How many people actually find utility from a Zettelkasten system?
I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.
I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.
I've written thousands of notes with just vim and the file system for over 20 years with little protocol. It's worked out great for me. Simple short text files that eventually graduated to markdown. I have folders and subfolders for top level topic hierarchy. Usually just a single level, a parent folder and then files for specific topics. It rarely goes deeper than two levels. I title everything descriptively to guide me to find what I need later. Like I said, thousands of notes spanning 20 years, never a problem.
I'm no expert, but looking from afar it seems to me that complex note-taking systems are an optimization on some anticipated theoretical future problem that seldom materializes in practice, and I think trying to squeeze those promised extra 10% of efficiency might possibly qualify as diminishing returns.
It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye to producing more, you will need to take a lot of research notes and you will inevitably organize them one way or another. If you are a working software developer, your needs are very different. I think most of the HN-blog-ecosystem-adjacent zettelkastens exist mostly for the fun of playing with information.
I don't follow this system per se, but for me the unlock was to build a a map of my life from the get go, following the PARA system (projects, areas, resources, archives). It has been a game changer because now I willingly take more notes, snip more quotes etc as it's never a struggle to know where they fit.
I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt:
/template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .
It's just so easy.
Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.
I developed one for a specific personal research topic. Once I answered my question, the initiative petered out.
I've considered starting another based on the idea of getting high off knowledge. I don't see the point as an information store, but as a toy it makes sense; use it spark curiosity, make neat connections, etc.
One of the core ideas - atomicity of notes - is a practice valuable on its own, and maybe the fundamental value of Zettl. It has really helped me to reduce digital note sprawl, and a natural sort of topic taxonomy has revealed itself as I refactor notes and link between them. Ensuring that my notes are atomic means that, as I write, natural fracture lines emerge - and I follow them. I break notes up along these lines, keeping them linked if there’s a relationship - which may be parent/child, peer, or whatever.
Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.
The system also feels to me like it would be busywork for most people. I just make notes in a very unorganized way and do some cross-linking. I rely on search for actually finding things, though I feel like I can improve search by using sentence/text embeddings and some vector search.
At the least, Zettelkasten like habit can be helpful.
For me, I don't bookmark a webpage, I'm usually after a sentence or something after.
Highlighting that one sentence or webpage is a habit.
Throwing a tag or two on them isn't as hard when you can call the tags whatever you want.
After that, those topics are one click away, 5-10 years later.
Trying out Zettelkasten, or PARA, Johnny Decimal or some other system, one will work for you. It's less about perfectionism at the start and just improving.
It's also possible to have an AI just organize the folders for you little by little.
It can not be great at first to play around but the more you work at it the more it does become.
Definitely not. I really like Obsidian, but organize everything like a book, which gives just enough structure to know where everything goes without thinking about it, and no more.
There’s just not enough there to make into a blog post.
I am in the same boat. And then with full text search, I wonder how much it is truly needed.
But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.
I found it useful when writing a thesis. It gave me a way to research many ideas, not directly connected to the main topic, but still interesting in my mind at least. I really enjoyed this unstructured approach. I didn't have to worry that I will get stuck, because I always had a way back to the main topic.
So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.
That's what LLMs are best, actually. Go through all your stuff and painstakingly document, add tags, refer to other documents, etc
> Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information
LLMs can also separate what information was only useful at a specific time vs more perennially useful notes.
Isn't the "gardening" aspect part of it though? It's where you naturally review and mentally correlate topics, infer connections in your brain and spark new paths?
This is true. It would be beneficial to do such a task
However, if one doesn't want (or just doesn't have time) to do the task but still want a tidy cross-referenced set of notes, one could outsource to a LLM
I think your analysis is right, zettelkasten is really good for research, writing and well... Linking ideas together. For projects, I just have a directory with plain text notes, todos, references and links.
It comes down to are you reading to write, or reading to think?
Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.
Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.
