Only personal experience in your note taking practice will guide you on what is most valuable for excerpting. After time you will come to know and understand what is worth spending your time on and what isn't. You will not learn this from others experience, only your own, and this is why we call it practice.

reply to u/Rampage_user at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wgq4l/how_to_get_started_with_zk_and_obsidian/

Perhaps what I've done in Obsidian may help: I've created several folders for individual pieces:

• Zettels folder - contains permanent/atomic/evergreen notes which broadly stand on their own; I give them decimal numbers so that alphabetical sorting within the folder provides me with neighborhoods of ideas without needing to provide direct links from one idea to another on each and every note.
• Bibliography folder - contains individual notes for details about sources (books, articles, videos, etc.) which also contains the fleeting notes related to them (each can have from one to sometimes hundreds of short, not fully formed notes and excerpts);
• Index folder - contains 26 notes, one for each letter of the alphabet each of which has index entries that lead to notes in the zettels folder; Like Luhmann's my index is sparse and I rely on the neighborhoods around the notes that link from the index.

While I do have a few tags, I broadly eschew them as they don't scale well with time in my experience.

Some literature is unspecific about it, but you should know that NOT EVERY FLEETING NOTE NEEDS TO BECOME A PERMANENT NOTE. Only split out the most interesting and potentially future useful ones. Some of my book notes have hundreds of fleeting notes, highlights, etc. and I've only pulled out 3 or 4 permanent notes from them. (The side benefit is that if you need them, you've got links to those fleeting notes for later if you need to review over, use, or convert them.)

Really the best advice is to practice. A Lot. Experience will help you know when your fleeting notes should become permanent ones and how much work they need to become permanent notes. You can always adjust things in the future if your experience helps you simplify things further for you. If you make three permanent notes a week, you're doing better than most. I add 1-5 bibliographic sources a day and average about 50 fleeting notes with only one, or maybe two permanent notes on a good day.

Good luck. Now go practice...

reply to u/throwthis_throwthat at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13gcbj1/requesting_advice_for_where_to_put_a_related_idea/

I don't accept the premise of your question. This doesn't get said often enough to people new to zettelkasten practice: Trust your gut! What does it say? You'll learn through practice that there are no "right" answers to these. Put a number on it, file it, and move on. Practice, practice, practice. You'll be doing this in your sleep soon enough. As long as it's close enough, you'll find it. Save your mental cycles for deeper thoughts than this.

Asking others for their advice is fine, but it's akin to asking a well-practiced mnemonist what visual image they would use to remember something. Everyone is different and has different experiences and different things that make their memories sticky for them. What works incredibly well for how someone else thinks and the level of importance they give an idea is never as useful or as "true" as how you think about it. Going with your gut is going to help you remember it better and is far likelier to make it easier to find in the future.

Emergent note taking: what ants can teach us about notes

Nothing new to me, but interesting to see part of Nicole van der Hoeven's process.

link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/hkyPEtm9Ee21MFP9ynnj0g

Too many zettelkasten aspirants only want the presupposed "rules" for keeping one or are interested in imitating one or another examples. Few have interest in the actual day to day practice and these are often the most adept. Of course the downside of learning some of the pieces online leaves the learner with some (often broken) subset of rules and one or two examples (often only theoretical) and then wonder why their actual practice is left so wanting.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/ZeZEgNm8Ee2woUds5QzgOw

Summary of Richard Carter's writing process from notes to product.

Sometimes collecting some sorts of data in one's notes (even, and particularly in digital notes) is not a useful practice as one eventually realizes that they remain unsearched and unused.

One thing which may not come under this heading is the difference in what others say versus what you write yourself, especially as it relates to plagiarism.

https://diggingthedigital.com/hoe-werkt-het-maken-van-een-idee-notitie/

Frank calls out what he considers a good example of actual note taking practice rather than the more often seen talk about note taking theory. The example in question is Forrest Perry's YouTube video #9 Zettelkasten: from source card to idea card.

How was this not obvious from the jump? Was the author of the essay so distracted by shiny object syndrome they failed to see the obvious?

It's like taking notes in a language class... the goal is to read and write with fluency, so you practice these things regularly and gain fluency over time. Taking notes about the grammar and syntax of a language is highly unlikely to get you to fluency. Note taking is the wrong tool for a number of processes and the user should very quickly get a gut feeling for what's useful and what is not.

This author obviously missed the boat here.

This is why one has some broad general rules for keeping and maintaining a zettelkasten. It helps to have some rules to practice and make a habit.

Unmentioned here is that true artists known all the rules and can then more profitably break those rules for expanding and improving upon their own practice. This is dramatically different from what is seen by some of those who want to have a commonplace or zettelkasten practice, but begin without any clear rules. They often begin breaking the rules to their detriment without having the benefit of long practice to see and know the affordances of such systems before going out of their way to break those rules.

By breaking the rules before they've even practiced them, many get confused or lost and quit their practice before they see any of the benefits or affordances of them.

Of course one should have some clear cut end reasons which answer the "why" question for having such practices, or else they'll also lose the motivation to stick with the practice, particularly when they don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Pure hope may not be enough for most.

In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.

In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.

He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]

In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!

I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.

I never really got into the habit of writing in the margins of books, it was something that never really occurred to me. While I am still hesitant to write in the margins of physical books, doing so digitally does appeal. Something I am starting to get more into, now that I'm on the journey to getting my Arts and Humanities degree.