Time for the daily/weekly/monthly note taking and productivity thread!<p>On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sources, and help bring me back down to earth.<p>In the end, my solution was simple. Stop trying. Of course, because I get a bit obsessive over this kind of thing (who could have guessed that a man who spent an entire month thinking about note taking can be obsessive), I couldn't just stop. So instead, I set myself a reminder to come back to it in a month, knowing full well that by then I'll be obsessed with the next thing and will keep putting it off.<p>I write this in case anyone else is going through the same dilemma. Just take a break, get a notebook where you can jot down ideas for how you will jot down ideas, set a reminder, and move on with your life. Unless your enjoy this sort of thing, in which case, have fun :)
Past related threads:<p><i>Org-roam-UI – graphical front end for exploring your org-roam Zettelkasten</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025491" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025491</a> - Aug 2021 (44 comments)<p><i>My Second Brain – Zettelkasten</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802277" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802277</a> - Jan 2021 (103 comments)<p><i>Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536</a> - Oct 2020 (73 comments)<p><i>Luhmann's Original Zettelkasten Digitalized</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24794569" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24794569</a> - Oct 2020 (6 comments)<p><i>Remembering what you Read: Zettelkasten vs. P.A.R.A</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068</a> - Aug 2020 (62 comments)<p><i>Zettelkasten note-taking in 10 minutes</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445742" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445742</a> - June 2020 (124 comments)<p><i>Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386630" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386630</a> - June 2020 (300 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: Thinking of using Zettelkasten , recommend software/platform</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22979257" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22979257</a> - April 2020 (5 comments)<p><i>Luhmann's Zettelkasten</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837</a> - Jan 2020 (83 comments)<p><i>Zettelkästen?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196</a> - Oct 2019 (90 comments)
The focus on technical solutions, Roam vs. Obsidian vs... obscures the fact that regardless of the software - maintaining a useful, up-to-date, well cross referenced corpus of knowledge is a lot of effort. The effort must be constant and ongoing, few will have the stamina to keep it going.
I tried hard to like this, i still have my “second brain” collection in onenote (which worked surprisingly well across linux, Windows & mac) but i don’t add to it anymore.<p>However PARA has just proven more ergonomic and far less time consuming for me. <a href="https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/" rel="nofollow">https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/</a><p>1. I don’t waste time trying to eek out atomic thoughts, PARA is a more pragmatic idea - if some bit of knowledge proves useful it will get incrementally refined<p>2. It works exceedingly well if your productivity system is based on GTD<p>3. I don’t waste time trying to link things sufficiently, instead i dump the folder of reference material in the active project using it. So simple, and quite a satisfying “cheat”<p>All this said, it’s like time management. I’m less convinced that there’s a “right” answer than i am that there is a wrong answer and the wrong answer is not to have a strategy and just let the tidal wave of digital artifacts wash over you.
This sounds very similar to a paper version of what I do with LaTeX PDF books. I constantly am typing and pasting stuff into a notes .txt file–every idea I have, anything I don't want to forget, anything I learn, URLS, names of books/movies etc. Then every few weeks I move stuff from the notes file to a place in a LaTeX PDF book, mainly the current year's book, then others split off as they get big enough, e.g. programming languages, mathematics, my programs, my essays etc. I put lots of pictures, and the books look lovely. (I find links between stuff isn't often necessary, as the hierarchical structure is so clear, and so easy to change around. But hyperlinking any 2 things is easy.)<p>It did take me about 3 months to master LaTeX and the common packages enough that I don't have to give it a thought these days.<p>Before that, I spent 25 years filling notebooks with ideas, notes, diagrams, drawings, maths, etc and never looking in them again, because there was no way of organizing them. Everything was just lost and forgotten.
Tried understanding Zettelkasten for a while, searched the internet, bought one/some books. But it was always too light on examples. I need full beefed out examples (like a 100 pages Zettelkasten) or let's say 10 pages. Of course you can say one doesn't need it, but isn't the value of any method to be benificial if done as designed?<p>This article seems to be the closest of having good examples.