I got enthusiastic about ZK years ago, learned about it and decided it was not for me, it is just too much work with very little to gain from it. Just use Google Keep
I remember doing some research on this topic, and, when I looked for usage patterns for my type of job specifically, I realized that most people were just posting about their workflows learning about... taking notes.
I asked it since I wasn't sure if I was just my brain being the odd one out here.
I tend to just remember topics and search for them when needed. For example, I rely completely on Outlook's search to find the email from 5 years ago that I remember X person sending (and I mention Outlook specifically because surprisingly Gmail is terrible at this)
Luhmann left behind 70,000 index cards, published over 70 books and ~400 papers, and his systems theory is still actively applied in sociology, legal theory, and organizational studies. He's required reading at German universities. Your sample size of n=2 is methodologically a little thin – which Luhmann himself would have appreciated, given that he had a particular fondness for pointing out systemic blind spots.
"Two professors hadn't heard of him" is a fascinating epistemological standard. Like me stating: I've also met two cardiologists who didn't know who Rudolf Virchow was. Guess he wasn't that productive either.
Fair enough, I missed the mark that I was intending. Possibly he remains better recognized in Germany than in North America; and it’s admittedly not my field. At the same time, more than once when I’ve posed the question about the utility of ZK, I’ve been pointed only to Luhmann. His academic productivity isn’t in dispute. And seemingly, for him, it was aided by the methodology that is promoted by ZK followers now. But it’s also an n=1 data point. I wonder if the ZK community has identified other productive and impactful academics who are devotees.
As for the last comment: having gone to medical school some decades ago and trained in cardiology, I’m familiar with Virchow. I would be surprised to encounter any physician who hadn’t any familiarity with him. But who knows?!
Yeah, I admit, Virchow was a low hanging fruit as a cynical comparison. I stumbled upon Luhmann in school. I always wished, I had a ZK. I never got around to being disciplined enough to build one.
I also was more of an Foucault guy at university. So I never really got into Luhmann. Albeit I originally studied literature and my uni was quite cultural studies heavy - this is why I read quite a lot from other disciplines back in the days.
I feel Luhmann might be a great poster child for deferred gratification. But that might just be the cynic speaking.
Most scientists are not very well known, even in their own discipline. Their fame is usually locally and temporary, limited to which ever bubble they were roaming. Luhmann was well known in Parts of Europe and South-american, and died ~30 years ago. Not unusual for someone today to never heard of him if they are living in other regions.
It is too complicated. We just get, save or write something, maybe with some categories, keywords, or tags.
After saving, maybe you need some organization later, but most time they are just there. Most time you search content by categories, keywords, or tags.
I think we need right tools for different requirements.
It depends on how you want to use your notes. If you're looking for a way to store information for later retrieval then what you described will probably work great. Zettelkasten is more about discovering connections between ideas that were not immediately obvious, and creating and discovering new ideas as you work with your notes.
So I said "Most time". I know the situation you said. The situation exists but is not regular (I think it's occasional except you want to create a complex system by notes).
By the way, the most important thing is thinking, not the notes, but notes can help you thinking and creating better systems.
More and earlier thinking, more notes, better systems.
Can anyone share agent skills that specifically help with the organizing, structuring, and linking of Obsidian files like a Karpathy style wiki? (Eg taking /raw content and processing it following some protocol)
I see a lot of people say you have to use methodology X, or that methodology Y is worthless.
I'm the end, I think we have maybe different uses for notes. Journaling, scratchpads, to-do lists, research, etc.
Take a methodology with a grain of salt. If it doesn't fit, there's a good chance it's solving someone else's problem, but you can always inform your own approach with it.
Zettelkasten is great for researchers. I actually don't think it's that valuable for practicing technologists. The general practice of taking notes and connecting ideas together is of course useful, but most technologists don't need such a sophisticated system.
