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Schmiddi recently wrote about their experience with keeping a zettelkasten and evaluates how useful it has been to them so far. Recently, I have been adding and editing dozens of zettels to my kasten daily as I digest a massive amount of in-depth reading for a class I am teaching next semester. During this process I have been thinking a lot about how much I appreciate this method, so I thought I would share my two cents about the potential utility of a zettelkasten and how to get the most out of it.
Schmiddi: When does a Zettelkasten become useful?
In a nut shell, Schmiddi tells us that they have accumulated a fair number of zettels, but feels that, while the zettelkasten has been somewhat useful, they are not getting as much out of it as they could. Schmiddi admits that this is probably due to having deviated from the zettelkasten method in their actual implementation. Based on the content of the post, I would agree!
Schmiddi summarizes their implementations as so:
I emphasize on collecting the information in a way I understand and is easy to search instead of linking the notes to create new ideas. Maybe the word "wiki" might be closer to what I am doing, but as I was starting off with the idea of creating a Zettelkasten, this word has stuck for now.
I think you are right that this resembles a "wiki" more. (I know that the word wiki is used loosely nowadays, but I still think of it as a knowledgebase that anyone can freely contribute to. For lack of a better word, I will just keep using the word wiki in this post.) Before I started using a Zettelkasten, I was trying to take notes in a wiki, but it became very cumbersome. So much thought and energy went into organizing and maintaining a sensible structure that it became kind of unwieldy and was ultimately not very flexible. It was sufficient for reference, as it seems Schmiddi has also discovered, but I needed more flexibility, because so much of thought is more an act of wondering than it is recalling facts.
It seems to me that one reason people will tend to impose structure in a zettelkasten-like system is that they are digesting information that is already structured. It seems like it would make sense to replicate that structure---that it would be useful---especially, as Schmiddi suggests, if the point of the lecture you are attending is for students to replicate its contents. The other reason I find is that people don't fully trust their tools, or their tools are cumbersome enough to inhibit a freer interaction with the zettelkasten, so it feels like structure is necessary to access or retrieve all the information it contains. I will comment on the former first, because it is something I have thought about working in the field of educational philosophy.
If it is true that your classes are lectures which evaluate you on your ability to either recognize or recall the content of the course, then that is very unfortunate. I know that this is, of course, not unusual! However, even if this is the case, LEARNING is not the acquisition of facts or information merely. Schmiddi feels that "lectures do not really need for the student to discover new ideas," but isn't it true that attending the lecture presupposes that the ideas it introduces ARE new ideas to you? It is also true that you encounter those ideas through a unique frame of reference that is your unique experience, including your history, your desires, your dreams, your ignorance, bias, etc. It is also true that grasping a new idea changes your view of the world, your very experience of it, and the things you already know in some small (or big) way. Thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are prospective---they are always a reaching out, a wondering. They always contain something unknowable; some ambiguity and uncertainty because that is how the world and our experience fundamentally are. This is where the momentum of life and action and learning derives.
The point I am trying to make is, thought contains more than the facts or information it is handling. In other words, there is no inherent structure to thoughts. Even the coldest and hardest of facts is not THOUGHT ABOUT uniformly by virtue of its being THAT fact. It does not wear its meaning on its face. Understanding is possible because of associations among thoughts---through reference to an assumed, sense-giving background.
If the zettelkasten method has any value and utility, it is for its ability to facilitate active THOUGHT; actively associating and organizing ideas with respect to their PERCEIVED MEANINGS. In other words, it may sometimes make sense to preserve some logical structure among ideas (such as when that logical structure is inherent to their meaning: eg., Maslow's hierarchy of needs), but generally speaking, the structure of the zettelkasten itself should derive through the process of thinking about these ideas. A zettelkasten will contain facts and information and facilitate their reference and retrieval, but how much more valuable or useful is a zettelkasten over the materials it sources if it is just a replica of their content and structure? Why not just reference the texts directly then? A course and its materials are organized to (hopefully) clearly communicate ideas. But what for? For students to privately replicate those sources? Or for students to think about it and understand it for themselves? And then what is that understanding for after all? Even if a course does not require you to really understand (because it is definitely possible to score well on an exam without really grasping the ideas), it is still worth making an effort to make sense of its content meaningfully. Nobody recalls everything they ever learned, and no amount of note-taking can change that. Our minds are meant to forget things. A zettelkasten will help you develop and sustain an understanding because (if you keep interacting with it) those thoughts will continue to interact with things you learn later rather than being isolated to a folder or notebook you may never open. This is something I wish I had known when I was starting college!
Of course, for it to work, you have to work with it. Which brings me to the second point: that your tools and implementation are important. I am not sure what Schmiddi is using to implement their zettelkasten, but it doesn't take much, really. Using the tools already available on your system should suffice for searching through and browsing your kasten; grep, find, vim, etc. Having a convenient interface is, in my opinion, very helpful because it reduces the amount of time and energy needed to handle different tasks when working with your zettelkasten. Also, formatting your zettels in a way that makes them searchable and accessible through different methods makes it easier to work with it, especially when it gets large.
