Tag: zettelkasten

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Reading Bob Doto’s recent book on his note making and writing practices, he explained how he uses his Luhmann-style alphanumeric numbering of notes as a way to spot where a richer grouping is emerging as a possible starting point for his writing. It made me ask, how to spot similar patterns in my digital notes without that numbering system?

Alphanumeric numbering

The alphanumeric numbering basically works like this: When you start your notes collection, you number the notes from the very first one. Say you start with your first two notes on two different topics, A and B. For Topic A, the first note you give the number 1. Topic B’s first note 2. Then for each new note, you decide where to place it in the existing collection. If you think it’s connected to Topic A, it may become 1a. A few notes down the line on other topics you may make a note you place in 1b. Then some time later you have a note you want to place directly after 1a. but not after 1b, so you number it 1a1, etc. Key here is that the numbering system doesn’t give a premade structure where you need to slot a new note in an existing hole (unlike library numbering systems). The numbering system merely means you must choose a first place where you place a new note, intentionally making a first connection to an existing note and number it accordingly. For physical note making systems on index cards this is I think basically the only way to do it, if you don’t want to use a predefined structure (and you don’t because structure is emergent from working with your notes, a knowledge output, not an administrative tool), and do want a navigable and explorable system.

Alphanumeric numbering to detect growth in your system

At the other end of his PKM system, where Doto creates writings using the material he collected over time, the alphanumeric system helps him in finding potential things to write about. Topics where there are lots of notes, accumulated over some period of time, will show up as denser parts of his alphanumeric system. Say in Topic B’s number 2 branch above, a year later there are just 1 or 2 new notes. 2.1 and 2.2. That is a signal Topic B wasn’t an interest that gained any depth that year. But say that note number 1a is now a grouping of a dozen notes, 1a1-1 and a further forking set below it, and 1a2 has some, and there’s 1a3 with no further notes attached. Clearly something happened there in the intervening time. Your attention attached a range of notes to that first starting point 1a, and perhaps it means you have something to write there to bring those notes together. It’s like a grape bunch on a vine. Vine 2 hasn’t grown any grapes let alone any bunches of them, but Vine 1a has. And there may be other grape bunches, bigger, smaller, elsewhere. You choose a bunch to make some wine, i.e. inspecting and reflecting on that grouping of notes and then writing.

On not having alphanumeric numbering in my system

My notes are not numbered that way, although they do contain a timestamp. They’re not numbered because I have a digital notes collection, in which it is easy to make links between notes. I add the time stamp both for unique titles (‘Some good summarising title 20241018125808’ is different from ‘Some good summarising title 20020424125820’ despite the same title text) and to glance from the title from which period in my activities something comes. My notes always have a link to another already existing note, like the alphanumeric system, I always intentionally choose a first connection. Without it, it is not really a navigable and explorable system. However, over time or at the time of first writing, I may add additional links from that note to others. It is not always visible which link was the first link, the equivalent of choosing the first position in the alphanumeric system.

On the output side this means I cannot easily spot where the density of my notes has grown to a budding grape bunch. I can see which notes are most heavily connected, using the Obsidian graph, but that’s equivalent to pointing a lot to a main branch, and the more I point to a single note the less meaningful it is, as it becomes more of a generic category essentially.

So what are my options to detect emerging dense spots in my notes?

The alphanumeric grape bunch is basically a group of one or more short or longer lineages originating from a single point somewhere in the total.
Those lineages are present in my notes too, but not easy to spot. Sometimes I make deliberate chains (Note B linking to more abstract concept A, and to more tangible example C, making an A-B-C train of thought), but not often. Lineages would be easier to spot if links in notes had metadata, like the time of linking. This would both show in a note the first link (the first place it was put in), and allow across notes the exploration of the sequence in which notes x, y and z got connected by looking at note creation data and incoming linkages. Links are information objects in their own right, and have different aspects like direction(s), character, intensity, a time dimension and a versioning history, none of which is captured in my system (nor in those of others I saw). Links can also grow into new notes. A link between A and B over time and through reflection deepening in meaning, necessitating its own note to express it with enough atomicity.

Might local graphs help?

The local graph of a note in my Obsidian tool can provide a bit of lineage, by looking at the vicinity of a single note limited to incoming links and set to a depth of 2 or higher. It’s not visually obvious though, it doesn’t jump out. In the following graph (incoming links, depth 2, with ‘Links as information object’ as the branching off point) I colored the different branches. Note that the title for each node/note has a timestamp showing how much time there was between one note and the following added to the lineage. Some notes have the same date, meaning they were written in the more or less the same sitting. Also note that some older notes link to some newer notes, indicating I edited the note to include a new link to a newer note)

What also emerges from this image is that several ‘lineages’ connect further ‘down’. Essentially they create a loop, a circle of notes. There are many more, and I think they are a sign of density (one that alphanumeric numbering doesn’t have), yet like lineages not easy to spot. Two examples are shown below. One circle based on a depth of 2, another with depth 3.