Amid all the fanaticism that grew around zettelkasten method the past few years people have forgotten and de-emphasized the fact that for Luhmann it was not a "second brain" to be referenced on demand, it was explicitly a system to support writing. It is tailored to help researchers write papers. It shines if you actually need a system in which to keep notions coherent and organized so that ideas are clear and citations precise when you need them during the writing process. If that's not you, the overhead probably isn't worth it. Just keep a notebook.
The article highlights that the real value of the ZK method is in the discovery of the deeper connections that run between ideas that on the surface may appear unrelated.
I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.
I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.
Having to manage links and tags for every note quickly makes the notion of a note system less than appealing.
Personally, I use a "temporary -Zettelkasten" strategy in my inbox. But it's more that I just timestamp new notes.
The power of obsidian imo is that I can quickly organize those inbox notes into their respective project notes with the touch of a hotkey
And then again in the project note, the Obsidian editor features (mostly around useful hotkeys) allow me to quickly manage my notes how I see fit (no particular strategy here other than being heavily influenced by GTD)
I built the AS Notes extension for VS Code (https://asnotes.io) partly because I wanted to be able to write my notes with the support of other VS Code extensions, and because of the agent harness options in VS Code (copilot etc). The key thing for easy zettlekasten management is really good wikilink support in markdown. AS Notes supports nested wikilinking and automatic updating in the index on rename etc.
I really want to use Obsidian but it being closed source is a big No for me. I know I can keep all my files in plain text and move on to another platform buy the thing is: if a bunch of files and a FS were enough for me to keep my KB, then ofc I wouldn’t need something like Obsidian. The thing is I need something like Obsidian; a bunch of files lying around is not enough for me
Technically, Obsidian is just a fancy 'browser/editor' for markdown files laying around. Should Obsidian disappear as a functional tool tomorrow, recreating the basic functionality (show, edit, manage links, follow links) would take a sufficiently motivated guy a few hours. If you need the 'petri dish' view, maybe a little longer. In such an event, I suppose enough people would be eager to build their own and OSS variants would emerge within days.
If you can stomach not working in Markdown, emacs' ORGmode exists and has all the functionality Obsidian has, and then some, open source, with a slightly different hypertext format.
Unless you are hellbent on one particular Obsidian plugin, you should be good.
Ideally I would like to stick to a single KB for the rest of my… life? So, the only option is going open source (either built by me or someone else). Imagine I start using Obsidian today and I love it. Updates keep coming and I love them. Two years from now they add something I hate, and from there more features that kill my workflow. What can I do? Sure I cn stick to the last version that worked for me but that means Im stuck with it “forever”. That’s not gonna work
To me the KB is the actual content and how it is laid out/its relations (which should be expressed in the filesystem or in plaintext). The client is more of a view/renderer. That feels like the right metaphor for my usage at least. I haven't updated for a quite long while, all my plugins still work correctly and I've had no trouble adding another one recently.
yeah the maintenance spiral is exactly why I gave up and just dumped everything into a GitHub repo. plain markdown files, no plugins, no drama. only problem is GitHub's renderer is kind of garbage for a real wiki. ended up having to build my own github wiki reader
The credit goes to Luhmann. Ahrens wrote a book about Luhmann's system, but Ahrens' book was more about the practical side of study habits and the nature of knowledge as much as it was about the practical side of actually using a zettelkasten.
I bought Ahrens's book to learn how to take smart notes. It should've been called Why to Take Smart Notes. The book was more about how good and lifechanging it is to use Zettelkasten, which was a bummer because I was already interested enough in the idea to buy a book about it. I was looking for more of a how-to.
Edit: Upon a quick scan, this looks more like what I learned as "Linking Your Thinking", which resonates way more with me than a strict Zettelkasten format where you try to arrange notes linearly to match some artificial constraint.
And I think that's a good thing, just not how Ahrens described Zettelkasten.
