To separate in different notes or not

Help
1

Hello,

Maybe a stupid question :

I For example : I have a page “Bicycles” then “Bikes”, “Bikes I own”, Bikes I am intesrested in"

There are several options :

  • One note with headers and subheaders
  • one note “Bicycles” and simple links to other notes (like a MOC)
  • One note with links visible in the note iself (![[bike]])

I like the idea of seperate notes (beautiful graphs :wink: ) but the readibility of the first solution might be better so the third solution seems to be quite a good option but more difficult to maintain.

What do you think of that ? What do you do ?

Here it is a simple topic but it could be for more difficult cases for example

2

For notes like this I will often create four separate notes and add links from the subject note “Bicycles” to the detail notes.

To see the contents of the detail notes on the subject page, I would embed them by putting an exclamation point before the link, e.g.

![[Bikes I Own]]
![[Bikes I am Interested In]]
3

Personally I’d put it all in one file.

I get you with the nice graph approach, (I’m definitely guilty on focusing too much on making a powerful graph) but at least personally I don’t really use the graph to navigate my notes.

When I have the chance I keep things within the context of the same file, if the topics are too similar.

If you are trying to achieve a zettelkasten (a series of concise notes, with the purpose of interconnecting them for creative output) then separating notes into smaller sections and connecting them is a good idea.

At least that’s what I do.

You might also benefit from using aliases in some cases

4

For me, the short answer is that it depends.

It depends on how many bikes there are in total, how many categories I want to put them in, and how much knowledge about each bike I want to have in my system.

More of anything (or everything!) pushes me toward separate notes and some kind of MOC feature.

Smaller numbers of categories and items (and especially sparse information about each item) push me toward a single note.

How I organize that information then depends on how I am using it. If there is a lot of churn between categories, I might use a kanban board (with each card linked to an individual bike’s note and using the categories for the list headings) for my MOC. If the set is more stable, I might use a note with headings or an outline. In some cases, I might even use a note containing a table as my MOC.

It seems like this should be problematic, but since I have stopped trying to standardize every single thing (with lots of reminding myself that I’m building a second brain, not a franchise), I find it easier to work with my notes. I organize things in a way that is natural for whatever it is I am organizing, and I trust iteration and evolution to adjust that as necessary.

5

Hello,

thank you for your feedbacks. For this specific use case, I did not think about Kanban :slight_smile:

6

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.