5 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Your First Zettelkasten:zap:
My Zettelkasten is now more than 9 months old. When I started to write my first notes with Obsidian I followed the rule “Start early and learn by experiment.”
But I also learned: Experiments took a lot of my precious time. Here are my top mistakes to avoid when starting your first Zettelkasten:
- Starting without templates - so that it was hard to build up a consistent note structure I needed later for effective searching.
- Using tags without rules for tagging - so that building clusters for searching was not very effective.
- No use of frontmatter - so that meta data and content of notes became inconsistent and confusing.
- No use of time stamps like “created” and “modified” within frontmatter - so that using backups and changing cloud spaces caused a loss of time information connected with my notes.
- No use of DataView plugin as a tool for gardening - so that inconsistencies in my Zettelkasten were growing and growing.
All these mistakes lead to intensive re-work of my notes later on.
What about your experiences?