I have a very similar note writing style to @mambocab as I am also heavily influenced by Andy Matuschak.
Example:
2 Likes
Thanks again for the example; helps! Whare are the little tag things like before Spaced repetition and Graph Note Databases (sorry, learning md amidst everything else)?
so in your note, you say - ‘Adapted from a claim in Cheng…’ yet you don’t link to anything but you do explain it in your own words; no thought or need to keep the link to the ‘claim’ in your experience?
@kdnavrat Ah whoops that’s a subtlety of my system at work here. 
In the note title you will notice the suffix (E.2102150921) which denotes it as an evergreen note of my own thinking.
In the reference section at the end of the note is a link to another note with the suffix (L.2102150922) which denotes it as a literature note capturing a single concept from a single source.
Here’s what that note looks like:
Notice the source link at the bottom. Literature notes in my system by definition have a single source, not a “sources” or “references” section.
That source note (with the S... suffix) in turn looks like this: (zoomed out a bit to be more visible in the screenshot)
These “source notes” are where I take my rough notes from a source, then compile them together and turn them into those individual literature notes capturing specific concepts. (yes this is a different use of the term “literature note” than many people)
Here’s an example of a source note that is partially complete, for Wozniak’s 20 rules of knowledge formulation:
As I (gradually – incremental reading!) process the source I extract information and chunk it together into those phrase-titled literature notes, each tied back to their source.
I will admit I’m not 100% happy with the L. and E. distinction because the line between them gets very blurry fairly often. Creating this distinction really helped me when I was dealing with a rapid explosion of my notes in the early days but now I’m starting to question the utility. It may be that I convert most/all of my L. notes to E. notes in the near future. TBD.
6 Likes
Thanks - makes sense and seems very clean; I’m new and working thru various ways of working with the tool and your examples are very helpful.
Good question – those are literally just the label emoji (
) in the title of the file. I experimented a bit with links-to-files-as-topic-tags-denoted-with-naming, but it creates too much friction, as I had to make decisions about “oh, is this an MOC or just a list or is it a tag note or…”. I just haven’t cleaned them up because their continued presence doesn’t do any harm.
I like them and what it does to the sort order; thanks
@kdnavrat Note that I did NOT start out like this. My system was a mess at first because I was frantically thrashing around trying a wide variety of things. Because of that I recommend newcomers start simple and focus on principles over mechanics, and solve the problems that come up when they come up.
I have a lot of junk floating around in my notes that I periodically work on cleaning up.
The good news I suppose is that I have a LOT of info on good and bad note taking principles now lol. A lot of it from failed experiments.
@mambocab I’ve done the same kinds of experimentation! I’ve used emoji and unicode for file name prefixes, at one point I was using tree emoji as a prefix then I made it a tag and then I abandoned it. I then decided to use a lightbulb emoji as a prefix (for some weird reason) and then abandoned it but had weird leftover files with it randomly scattered around. Now I’m resurrecting the emoji not as a file name prefix but to denote insights within notes which seems to work well.
As you said it gets difficult when trying to keep things straight because concepts can get so overlapped once you have enough notes. I do think a classification method of some kind is useful but more as a mental model to guide behavior than as something explicit in the note system itself.
2 Likes
This 
What you’ve shared here makes sense to me and I’d like to implement it. I spent time last week creating some top-down MOCs that I had to force notes into. I realize now that I need to delete these non-existent MOCs and look at what themes and connections already exist.
You say you didn’t start out like this. Did you always time-stamp your notes? If you had to go back and put timestamps on them and they weren’t already created, how would you do it?
Someone else wrote about the utility of making a general catch-all note of a source, then breaking out into smaller literature notes, with these being distinct from evergreens. It may have been on the reddit forum.
You say you didn’t start out like this. Did you always time-stamp your notes? If you had to go back and put timestamps on them and they weren’t already created, how would you do it?
No I didn’t. It’s funny because this is something I wrestled with a lot early on, and I adopted multiple ID methods. First I used no ID, then Luhmann numbering, then no ID again, then timestamp in front, then no ID again, then timestamp at end. Each time I re-ID’d all of my notes. This wasn’t too bad when I had a few dozen but now I have over 500 so it is not something I would want to do again.
I like the timestamp at the end because it solves the unique ID problem without obstructing readability of the link in the text. This means I don’t need to pollute my system with an alias for every single note like I did with the timestamp-prefix approach. (or alternately, don’t use an alias and have the timestamp prefix act as a speed-bump while reading every link in a note – this annoyed the heck out of me)
As far as how, Keyboard Maestro macros really help. In fact that’s what I use now to create the suffix stamps, with a couple of hotkeys set that automatically updates the title of whatever note I’m in.
Someone else wrote about the utility of making a general catch-all note of a source, then breaking out into smaller literature notes, with these being distinct from evergreens. It may have been on the reddit forum.
May have been me. That’s my approach and I’ve talked about it a lot lol.
I will say its getting a little messy and I’m starting to work on tweaks to that approach now that I have a better understanding of the pros and cons of it, especially given my specific needs.