I ended up just making my own neovim plugin so that I could implement a lot of convenience functions, such as finding all backlinks to a given zettel, finding broken links, finding zettels with no links, inserting a link, making a new zettel from a template etc. It also just makes it easier for me to use it because vim is the most used program on my computer! I feel at home in my zettelkasten as a result, which makes it easier to trust my system. In addition to the convenience functions I wrote, I just use vim's builtin functionality to navigate, search, and perform bulk actions on zettels. This makes sense for me, but of course everyone has their own preference.
Regardless of what you actually use for a zettelkasten, I think there are some sane practices that will improve your quality of life.
First, just have all the zettels in one folder without subfolders and leave all the organization to links and tags. Another aspect of this is that your notes really should be "atomic." But don't worry if it is big, maybe it just needs to be. If you ever feel like you would like to link to one part of a zettel, then maybe then it's worth breaking that part out into its own thing.
Second, use tags gratuitously. There is really no harm in tagging your zettels with a bunch of tags that make sense to you. I wouldn't go out of your way to excessively tag everything for the sake of having a bunch of tags, but as you go along don't shy away from tagging things with different schemes. For example, all of the zettels I am writing as I prepare for my autumn semester class I have tagged with the name of that course. This makes it easy to just find all of the zettels I have created during this sprint should I need to do that someday. As your zettelkasten grows, you will not always know exactly where to access some obscure piece of information, even if you do impose a wiki-like structure! Tags are helpful, because you can browse zettels by tag and likely come across what you are looking for, especially if you use something like fzf to fuzzy sort through the results.
Third, browse your zettelkasten and make connections regularly or as you add zettels. The point is not to have a "logical" structure anyone can follow, but to integrate all these ideas such that when you do want to retrieve some obscure zettel you will likely find it because THE STRUCTURE OF THE KASTEN HAS GROWN OUT OF YOUR OWN THOUGHT PROCESSES! Not only that, but as you browse around the kasten you will happen upon connections that may raise other questions and lead into new insights or rabbit holes that yield even more knowledge on a topic (or a related one).
Fourth, ask questions in your kasten! I think when you are digesting a lot of pre-structured material it can feel like you are transcribing stuff into your little zettel format and filing it away. But as you go along, questions naturally arise, or ideas, or even your own theories. I find it helpful to add these as their own zettels and link them to related ideas. If the question becomes answered, it may just become its own zettel, or it may become the kernel of a whole outgrowth of inquiries. For example, as I was preparing for my class, I made a zettel about the aristocratic bias of ancient Greek educational theory and practice. I don't really know how it occurred to me---it was just a vague thought based on different things I have read over the years, but something I couldn't really pin down. But as I kept reading and collecting different zettels, the idea started to flesh itself out, simply by linking to and from related zettels that support that idea.
Finally, allow zettels to change. As I write, some zettels will get unwieldy and I will break them up into separate zettels and link to them. The original zettel then becomes mostly an index. This is why keeping all your stuff in one folder is helpful---these changes won't break your system!!!!! Things are free to move and become totally different zettels if that is their fate.
Schmiddi says that they have accumulated 240 zettel (is zettel the proper plural form in German?). That is not a small number. It may seem like you need to have thousands or something before you hit critical mass and it starts to really pay off, but I don't think so. I really think it all comes down to just interacting with the zettelkasten: browsing through it, changing things, making connections, asking questions, checking your understanding, etc. If you feel like you have a rigid structure that you want to loosen, I would suggest accessing your zettel at random instead of approaching them through the structure you may have imposed. Connections may become more obvious when you are not encountering the ideas in the routine, familiar way. Another thing is to try and explain some of the ideas in your kasten to see how it serves you in discussing the topics. You may find that when you want to explain something to others using your zettelkasten that you become aware of other things that require explaining that are not residing in your kasten already. These usually have to do with your own taken-for-granted assumptions and background understanding. It's a good thing to probe that! Not only for the sake of explaining things, but for further questioning your own predispositions and verifying your own understanding. Another strategy would be to just start adding stuff totally unrelated to what you have. Most of my kasten has academic stuff, but it also contains a lot of practical stuff like zettels about first aid that I wanted to remember.
I am happy to hear that Schmiddi will keep at the zettelkasten. 240 zettels is evidence of A LOT of thought. There is a lot to work with and build off of there, and I think if they keep enjoying the process that they will be very grateful later that they did. God, I wish I had known about zettelkasten when I was undergrad. Now I just have piles of notebooks and the daunting task of going through them all to redigest that information and follow through with some of the ideas they contain.
I am also just glad to see other folks doing the zettelkasten thing here :) My inbox is always open to anyone who wants to nerd out about zettelkasten or learning! Maybe when I get a chance I will post my neovim plugin to a public repo so folks can get some ideas about the kind of tooling they can make for themselves. Of course, you could use my plugin yourself, but then you would be at the mercy of my design decisions. It is built around gemtext, so maybe folks here would actually feel at home with it.
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