This is a fascinating discussion, as I’ve just been diving into developing a PKM system in the last week. Was pointed to Zettelkasten by someone in a completely unrelated context — an online music forum — and have since been reading all I can find to help me solidify my personal conception of the ideal system. I’ve been using Evernote for almost 9 years, and more recently a combination of GoodNotes for day-to-day research notes — which bounce back and forth between typed and [Apple Pencil] hand-written, depending on my mood — and LiquidText for PDF careful reading and markup. Have been frustrated that each of these 3 tools does only part of the job I want done, and would love to see Obsidian become a unifying app…
But to the topic at hand of forming useful relationships between notes, I wanted to comment specifically on the use of Folders. For my first vault, I’ve employed a combination of project specific folders, which map to my work as an R&D scientist, and a simple folder structure I’ve used successfully in the past: yyyy/mm/. I find this to be the most generic way to solve the problem of one giant, flat folder, because at the start of each month, I create a new bucket to dump notes into. Obvious advantages:
- No bucket is ever too full to quickly browse through
- The structure naturally captures one of the axes — creation time — by which I tend to access data. My daily work and thinking most likely lies in the current bucket; I can remember the last several buckets without too much effort; and due to the forgetting curve, past projects are remembered more by [approximate] year than anything else.
- Having now seen the Zettelkasten UID, the full file path in this system seems to be not entirely unlike the dreaded [to me at least] 14 digit time stamp, without the offense of a time stamp as a file name. I should note that I’ve been adding my daily notes with the simple name <dd.md>, so today’s note would be 2020/05/30.md. Easy!
- By dropping new notes relating to any topic into the current bucket, I’m implicitly not relying on the bucket to provide any categorical information about the meaning of the note, other than as a marker of when I was thinking about it.
This leaves me with a system where I have to explicitly provide the relationships between notes or concepts via links, tags, MOCs, or whatever else I may use — and I believe the goal of any PKM system is to make you think about the linkages in your knowledge — while providing a rough temporal framework in the physical storage structure.
I’m sure I’ll evolve on this, but that’s what I’ve created as a starting point.