tool
   There are four things in Obsidian that are to me key affordances:

   it is a viewer/editor, a fancy viewer/editor, on top of plain markdown text files on my laptop. It builds its own local database to keep track of links between notes. Whatever happens to Obsidian, my data is always available.It being ‘just’ a viewer is important because Obsidian is not open source and won’t be. There is a potential open source alternative, Foam, but that tool is not yet developed enough.
   being ‘just’ an editor means using regular text files, it feels like coming full circle, as I have for the most part been note taking in simple text files since the late ’80s. Textfiles always had my preference, as they’re fast and easy to create, but it needed a way to connect them, add tags etc., and that was always the sticking point. It means text files are available outside of Obsidian. This allows me to access and manipulate notes from outside Obsidian without issue, and I do (e.g. on mobile, but also with other software on my laptop such as Tinderbox that I used for the images in this post).
   it makes linking between notes (or future links) as simple as writing their filenames, which is supported by forward search while you’re typing.
   it shows graphs of your note network, which to me is useful especially for 2 steps around a note you’re working on.
   I use Obsidian as simple as possible; I do not use plugins that are supposed to help you create notes (e.g. the existing Zettelkasten and Day log plugin), because they make assumptions about how to create notes (how to name them, which links to create in them). I created my own workflow for creating notes to avoid functionality lock-in in Obsidian: day logs are created manually by keyboard shortcuts using Alfred (previously TextExpander), as are the timestamps I use to create unique file names for notes.
   Timeline of three months of Obsidian use
   Below is a timeline of steps taken in the past months, which gives you an impression of how my use of Obsidian in support of my system has evolved.
   November 2019 I discuss the concept of cards (i.e. atomic notes), curation and writing output
   January 2020 I first looked at the Zettelkasten method and some tools suggested for it. I mention the value of linking notes (possible in Evernote, but high friction to do)
   May 2020, read the book about Zettelkasten by Sönke Ahrens, adopted Zotero as a consequence.
   7 July started with deliberately making Zettelkasten style atomic notes in WordPres en Evernote in parallel, to move away from collecting as dumping stuff in your back yard. Atomic notes only concerning my concepts in my work.
   8 July started using Obsidian, after having just started creating ‘evergreen’ notes
   15 July having made 35 atomic notes, I make a new association between two of them for the first time.
   28 July I’m at 140 conceptual notes. I named the collection Garden of the Forking Paths. I switched my digital tickler files (a part of the GTD method) from Evernote to Obsidian. I had stopped using them, but now it felt normal again to use them. The post I wrote about this, was made from atomic notes I already had made beforehand.
   5 August I find I haven’t used WordPress anymore for my day logs ever since starting with Obsidian, and that I also added week logs (an automatic collation of day logs), and monthmaps (a mindmap at the start of the month listing key upcoming things and potential barriers). My Evernote use dropped to 4 notes in 4 weeks, whereas it was 47 the 4 weeks before it. After almost a month of Obsidian, I am getting more convinced that I am on a path of ditching Evernote.
   12 August I renamed my ‘evergreen’ notes, that contain my concepts mostly, to Notions, as the generic word notes doesn’t make a distinction in the character of some the things I’m putting into notes.
   12 August I write a first long form blogpost made from Notions
   13 August Added Nextcloud synchronisation of the note files, allowing mobile viewing and editing of notes
   31 August I keep track of tasks in Obsidian and drop Things. There was a time I always did such things in straightforward text files. Being able to do so again but now with a much better way of viewing and navigating such text files and the connections between them, makes it easy to ‘revert’ to my old ways so to speak.
   13 September I am at 300 Notions. These first 300 notions are mostly my notions, the things that are core to my thinking about my own work, and the things I internalised over the past 25 years or so, of doing that work. I expect that going forward other people’s ideas and notions will become more important in my collection.
   13 September I describe how I make notions and notes
   September / October I increasingly use my conceptual Notions as reference while in (online) conversations.
   5 October I gave a client presentation (about the Dutch system of base registers) pulled together completely from existing Notions.
   7 October added a ‘decision log’ to my note keeping.
   16 October 100 days in Obsidian, 500 Notions and about 700 other types of notes.
   16 October reinstated a thorough Weekly Review (a component of GTD) into my system.
   21 October I gave a brief presentation Ethics as a Practice, the second this month pulled together from existing notes.
   This all as a first post looking back on 100 days of Obsidian.
   Part 2: Hierarchy and Logs
   Part 3: Task management
   Part 4: Writing connected Notions, Ideas, and Notes
   Part 5: Flow using workspaces
   Part 6: Obsidian development vs my usage

8. This page lists some things on Personal Knowledge Management. In 2020 I’m mostly focused on processing material collected through my information strategies.
   For now therefore I’m just listing some of the things I wrote recently about note taking.

   Current description of my system

   Hierarchical folder structure for Areas and Projects, description of day, week and monthlogs
   How I do task management

   Making notes and notions
   How I make ‘notions’ my permanent notes
   My 300th Notion

   Planting the Garden of Forking Paths, a bit more about the note taking process
   Second order notes, Zettelkasten
   Wiki, Blogs, Note taking
   Threading Cards and Zettelkasten
   Threading Cards

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