I wanted to like Linking Your Thinking, but while I found the ACE concept novel and intriguing, it didn't really fit my brain. (And while certainly a point of style, Nick Milo's presentation method somewhat grated on me). I ended up with a combination of PARA and Jonny Decimal. I actually wrote a big long conversation with Claude to recommend a methodology. I talked about what I liked about Zettelkasten, ACE, PARA, and where I had issues implementing, adhering, and how I found myself using things, and it actually came up with a fairly decent starting point.
Yes that is fair, I adjusted and simplified the system for my usage. I didn't include any of the note "phases" / transitions, so e.g. no fleeting notes.
What I'm taking issue in is the many opinions on how to build something really useful yourself. I love Obsidian, because it does what it does great - taking notes, easy and fast navigation, no bullshit. What I don't like is the urge to do so many things with it, todos, libraries, etc. Obsidian wasn't built for this. I had spent months improving my Obsidian setup when finally I realized I don't want to spend all this time on making a note-taking tool do something else. As a dev, naturally, I started developing my own stuff to be perfect for me, but not everybody can do that. Technical users might like spending hours implementing the perfect system for their lifes, but I think for everybody else it should be so much easier.
> Large language models can’t do much with raw notes or scattered documents.
Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.
Why on Earth, the chapter “What the Zettelkasten method actually is” doesn’t tell me what is this method? The same with the first result on Kagi. There are several paragraphs without saying anything worth saying. They have a very religious kind of feeling.
I had to force even LLM to answer properly, because it answered the same substanceless way. The only thing helped is to ask it, what distinguishes this to the web, wikis, or HATEOAS.
Systems like these made sense in the pre-AI era, where things needed to be organized at the outset to be useful later.
With AI, there's nothing stopping you from dumping a huge pile of information into a single folder and telling an AI what you want to make with it that day.
Actually AI also benefits from thins being organized.
I find Skills to be Zettlekasten inspired or wiki inspired in that sense.
Zettlekast has other benefits for humans though.
If your goal is to grasp lot of knowladge oyu need to do it in atomic way, connect mentally to what you already know and do spaced repetition to internalize.
Zettlkeaste forces you do it it all as part of organizing. Basically by organizing you make it your own.
Yes AI can help today but it also means it does not stay in your head.
Not sure its important if it is in your head or you can call AI at any moment instead of your own memory.
No. But it also can automate some of the tedium away. Maybe there's some level of organic linking that you do, but it can also go through and be more thorough. I guess it depends on where you derive the value - if you want to be the one discovering the connections and making them, then obviously less so.
Except that note-taking systems are meant to help you organize your own mind and understand the world better. Offloading tasks to AI won't help you with that.
How many people actually find utility from a Zettelkasten system?
I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.
I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.
I've written thousands of notes with just vim and the file system for over 20 years with little protocol. It's worked out great for me. Simple short text files that eventually graduated to markdown. I have folders and subfolders for top level topic hierarchy. Usually just a single level, a parent folder and then files for specific topics. It rarely goes deeper than two levels. I title everything descriptively to guide me to find what I need later. Like I said, thousands of notes spanning 20 years, never a problem.
I'm no expert, but looking from afar it seems to me that complex note-taking systems are an optimization on some anticipated theoretical future problem that seldom materializes in practice, and I think trying to squeeze those promised extra 10% of efficiency might possibly qualify as diminishing returns.
It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye to producing more, you will need to take a lot of research notes and you will inevitably organize them one way or another. If you are a working software developer, your needs are very different. I think most of the HN-blog-ecosystem-adjacent zettelkastens exist mostly for the fun of playing with information.
I don't follow this system per se, but for me the unlock was to build a a map of my life from the get go, following the PARA system (projects, areas, resources, archives). It has been a game changer because now I willingly take more notes, snip more quotes etc as it's never a struggle to know where they fit.
I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt: /template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .
It's just so easy.
Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.
I developed one for a specific personal research topic. Once I answered my question, the initiative petered out.
