Themed logs are still more useful than daily notes<br /> by [[Eleanor Konik]]<br /> accessed on 2025-08-18T09:19:49

On ordering notes in particular ways. Presumably search and indexing are the important factors here, but potentially also has something to say about context and the immediacy of neighborhoods.

Personal preference may be the biggest determination.

She focuses on where she'll search for things rather than indexing them where they start and then searching and concatenating them later (or digitally).

She uses the "everything has it's place" idea to commonplace more traditionally (or at least in an Obsidian digital context).

She also tangentially touches on the idea of where to place the work when taking notes. Toss it into a pile or deal with it now and the work it may take to clean up later.

Some interesting and potentially useful idiosyncratic evidence here, but nothing new or earth shattering.

🌲When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes by [[Eleanor Konik]]

Konik seems to have realized that filing things topically can be a valuable practice as if this wasn't the mode of the day for centuries now. How did the daily note become such a thing that this was lost? Is it the focus on notebook-based bullet journals? Programmers creating daily notes?

inspired by, but definitely not take from as not in evidence

Many people have "daily notes" and "project notes" in what they consider to be their zettelkasten workflow. These can be thought of as subcategories of reference notes (aka literature notes, bibliographic notes). The references in these cases are simply different sorts of material than one would traditionally include in this category. Instead of indexing the ideas within a book or journal article, you're indexing what happened to you on a particular day (daily notes) or indexing ideas or progress on a particular project (project notes). Because they're different enough in type and form, you might keep them in their own "departments" (aka folders) within your system just the same way that with enough material one might break out their reference notes to separate books from newspapers, journal articles, or lectures.

In general form and function they're all broadly serving the same functionality and acting as a ratchet and pawl on the information that is being collected. They capture context; they serve as reminder. The fact that some may be used less or referred to less frequently doesn't make them necessarily less important

https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

Conor is asking himself, how do you get people to take (daily) notes, and how do you get them to refine them.