I don't get these methods. So it's a note taking system with hyperlinks between them. OK. So what if we made it digital - then it would be like HTML, right? Now, since more notes is better - what if we also let other people write notes and add them into the same library. Oh look, we just invented the world wide web.<p>What am I missing here?
For anyone interested, Ive catalogued a list of knowledge management apps that I found for productivity: <a href="https://listifi.app/u/erock/knowledge-management-apps" rel="nofollow">https://listifi.app/u/erock/knowledge-management-apps</a>
Roam[0] is great for it. I think they were rejected by YCombinator numerous times, and they are a Clojure company.<p>[0]: <a href="https://roamresearch.com/" rel="nofollow">https://roamresearch.com/</a>
My Zettelkasten and secure note-taking tool is Passfindr.
My sketch book is a Moleskine notebook.<p>Most of my notes are URLs, micro-notes, ideas, login credentials for online and other accounts, addresses and everything between. Lots of micro documents. Some of the notes are 20+ years old. Finding these notes and finding them fast is crucial. Passfindr does that with ease and I get information faster than anything else. Fast searching/finding matters. Once you get the idea behind the internal about: commands, you can even enhance the searching and finding capabilities and build your own Zettelkasten.
We're developing Saga [0] and we have many users using it for Zettelkasten, although it's not our main value proposition.<p>Why: Saga automatically links pages one to another, so it builds your wiki/knowledge system automatically for you.<p>You can also group pages in "Collections", which are smart tags similar to the Zettelkasten tagging method, which allows users to easily recollect and find notes.<p>I welcome anybody to try Saga for Zettelkasten and give us feedback on how we can make it a better tool for this use case!<p>[0] <a href="https://saga.so" rel="nofollow">https://saga.so</a>
If anyone wants a visual breakdown of the Zettelkasten method, I have created two popular videos on YouTube<p>1. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqKspwjXu18" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqKspwjXu18</a> (overview)<p>2. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziE6UExsOrs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziE6UExsOrs</a> (step by step with examples)<p>Sorry for the shameless plug, but reading the comments on here I see these videos might be able to help make it more tangible.
Zim is what i use for notetaking, its essentially tree-like notes
allowing expanding ideas and focusing on stuff without
any paper limits, you can also attach images/files to notes.
I write a lot and for most of my career I just used a Notes.md file synced across devices with iCloud.<p>I forked foam <a href="https://github.com/foambubble/foam" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/foambubble/foam</a>
A few months ago and have been using it as my note taking system. It works great even if you rarely backlink or tag, just every now and then you should clean out your inbox.
If anyone is interested, I'm currently starting a weekly ZK meetup on Zoom w/ a few founder friends who want to dive into the method.<p>Format is:<p>* 15 mins - check in on your workflow
* 30 mins - work on your ZK (write notes, refactor, etc.)
* 15 mins - set ZK goals for upcoming week and discuss tactics<p>If you're interested in joining, drop me a quick note to the email in my profile with a bit about yourself and experience in the method!
Some tools should be mentioned here, too.<p><a href="http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/" rel="nofollow">http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/</a> has great resources<p><a href="https://www.zettlr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zettlr.com/</a> is new and also useful for a Zettelkasten like setup
Anyone looking for a good note taking solution, similar to Roam / Obsidian / Notion, but with a much better native macOS experience needs to check out <a href="https://www.craft.do/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craft.do/</a>.<p>It's incredibly well made and is being developed at a crazy pace. A real pleasure to use and they have Mac, iPad, iOS and web version with real-time collaboration.<p>Edit: I forgot to mention the calendar sync! Really neat way to attach a note to calendar days or events. Especially nice when used with recurring events, as it keeps the note associated with them throughout their lifetime.
When someone says that they used this and that technique to increase their research productivity, I always think about TRIZ and the fact that so few ppl know about it.