I've considered starting another based on the idea of getting high off knowledge. I don't see the point as an information store, but as a toy it makes sense; use it spark curiosity, make neat connections, etc.
One of the core ideas - atomicity of notes - is a practice valuable on its own, and maybe the fundamental value of Zettl. It has really helped me to reduce digital note sprawl, and a natural sort of topic taxonomy has revealed itself as I refactor notes and link between them. Ensuring that my notes are atomic means that, as I write, natural fracture lines emerge - and I follow them. I break notes up along these lines, keeping them linked if there’s a relationship - which may be parent/child, peer, or whatever.
Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.
The system also feels to me like it would be busywork for most people. I just make notes in a very unorganized way and do some cross-linking. I rely on search for actually finding things, though I feel like I can improve search by using sentence/text embeddings and some vector search.
At the least, Zettelkasten like habit can be helpful.
For me, I don't bookmark a webpage, I'm usually after a sentence or something after.
Highlighting that one sentence or webpage is a habit.
Throwing a tag or two on them isn't as hard when you can call the tags whatever you want.
After that, those topics are one click away, 5-10 years later.
Trying out Zettelkasten, or PARA, Johnny Decimal or some other system, one will work for you. It's less about perfectionism at the start and just improving.
It's also possible to have an AI just organize the folders for you little by little.
It can not be great at first to play around but the more you work at it the more it does become.
Definitely not. I really like Obsidian, but organize everything like a book, which gives just enough structure to know where everything goes without thinking about it, and no more.
There’s just not enough there to make into a blog post.
I am in the same boat. And then with full text search, I wonder how much it is truly needed.
But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.
I found it useful when writing a thesis. It gave me a way to research many ideas, not directly connected to the main topic, but still interesting in my mind at least. I really enjoyed this unstructured approach. I didn't have to worry that I will get stuck, because I always had a way back to the main topic.
So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.
> I just can't bring myself to go to the effort
That's what LLMs are best, actually. Go through all your stuff and painstakingly document, add tags, refer to other documents, etc
> Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information
LLMs can also separate what information was only useful at a specific time vs more perennially useful notes.
Isn't the "gardening" aspect part of it though? It's where you naturally review and mentally correlate topics, infer connections in your brain and spark new paths?
This is true. It would be beneficial to do such a task
However, if one doesn't want (or just doesn't have time) to do the task but still want a tidy cross-referenced set of notes, one could outsource to a LLM
I think your analysis is right, zettelkasten is really good for research, writing and well... Linking ideas together. For projects, I just have a directory with plain text notes, todos, references and links.
It comes down to are you reading to write, or reading to think?
Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.
Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.
I came to a similar conclusion. I’m just writing notes so I can remember things. I’m not writing my thesis.
At some point, these complex systems become a form of procrastination.
I got enthusiastic about ZK years ago, learned about it and decided it was not for me, it is just too much work with very little to gain from it. Just use Google Keep
It does feel very cultish, with a lot of hand-waving and very little that seems useful. No one has ever answered your question when I've asked it.
I remember doing some research on this topic, and, when I looked for usage patterns for my type of job specifically, I realized that most people were just posting about their workflows learning about... taking notes.
I asked it since I wasn't sure if I was just my brain being the odd one out here.
I tend to just remember topics and search for them when needed. For example, I rely completely on Outlook's search to find the email from 5 years ago that I remember X person sending (and I mention Outlook specifically because surprisingly Gmail is terrible at this)
They point to Luhmann and his hundreds of academic papers. But I’ve asked two sociology professors about Luhmann and they had never heard of him.
Luhmann left behind 70,000 index cards, published over 70 books and ~400 papers, and his systems theory is still actively applied in sociology, legal theory, and organizational studies. He's required reading at German universities. Your sample size of n=2 is methodologically a little thin – which Luhmann himself would have appreciated, given that he had a particular fondness for pointing out systemic blind spots.