2 Likes
I just had a thought about this. From what I understand the Zettelkasten purists would say that every note should have a unique identifier. There is a good discussion of this here
I suppose you could use the title of the note for the UI but then the title could never change or be used twice.
I am going to try using the file name as a hierarchical numbering system as originally contemplated by the Godfather of Zettelkasten.
I will then add a descriptive title at the top of the note.
Some would say that this is not strictly necessary with a digital Zettelkasten but I think there will be value in having a loose “physical” place for each note, with related notes located in “proximity” to each other. I am hoping this added level of abstraction will add value.
Actually, I suppose you could use a unique ID with a descriptive title appended to the ID…
My YAML Template
---
title: {{title}} ({{date:DDMMYYYYhhmmss}})
author: # YOUR NAME HERE
date: {{date:dddd, D MMMM YYYY}} / {{time:HH:mm:ss}} # change this if you don't like it! use "\today" without " " to display current date
lang: en-EN # change language to display date in your locale (de-DE, ro-RO etc.)
geometry: # this are settings for page geometry
- a4paper # change to a0paper, a1paper, a2paper, a3paper, a4paper, a5paper, a6paper,b0paper, b1paper, b2paper, b3paper, b4paper, b5paper, b6paper,c0paper, c1paper, c2paper, c3paper, c4paper, c5paper, c6paper,b0j, b1j, b2j, b3j, b4j, b5j, b6j,ansiapaper, ansibpaper, ansicpaper, ansidpaper, ansiepaper,letterpaper, executivepaper, legalpaper
- margin=2.5cm # use "inch" if you like it: "margin=1in" or whatever
- heightrounded
- bindingoffset=.5cm # offset for binding
header-includes: # settings for header & footer
# - \usepackage{} ; if you know LaTeX add here more packages in preamble
- \usepackage{fancyhdr}
- \pagestyle{fancy} # change to "empty" if you don't want it
- \fancyhead[L]{\textbf{\leftmark}} # settings for left header
- \fancyhead[R]{\textbf{\rightmark}} # settings for right header
- \lfoot{}\cfoot{\thepage}\rfoot{} # put page no. on center footer
linestretch: 1.2 # line spread of the document; change to "1", "1.2" whatever
numbersection: false # change to "true" if you want to display numbers on sections
bibliography: [full/path/to/file.bib] # full path to .bib file
csl: [full/path/to/style.csl] # put here your full path to style (all of styles available here <https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles>)
documentclass: article # available options: report, book
toc: true # shows Table of Coontents; change to "false" if you don't want it
toc-depth: 5 # this is the maximum depth of TOC
toccolor: MidnightBlue # <see here other colors: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/xcolor/xcolor.pdf>
---
<!-- borrowed from "tomgac" https://forum.obsidian.md/u/tomgac/ -->
<!-- Connections | Consequences | Implications -->
<!-- Why is this of interest? -->
<!-- What else does this relate to? -->
<!-- Where have i heard this before? -->
<!-- What does the opposite of this mean? -->
<!-- Compare how this fits with X or Y -->
<!-- Contrast with Z -->
<!-- How can this be combined with other ZKN notes? -->
<!-- What is missing? -->
<!-- What are the similarities? -->
<!-- How does this connect to XYZ? -->
<!-- How does this fit with what i know? -->
<!-- Can this be explained by something else? -->
<!-- What are the limitations? -->
<!-- Is this convincing? -->
<!-- Can this be disproved? -->
<!-- Why X 5? -->
<!-- What if this is wrong? -->
<!-- What if... -->
<!-- So what? -->
Use this template with Pandoc:
pandoc YourMDfile.md -o YourPDFfile.pdf
If you use citation use:
pandoc --citeproc YourMDfile.md -o YourPDFfile.pdf
5 Likes
Reason of Format
Most of my notes in Obsidian are related to Math. So, I created a very own zk template to go along with it (Sometimes I use this template for different categories, but it’s a solid template in general).
***
Tags:
Links:
Explanation of Links:
Zettelkasten:
Summary:
***
# title
*Context*
***
## Questions
Tags:
- [ ] *insert question*
- *future solution*
Zettelkasten:
Tags:
Links:
3 Likes
I really like your template. Especially the connection with the MOCs (Tags). I would like you to give me an example to clarify more about the “footer” of the template. It looks a bit like what I am implementing for Topic Maps in Obsidian.
When you say topic: - do you mean the overall topic of the book. Or is it the topic of the note from the book?
Thanks
Templater’s System Module has the function tp.system.clipboard() to access the system clipboard.
My template (that is not complete, I’m still developing it) has the code below to insert the contents of my Clipboard into the note upon creation:
## Quote(s):
> <% tp.system.clipboard() %>
1 Like
It’s your note so definitely you know what the icons mean. I incorporate some icons to depict tag and links; they look neat and nice.
- One awesome tip: You can actually use icon in tag!
-Cheers-
🌈 #
🗂: [[
# {{title}}
ㅤ
#### References