This is your friendly reminder to avoid the productivity hacking tarpit. It feels productive to think about productivity but oftentimes you're confusing movement for progress. I'll give two specific pieces of advice for people who are thinking about switching from methodology / app A to methodology / app B.<p>1. You might find something that B does that is just so difficult to accomplish in A, so you want to switch. But before you do, you should spend a week living with the difficult path to do that thing in A. You will likely find that learning the muscle memory to do that thing in A was actually the difficult part, and once you've overcome that hurdle it isn't difficult any more.<p>2. You might switch to B and feel that "now, everything is so organized!" However, it's very likely that you could have "switched" from A to A and you'd feel the same way. What I mean by this is that by switching, you've forced yourself to revisit all of your notes. If you forced yourself to revisit your notes without switching, you'd see the same effect.
My mother had a zettelkasten slide-cabinet. My father produced over 60,000 slides for her, over the course of their academic careers, by copying illustrations in art and architecture books (and by street photography on their many trips abroad)<p>She could walk up to the slide cabinet, and ask "give me a theme" and we'd say "animals" and she'd say "give me a period" and we'd say "modern" and she'd select slides about the history of representative art about animals, in modern times.<p>When she'd put the slides back, she could re-enter the cabinet and select slides about Michaelangelo and followers, or about the role of the pediment in architectural design, and select from the same slides, but for a different context.<p>Amazing stuff. Totally indexed by herself, operated for a lifetime of academic teaching.<p>I think she "invented" hypermedia in the 1960s basically.
Neuron [1] is an exciting new Zettelkasten project.<p>In short, it’s a CLI tool that transforms a directory of markdown files with some special syntax into a static site.<p>A couple of highlights: It’s got support for tags, links, backlinks; it can generate trees of links to notes matching a given tag; the static site has search functionality; there are editor plugins for vim and Emacs.<p>The CLI has the ability to output your entire Zettelkasten graph as JSON, which you can then parse and use to write scripts. I’ve already used this feature to write a few tools for myself that greatly improve my note taking workflow.<p>Behind the scenes, Neuron uses Pandoc to convert the markdown into HTML. There is talk of a feature that would allow the user to write Pandoc filters which would essentially be programs that transform the Neuron AST prior to it being rendered with Pandoc. Such a feature would open up tons of opportunities for customization, e.g. you could write rules to parse custom syntax in your markdown files and generate inline HTML. I’ve already written a tool that does something similar [2] without the use of a Pandoc filter by operating directly on the generated HTML files, but a Pandoc filter would greatly improve the process.<p>All of your notes are simply markdown files stored on your local machine, so you’re free to do whatever you’d like with them: store them in git, write scripts to generate them, whatever.<p>The author is simultaneously developing Cerveau [3] which is a hosted web interface that allows you to edit your notes remotely via a web browser. It transparently syncs your edits to a GitHub repository. Unfortunately, Cerveau is currently closed source, but I believe the author has expressed interest in opening it up if he’s able to get enough GitHub sponsors to sustain its development.<p>If it matters to you, Neuron is written in Haskell and the project makes heavy use of Nix.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/srid/neuron" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/srid/neuron</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-670290253" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/228#issuecomment-67029...</a><p>3: <a href="https://www.cerveau.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.cerveau.app</a>
For having been around for so long in its most basic form, it's pretty exciting to see an entire renascence of knowledge tools and methodologies.<p>Every few years I get bitten by the bug and I go on a hunt of what's out there. Most recently, some colleagues were very excited about Roam Research [0], so I took another look, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, among many great tools, the good old TittlyWiki [1] had evolved with the times, and now you have "distributions" tailored to apply the Zettelkasten methodologies.<p>I settled on Drift [2], and over a weekend, I moved hundreds of notes I had spread in several formats over to a small set of Drift files. I even moved my entire personal web site (mostly audio and foodie geeky stuff) into it, with close to 80 tiddlers by now [3].<p>Porting was phase 1. The fun part where the methodology becomes really powerful, is breaking down the monoliths, just like you would do with app modernization into microservices. Taking longer blog posts and decomposing them into discrete, reusable components that can hold meaning under different contexts. The more I looked at them, the more I could find I could break them down into more discrete ideas. And I'm sure I'm not done.