"Two professors hadn't heard of him" is a fascinating epistemological standard. Like me stating: I've also met two cardiologists who didn't know who Rudolf Virchow was. Guess he wasn't that productive either.
Fair enough, I missed the mark that I was intending. Possibly he remains better recognized in Germany than in North America; and it’s admittedly not my field. At the same time, more than once when I’ve posed the question about the utility of ZK, I’ve been pointed only to Luhmann. His academic productivity isn’t in dispute. And seemingly, for him, it was aided by the methodology that is promoted by ZK followers now. But it’s also an n=1 data point. I wonder if the ZK community has identified other productive and impactful academics who are devotees.
As for the last comment: having gone to medical school some decades ago and trained in cardiology, I’m familiar with Virchow. I would be surprised to encounter any physician who hadn’t any familiarity with him. But who knows?!
Yeah, I admit, Virchow was a low hanging fruit as a cynical comparison. I stumbled upon Luhmann in school. I always wished, I had a ZK. I never got around to being disciplined enough to build one.
I also was more of an Foucault guy at university. So I never really got into Luhmann. Albeit I originally studied literature and my uni was quite cultural studies heavy - this is why I read quite a lot from other disciplines back in the days.
I feel Luhmann might be a great poster child for deferred gratification. But that might just be the cynic speaking.
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I don't think there's anything passive here - it's a very constructive and valid argument. Are we not here to have a discussion?
Most scientists are not very well known, even in their own discipline. Their fame is usually locally and temporary, limited to which ever bubble they were roaming. Luhmann was well known in Parts of Europe and South-american, and died ~30 years ago. Not unusual for someone today to never heard of him if they are living in other regions.
the zettelkasten of niklas luhmann is currently being digitized. you can browse it online. zettelkasten II is the more interesting one.
https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhalt...
[Luhmann, back from the dead]: how has my work been received?
Sociology prof: "uhhhh. Well, the good news is that there are a ton of YouTube videos about you."
It is too complicated. We just get, save or write something, maybe with some categories, keywords, or tags.
After saving, maybe you need some organization later, but most time they are just there. Most time you search content by categories, keywords, or tags.
I think we need right tools for different requirements.
It depends on how you want to use your notes. If you're looking for a way to store information for later retrieval then what you described will probably work great. Zettelkasten is more about discovering connections between ideas that were not immediately obvious, and creating and discovering new ideas as you work with your notes.
So I said "Most time". I know the situation you said. The situation exists but is not regular (I think it's occasional except you want to create a complex system by notes).
By the way, the most important thing is thinking, not the notes, but notes can help you thinking and creating better systems.
More and earlier thinking, more notes, better systems.
I hope it can help you and other people.
Yep. I agree. This and other systems like it are for people who obsess over planning on doing work rather than actually doing any.
I have written something similar! Used and improved my Obsidian setup through years of use.
My practical guide on setting up a smart notes / Zettelkasten / atomic notes Vault: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-zettelkasten
Also wrote about how it fits into my overall Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault
Can anyone share agent skills that specifically help with the organizing, structuring, and linking of Obsidian files like a Karpathy style wiki? (Eg taking /raw content and processing it following some protocol)
I see a lot of people say you have to use methodology X, or that methodology Y is worthless.
I'm the end, I think we have maybe different uses for notes. Journaling, scratchpads, to-do lists, research, etc.
Take a methodology with a grain of salt. If it doesn't fit, there's a good chance it's solving someone else's problem, but you can always inform your own approach with it.
Zettelkasten is great for researchers. I actually don't think it's that valuable for practicing technologists. The general practice of taking notes and connecting ideas together is of course useful, but most technologists don't need such a sophisticated system.
Amid all the fanaticism that grew around zettelkasten method the past few years people have forgotten and de-emphasized the fact that for Luhmann it was not a "second brain" to be referenced on demand, it was explicitly a system to support writing. It is tailored to help researchers write papers. It shines if you actually need a system in which to keep notions coherent and organized so that ideas are clear and citations precise when you need them during the writing process. If that's not you, the overhead probably isn't worth it. Just keep a notebook.