While this type of visualisation isn’t useless, it’s also not obviously useful in this case. Would there be other ways to search for things like “lines longer than 3 notes, with more than 1 branching off point with at least 2 notes depth”.

Do you have ways to spot emerging clusters outside of alphanumeric numbering and graphs in your notes? As a suggestion for your potential next writing?

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In reply to Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output by Chris Aldrich

Even while on hiatus I obviously cannot ignore Chris Aldrich’s call for examples of output creation systems and the actual output created with Zettelkasten style note card systems. For two reasons. One is that I fully agree with him that having such examples publicly visible is important. The other is that I recognise his observations about the singular focus on system design and tweaking often being a timesink precluding outputs (with the loudest voices often being utterly silent on output).

Here’s a first list of outputs from my system, without the receipts though as I’m writing this away from home with limited tools. After the list I’ll make a few general observations as well.

  • I have created 2 or 3 slide decks for client internal and conference presentations from my conceptual notes. First searching for notes on the topic, and the contextual factors of where the slide deck will be used. Then gathering the findings in what I call an ’emergent outline’ (Ahrens calls them speculative outlines). Or perhaps I already have an overview of sorts in the form of an ‘elephant path’ (a map of content, or annotated topical index) which normally help me navigate.
  • I have written blogposts directly from my notes. This is now easier than before, since earlier this year I created a way of publishing to this site from my internal notes. This allows me to write in a note, linking internally or including, all within the notes environment and then push the result out to the website.
  • I created some new personal insights from new connections within my notes. Not sure if that counts towards Chris’ definition of outputs. This results in new notes where the edge, i.e. the newly found link between two notions, gets expressed as a note in its own right. The first such connection (between my notions of Maker Households and Networked Agency) happened when I was about 35 notes ‘in’.
  • For a recent panel at a conference I collated my talking points from my notes
  • I use my notes a lot in work conversations, pulling up concepts as needed. I used to do this to pull up facts and earlier meeting notes with the same participants. Now I also use this to provide richer input into the conversations themselves, including pointing to sources and references. This emerged during the many video calls in the pandemic lockdowns, where it was easy to pull up additional material on one of my screens. Now that I have more meetings in person again, I find I still do this automatically. Whatever material I mention I also link in my own meeting notes. This has been remarked upon by conversation partners as a valuable thing.
  • I have some elephant paths I regard as output in their own right. One currently important to me is the Practices elephant path. It gives an overview of things I want to approach as a practice (which I place somewhere on the spectrum between habit/routine on one end and literacy (in the Rheingoldian sense of skill plus community) on the other end. Practices are the sweet spot to me for (groups of) knowledge workers to implement fields of theory in their own daily work
  • I maintain a client website directly from my notes on EU digital and data legislation. I have conceptual notes for all the regulations involved and maintain summaries alongside them. Those summary notes are automatically synced to GitHub and then published on Github pages as well as the client’s own domain. These same summaries also serve as outline and text for my frequent presentations on this subject, where the slidedeck is kept up to date from the notes that I am certain are always up to date because they are the notes I work with daily.

Some other observations:

What constitutes output? The ‘Luhmann had 90k notes and wrote 70 books’ mantra makes for a rather daunting benchmark to be compared against. I propose we count outputs that have utility to its creator. For me then there are two types of outputs from my notes. A group that is the result of better project tracking, allowing me to pick up where I previously left of, which is a valuable ratcheting effect. Me building my own micropub tools resulted from such ratcheting in 15 minute increments. This group of outputs results from notes, but not the conceptual notes of my ‘Garden of the Forking Paths’ (ie my Zettelkasten style collection). The other group results from re-using and re-arranging the material in my ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ and the example outputs listed above follow from it. In a sense all my work is an output of my notes and my experience, and my tools have always been aiding in my work. Yet there is a qualitative difference.

I have used notes based PKM for over two decades, and in hindsight it was mostly focused on reporting conversations, project stuff, conversations with myself, and many many examples of things I thought relevant. Those I would tag extensively, and I think most of those historic tags would now be their own conceptual notes, expressing the communality of the tagged examples and material, or expressing the link/edge between two or three of the tagged source notes as a notion.

Many of my conceptual notes (now 1000+) and ideas plus non-conceptual atomic notes (another 500 or so) stem from ‘atomising’ my archive of blogposts, and my presentations of the last 10-15 years. Many notes are thus created from earlier outputs themselves.

I recognise what Stephen Downes remarked, that creating the notes is the valuable part towards pattern recognition, and making output needs further gathering of new material. In part this is because adding things to my notes is aiding memory. Once it’s noted it’s no longer novel, and in that sense looses part of the surprisal (informational worth) that led to its creation in the first place. If outputs in my own mind need to be novel, then my notes are limited in value. (This goes back to earlier conversations of the 90% is crap heuristic which I see as feeding impostor syndrom. Outputs imo highly connected to impostor syndrom.

