When I run across interesting questions or topics that would make good papers or areas of future research I’ll use a tag like #OpenQuestion, so when I’m bored I can look at a list of what I might like to work on next.

I do have a handful of templates for books, articles, and zettels to help in prompting me to fill in appropriate meta data for various notes more quickly. For this I’m using the built-in Templates plug-in and then ctrl-shift-T to choose a specific template as necessary.

For some smaller self-contained things like lectures, I may keep a handful of notes together rather than splitting them apart, but they may be linked to larger structures like longer courses or topics of study.

In other words, it was wasted time. Now, if I have to write about a specific topic, I can use the line:(#tag1 #tag2 #tag3) search command to find previously encountered ideas I need for a given purpose.

Now, I simply (1) highlight what I find relevant and useful in journal articles or book chapters, (2) tag each highlight as I go in Acrobat Reader for articles or Kindle for chapters, (3) import them into Obsidian in a folder called ‘Highlight notes’, and (4) rework them with my own ideas into outputs. Perhaps the key to this system is that I not only tag each highlight for its key concepts, I also tag their ‘rhetorical purposes’ which will help me to find them again later. So, an example for a useful quote that defines the writing prompts used in an assessment like NAPLAN (Australia’s national writing test) might be:

Categorizing your ideas with different tags allows you to find relevant information in a note-taking system quickly. And because one idea may have more than one tag, you can easily find the relevant idea from any number of search terms.

However, according to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (Dreyfus, 1980), people learn first by following rules until they’ve learned enough that they feel confident in experimenting with their own way of doing things.

Some notes are going to end up getting totally lost in your Zettelkasten, just like how we forget things naturally. That’s okay. The advantage with a Zettelkasten in this case is that you can actually scan through orphan (forgotten) notes to see if they spark reminders that you can turn into connections now and again

It’s going to take time for clusters to start forming between-topics instead of in-topics, but that’s the whole point of doing this. As long as you make an effort to connect your current note to relevant existing notes, those will form by themselves.

Writing your first Zettelkasten note

The next step is to elaborate those reminders of those ideas into a paragraph that describes the idea in full.

Literature Notes

When I take fleeting notes from a book, I start by writing the title of the book at the top of the page.

Second, in order to take a fleeting note, it must meet at least one of the following two criteria:1. You want to remember the idea permanently.2. You want to use the idea in your work (in a blog, book or something that will help you take a step forward in achieving a concrete goal).

Fleeting NotesFleeting notes are temporary reminders of ideas.

The premise is that when you understand the principles, you can then go on to design your own implementation method.

Zettelkasten WorkflowThe Zettelkasten method has totally changed my approach to learning for the better. There are five different types of note-taking processes that build on each other. I’ll go through each of these and demonstrate how I implement them in my own system below.1. Fleeting notes2. Literature notes3. Permanent notes4. Index notes5. Keyword notes

In comparison with this structure, which offers possibilities of connection that can be actualized, the importance of what has actually been noted is secondary. Many of the notes will soon become unusable or cannot be used at a given occasion. This holds both for excerpts which are only useful in the case of especially remarkable formulations and for our own deliberations. Theoretical publications do therefore not result from simply copying what can already be found in the slip box. The communication with the slip box becomes fruitful only at a high level of generalization, namely that of establishing communicative relations of relations. And it becomes productive only at the moment of evaluation, and is thus bound to a certain time and is to a high degree accidental.

In any case, communication becomes more fruitful when we succeed to activate the internal network of links at the occasion of writing notes or making queries. Memory does not function as the sum of point by point accesses, but rather utilizes internal relationships and becomes fruitful only at this level of the reduction of its own complexity. In this way, more information becomes available at this isolated moment of an search impulse than one had in mind.

Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system.

To sum up: this technique guarantees that its order which is merely formal does not become a hindrance but adapts to the conceptual development.

As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate. It proves to be similar to our own memory in that it does not have a thoroughly constructed order of its entirety, not hierarchy, and most certainly no linear structure like a book. Just because of this, it gets its own life, independent of its author. The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder, but at the very least it is a disorder with non-arbitrary internal structure.

Bibliographical notes which we extract from the literature, should be captured inside the card index. Books, articles, etc., which we have actually read, should be put on a separate slip with bibliographical information in a separate box.

One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other

I work on multiple projects and need to quickly switch between them. Currently I need to close all my documents and then start over every time I switch projects.