The article highlights that the real value of the ZK method is in the discovery of the deeper connections that run between ideas that on the surface may appear unrelated.
I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.
I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.
Having to manage links and tags for every note quickly makes the notion of a note system less than appealing.
Personally, I use a "temporary -Zettelkasten" strategy in my inbox. But it's more that I just timestamp new notes.
The power of obsidian imo is that I can quickly organize those inbox notes into their respective project notes with the touch of a hotkey
And then again in the project note, the Obsidian editor features (mostly around useful hotkeys) allow me to quickly manage my notes how I see fit (no particular strategy here other than being heavily influenced by GTD)
On a different note, the website feels a bit quickly AI generated just made to promote this desktopcommander app?
Edit: Oh, I actually just found the comment from the author here, sounds like AI slop.
I built the AS Notes extension for VS Code (https://asnotes.io) partly because I wanted to be able to write my notes with the support of other VS Code extensions, and because of the agent harness options in VS Code (copilot etc). The key thing for easy zettlekasten management is really good wikilink support in markdown. AS Notes supports nested wikilinking and automatic updating in the index on rename etc.
I really want to use Obsidian but it being closed source is a big No for me. I know I can keep all my files in plain text and move on to another platform buy the thing is: if a bunch of files and a FS were enough for me to keep my KB, then ofc I wouldn’t need something like Obsidian. The thing is I need something like Obsidian; a bunch of files lying around is not enough for me
Technically, Obsidian is just a fancy 'browser/editor' for markdown files laying around. Should Obsidian disappear as a functional tool tomorrow, recreating the basic functionality (show, edit, manage links, follow links) would take a sufficiently motivated guy a few hours. If you need the 'petri dish' view, maybe a little longer. In such an event, I suppose enough people would be eager to build their own and OSS variants would emerge within days.
If you can stomach not working in Markdown, emacs' ORGmode exists and has all the functionality Obsidian has, and then some, open source, with a slightly different hypertext format.
Unless you are hellbent on one particular Obsidian plugin, you should be good.
That’s why Im not using Obsidian
One option to check out is VSCodium + FOAM plugin. When editing a folder of Markdown files, you can cross-link to them using Obsidian-style links.
Later, if you want to publish the files as HTML, you can use MkDocs.
What risk are you trying to avoid? You can disable updates.
Ideally I would like to stick to a single KB for the rest of my… life? So, the only option is going open source (either built by me or someone else). Imagine I start using Obsidian today and I love it. Updates keep coming and I love them. Two years from now they add something I hate, and from there more features that kill my workflow. What can I do? Sure I cn stick to the last version that worked for me but that means Im stuck with it “forever”. That’s not gonna work
To me the KB is the actual content and how it is laid out/its relations (which should be expressed in the filesystem or in plaintext). The client is more of a view/renderer. That feels like the right metaphor for my usage at least. I haven't updated for a quite long while, all my plugins still work correctly and I've had no trouble adding another one recently.
I'm doing a similar system that works through a telegram bot and a self hosted instance
https://github.com/skiwithuge/brainstack
For me, neovim with a few utility scripts cover about 95% of my use-cases in Obsidian... linking is a tiny bit overrated.
yeah the maintenance spiral is exactly why I gave up and just dumped everything into a GitHub repo. plain markdown files, no plugins, no drama. only problem is GitHub's renderer is kind of garbage for a real wiki. ended up having to build my own github wiki reader
Please credit Sönke Ahrens and his 2017 book _How to Take Smart Notes_ for this system.
The credit goes to Luhmann. Ahrens wrote a book about Luhmann's system, but Ahrens' book was more about the practical side of study habits and the nature of knowledge as much as it was about the practical side of actually using a zettelkasten.