<p>Several weeks into it, I've become more organized than I had been in years, and I realize it helps me structure my thinking, and how to connect ideas.<p>Regardless of what tool you choose (and there are plenty) it's a great moment to look at what this methodology can do for you.<p>[0] <a href="https://roamresearch.com/" rel="nofollow">https://roamresearch.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://tiddlywiki.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tiddlywiki.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://akhater.github.io/drift/" rel="nofollow">https://akhater.github.io/drift/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://ramirosalas.com" rel="nofollow">https://ramirosalas.com</a>
So there does seem to be a recent Hype-train around improved note taking and Zettelkasten in particular.<p>I would 100% echo the timesink/tarpit comments insofar as unless you have a specific learning or knowledge management goal devoting time to this can be a fun procrastination game.<p>Many of the sources rate the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens as a starting point (ISBN10 1542866502
, ISBN13 9781542866507)<p>There are a plethora of youtube channels and Productivity websites to be found so YMMV, I liked:<p>Bryan Jenks' - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo20ZoipEt6YeL3" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5fd4SsfvECy0zzf8Cyo2...</a><p>Justin (Effective Remote work )- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzyo69rqBoBJUyQ9jo53Bw/vid...</a>
Hacked up a simple CLI tool to create and organize notes using Markdown files and publish that as a static website. The idea is very much inspired from Neuron - but a few differences:<p>- In zettel we have a concept of Connections and not uplinks/backlinks. This lets us have circular links across notes.<p>- For visualisation we use Graph structure instead a of a Tree. For reasons mentioned above.<p>zettel is a simple CLI written in Go, so very easy to just grab the binary and get started.<p>The project is in a nascent stage, feature requests or any relevant ideas are more than welcome!<p>Our GitHub Repo: <a href="https://github.com/hackstream/zettel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hackstream/zettel</a><p>Documentation: <a href="https://zettel.hackstream.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zettel.hackstream.dev/</a><p>(Yes the docs are generated by zettel as well)
I know about Baader-Meinhoff, but did something happen recently to lead to some sort of resurgence of zettelkasten interest?<p>I feel like I learned about the term a few months ago on HN, and then it's been cropping up quite frequently since. It's a pretty distinctive word, I feel as if I would have noticed and investigated if it had come up so frequently in the past.
Sounds cool, though I've seen this on hacker news several times already.<p>But this kind of regimental organisation would never work for me. I don't have the patience.<p>For me organising means putting all my stuff on the desktop, which then goes in a folder "Old Desktop" when my desktop becomes so full that I can't add more files to it :'). It's become a nested chain of old desktops over the years. Yet I never seen to have issues finding even old stuff back. In fact it's surprisingly effortless, somehow. When I navigate it, it feels like walking through an old neighbourhood I use to live in but haven't visited in a while. Same with my notes mess in OneNote. For some reason it makes sense to my brain.<p>I've been trying different organisation methods in the past but they never stuck. It was a lot of work and didn't really make retrieval easier because it was never that hard for me to begin with. So I'm taking that as a sign this lack of organisation is good enough for me :)
A Zettelkasten tool built on VS Code: Foam<p><a href="https://foambubble.github.io/foam/" rel="nofollow">https://foambubble.github.io/foam/</a>
I'm working on a Zettelkasten app myself at the moment. Backlinks and tags are working.<p>Rather than using solely a time based ID like "202006110955", I'm adding the date to the file name. Links then show the file name instead of the id (e.g 2020-10-29 lessons learned.html → [[lessons learned]]).<p>Also working on ways to surface information from the Zettelkasten like a spreadsheet view and generated one-page summaries.<p>Quick demo here: <a href="https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/hf2s8fZsojY</a>
If, as the top post wisely indicates, you are in search of results and real impact you should carefully consider which app really helps you get things done.<p>Lots of hype and lots of features in an app is a recipe for lots of wasted time.<p>For making a zettelkasten with the minimum of hassle and friction check out <a href="https://scrapbox.io" rel="nofollow">https://scrapbox.io</a>
I tried something with elixir, markdown, graphviz and feh.<p><a href="https://github.com/enter-haken/memories" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/enter-haken/memories</a><p>Currently I add my thoughts manually.
I'm still trying to find out if it has a significant advantage over classic note taking methods.