Indeed this is a great discussion, and I really appreciate the perspectives of @ryanjamurphy and @Eugleo with respect to creating the flattest structure possible, backed up by really awesome metadata and tools to create the right view at the right time. As @Eugleo said:
“just write good metadata, people!”
Easier said than done…
In response to @nickmilo’s request to take a deeper dive into the purpose(s) of these tools, I’d suggest that I have two broad categories – that word again! – of need, which are quite different and drive a fair bit of the conceptualization disconnect. The first is simple and practical: I just want to remember how to do stuff that I already “know” how to do, or recall details of some stored but not particularly important piece of information. Some examples:
- I need to look up an address or other contact information
- If I only do some task every 6 months, I forget the details, and it frustrates me
- There’s some specialized syntax to get my LaTeX figure or jupyter plot to look just right
I’d put all these under the general heading of Augmented Memory. I forget facts and details over time, and this is stuff I don’t need to burden my brain with remembering, so long as I have a way to recall it quickly and without much effort. This may be boring, but it’s both necessary and the more common use of a note taking system.
The second category is far more interesting and is generally the one I think folks in this thread like contemplating, which I’d put under the heading of Aspirational Thinking: I want to have amazing new thoughts that no one has ever had before! And I want this system to help me do that. Asimov’s notion of creativity, which heavily shapes my thinking here, held that new ideas come from people taking two [or more] things they already know and combining them in a new way. From what I’ve read about Zettelkasten, this seems entirely consistent with taking all the things I know, breaking them into index-card-digestible pieces, and noodling on their possible linkages, at which point new ideas will reveal themselves.
Given these two different uses – the mundane and the revelatory – I’d like a system that can handle both, and I think there’s a commonality that can be leveraged. The problem with human memory is that we lose the handle – the pointer if you’re a computer nerd – to stuff that our brain knows. The challenge is to find a way to refresh the handle or at least give ourselves more places to grasp on to the things we already know, if only we had the pointer to it. As Tiago Forte said in his note on Progressive Summarization:
Once we capture something, how do we structure the note so that it’s easily discoverable and usable in the future? How do we make sure what we’re saving today adds value to future projects, even when we can’t predict or even imagine what those projects might be?
There’s agreement here to add lots of metadata, as @ryanjamurphy said:
In other other words: when you’re note-taking, capture rich notes, use useful tags, and keep good metadata.
But there’s a part of me that see this as just adding many classes, instead of just one, when I add a note to the system.
In an attempt to tie these thoughts together, I see base classes or categories as a set of default handles or entry points that I can grab onto without much effort. I may remember that an idea was sparked by a particular author or a conversation with a colleague, so my entry point in either case is Person. So I can think of “Asimov” or “Luhmann” or “Forte” or “ryanjamurphy” as short-hand for a body of thought, a handle or pointer to a complex set of concepts. A tool that can help me follow this entry point to a web of other ideas is what I’m looking for.