I don’t think I have actual established processes for outputs yet, I’d like to, and I don’t yet feel outputs created suggest as-effective-as-can-be processes yet. Maybe that is because I have not been really tracking such outputs and how I created them. I have become better at starting anything with interrogating my notes first, and putting them together, before starting exploration further afield. Often I find I already have some useful things, which gives a headstart in exploring anything new: there’s something to connect new findings to.

I do not think my current notes could yield something along the lines of a book, other than the nonsense kind of a single idea padded out with anecdotes. I also feel the method of information collection isn’t good enough to base any work on academically. This goes back to the earlier remark as to what qualifies as output of good enough quality.

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After writing 700 Notions I see a pattern emerge w.r.t short, ‘right’ and long ones

Then last week I came across this click-baity posting by Tim Denning, advocating max 200-word posts to reach ‘virality’, while reflecting on my blogwriting pace. Checking the length of my Notions, I looked at the ones that feel just right. Those are around the 200 mark. I suppose they are bite sized enough to not have to make a ‘mental summary’ during reading.

I also looked at other Notions:
Shorter ones are not developed enough, basically stubs.
Longer Notions are mostly not edited enough, either there are multiple notions packed into one, or I’m unclear in my formulation or understanding or both.
The ‘right’ ones fit much better into emergent outlines, where I collate several Notions.

I started calling the optimal notion length ‘Notion Mass Index’, and an NMI of 200 seems a healthy one. (This blogpost has 194 words, the Notion it is based on has 177.)

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This morning I watched parts of Andy Matuschak’s stream that shows him working on processing his thoughts and notes from a book he read.
It’s about 100 minutes of seeing him making notes….

There is much value in getting an insight in how other people actually do their work (the master-apprentice model is important for a reason), and it is not often you get to see how knowledge workers organise and do the things they do. It’s why I e.g. documented the way I currently use Obsidian for my PKM system. As a resource for my future self, and as a way to offer others a glimpse so they may take some part of it that fits with their own practices.

Andy Matuschak basically took the idea of live streaming your gaming adventures, to live stream a note taking session. And it’s highly fascinating. Because it shows it is actual work that takes time and energy, digesting a book, following lines of thought, doubling back, referencing earlier material, looking things up in the book in question etc. Also of interest is he is focusing on the tensions that what he read causes with other things he knows and has read. He’s not just lifting things out that chime with him, but the things that cause friction. Because in that friction lies the potential of learning.

I had come across this video earlier already this summer, and then only watched the first few minutes. Then I was expecting something else, that the video would show his set-up. I didn’t have time to watch someone go through their actual process. Now I re-encountered it in a different context and the video made much more sense this time 🙂

Browsing through Andy Matuschak’s public Digital Garden is also interesting to do.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. it makes linking between notes (or future links) as simple as writing their filenames, which is supported by forward search while you’re typing.
  4. 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 WordPress 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

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Screenshot of my current digital garden

The blogpost I posted earlier today, on cities as a source of inspiration, is the first one that fully came from stringing some of my notes together. An earlier posting, a meta one about note taking, was based on notes, but this one is basically just putting notes together, and writing a few sentences to make them flow over into each other. With a twist though. Because the notes used as a basis are already in full text form (although mostly in Dutch), there wasn’t much writing involved in bringing the point across I started out with. In the end that freed up time that was then used to write additional things, ending up in a conclusion that wasn’t part of the source notes, but in itself ended up as new content for those notes. It think that is a nice example of writing/blogging as thinking out loud.

The source notes themselves were created last week. And while creating them I noticed for the first time that the notes in the Garden of the Forking Paths, form a thinking tool, not a collection, a garden, not a back yard. I started out with just making one or two notes on cities, and while thinking how it connected to other notions already in there, additional patterns stood out to me. Additionally I couldn’t remember where I got some of the notions (e.g. cities being efficient, cities being crossroads), and that had me searching for the literature I got it from in the first place adding them to my reference library (in Zotero), which in turn teased out additional patterns ending up in notes. Feedback happening, in short. At first it bothered me that what I was doing (‘making just one or two notes on cities’) took much longer than expected, but then I realised it was an effect I intended to create, and that thinking takes time. That it took me beyond those one or two notes, but not in a yak-shaving kind of way, but as an act of creation.

Both those effects, new things rising because of writing about existing ones, and spending time thinking to be able to create, are most welcome ones.

As I write this, I realise I’ve developed a dislike for the word ‘notes’ in the past weeks to describe the plantings in my digital garden, as it invokes primary/raw note taking mostly. Maybe I should call them ‘notions’ instead. My Garden of the Forking Paths now has 234 ‘notions’, and another batch that size of ‘notes’ outside it, but somewhat interlinked with it (think day logs, tickler files, ideas, raw notes, thoughts and snippets for projects). That second batch basically is a folder structure similar to my existing Evernote notebooks.


The wiki I used to take both primary and secondary notes in, in 2006. It was wikkawiki which I ran locally on my laptop, with the css adapted to that of my then employer.