I bought Ahrens's book to learn how to take smart notes. It should've been called Why to Take Smart Notes. The book was more about how good and lifechanging it is to use Zettelkasten, which was a bummer because I was already interested enough in the idea to buy a book about it. I was looking for more of a how-to.
A few chapters in, this is a great how-to book: A System for Writing (Bob Doto)
https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/
Glad you're enjoying it! Thanks for the mention. Hmu with any questions.
I wrote a bit about using Obsidian with bottom-up / smart notes.
My Obsidian Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault
All posts about Obsidian: https://bryanhogan.com/tags/obsidian
Maybe this helps?
I'll check it out, thanks!
Edit: Upon a quick scan, this looks more like what I learned as "Linking Your Thinking", which resonates way more with me than a strict Zettelkasten format where you try to arrange notes linearly to match some artificial constraint.
And I think that's a good thing, just not how Ahrens described Zettelkasten.
I wanted to like Linking Your Thinking, but while I found the ACE concept novel and intriguing, it didn't really fit my brain. (And while certainly a point of style, Nick Milo's presentation method somewhat grated on me). I ended up with a combination of PARA and Jonny Decimal. I actually wrote a big long conversation with Claude to recommend a methodology. I talked about what I liked about Zettelkasten, ACE, PARA, and where I had issues implementing, adhering, and how I found myself using things, and it actually came up with a fairly decent starting point.
Yes that is fair, I adjusted and simplified the system for my usage. I didn't include any of the note "phases" / transitions, so e.g. no fleeting notes.
What I'm taking issue in is the many opinions on how to build something really useful yourself. I love Obsidian, because it does what it does great - taking notes, easy and fast navigation, no bullshit. What I don't like is the urge to do so many things with it, todos, libraries, etc. Obsidian wasn't built for this. I had spent months improving my Obsidian setup when finally I realized I don't want to spend all this time on making a note-taking tool do something else. As a dev, naturally, I started developing my own stuff to be perfect for me, but not everybody can do that. Technical users might like spending hours implementing the perfect system for their lifes, but I think for everybody else it should be so much easier.
> Large language models can’t do much with raw notes or scattered documents.
Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.
Why on Earth, the chapter “What the Zettelkasten method actually is” doesn’t tell me what is this method? The same with the first result on Kagi. There are several paragraphs without saying anything worth saying. They have a very religious kind of feeling.
I had to force even LLM to answer properly, because it answered the same substanceless way. The only thing helped is to ask it, what distinguishes this to the web, wikis, or HATEOAS.
Is it just me, or does this link not actually point to an article or howto, but to a generic 'download / buy our tool' kinda page?
i think just for you, link is working correctly. here is a full link to article https://desktopcommander.app/blog/zettelkasten-obsidian/
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Systems like these made sense in the pre-AI era, where things needed to be organized at the outset to be useful later.
With AI, there's nothing stopping you from dumping a huge pile of information into a single folder and telling an AI what you want to make with it that day.
Actually AI also benefits from thins being organized. I find Skills to be Zettlekasten inspired or wiki inspired in that sense.
Zettlekast has other benefits for humans though. If your goal is to grasp lot of knowladge oyu need to do it in atomic way, connect mentally to what you already know and do spaced repetition to internalize. Zettlkeaste forces you do it it all as part of organizing. Basically by organizing you make it your own.
Yes AI can help today but it also means it does not stay in your head. Not sure its important if it is in your head or you can call AI at any moment instead of your own memory.
AI will also just run some query or grep commands against it for the most part and has no magical way of finding connections that a human can’t.
No. But it also can automate some of the tedium away. Maybe there's some level of organic linking that you do, but it can also go through and be more thorough. I guess it depends on where you derive the value - if you want to be the one discovering the connections and making them, then obviously less so.
Except that note-taking systems are meant to help you organize your own mind and understand the world better. Offloading tasks to AI won't help you with that.
Agreed in theory, but ultimately it's just bikeshedding.