#6

Ha, touché and well said!

#7

Luhmann used it as an aid to thinking and writing/publishing. He carefully limited what he put in. A store of his own work-related thoughts.

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#8

@nickmilo I really like several of those answers from Discourse but I don’t think they’re helpful to someone searching for a PKM system. A far better question for many in these forums might be “when are you not creating a zettlekasten?” To which my answers would be:

  1. when you are capturing a giant list of random notes that have unique numeric addresses, and/or,
  2. when you are having a machine create automatic links between your notes.

Both are falling right into the collectors fallacy that the system was created to avoid. Neither helps with real learning.

7 Likes
#9

@greasemonkey Excellent points.

What IS NOT a zettelkasten is equally important to understand.

Your two points are good examples of that. For point two, what software even does that?

#10

That is what I am considering to do, but “IT” is a broad field in itself. And then there is unrelated stuff, books I read etc. Guess I need at least 2 vaults to keep this somehow sane and usable.

#11

Not sure any does - but there have been feature requests to have Obsidian perform in that fashion. There is also a potential pitfall even in the drop down selector for backlinks - if you’re mindlessly backlinking.

Personally I’d argue that there are 2 main values in Zettleing - 1) the habit of reading with pen in hand and 2) the value of investing mental energy in how a permanent note fits into your existing knowledge. Your concept of MOCs fits #2 perfectly although I would suspect that there will be many folks who go too far with that as well. (Meaning that the value is there only as long as you are thinking hard about how the knowledge fits - once you drift into heavy tweaking of the system you are succumbing to the procrastination/collectors fallacy that our minds are so prone too).

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#12
  1. the value of investing mental energy in how a permanent note fits into your existing knowledge.

I love that phrase.

I agree I’m a little concerned people might misuse MOCs simply to collect notes, when MOCs provide the most value as an active thinking tool.

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#13

Just to be contrarian… although you may certainly be corrrect in how a Zettelkasten is best used and what the strongest values are - some people will (and are) using Obsidian in other ways.

As long as features and functions don’t take away from either use case, I’m fine with it, but I don’t think we should view every usage strictly in how one person or another thinks the tool should be used.

Not slighting any of the presented ideas or use cases at all - just mentioning that somebody else with an entirely different way of working, even if it doesn’t get them the maximum that it could - well, it’s their use case :slight_smile:

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#14

Certainly true. But this thread is a discussion specifically about Zettlekasten - it’s right there in the title. I can’t find a post here anywhere suggesting that other use cases aren’t valid, useful or appropriate?

#15

OK, fair enough… I’m probably conflating multiple threads on here.

I guess my take was that even within the idea of a Zettelkasten, people may have multiple ways of best using it to fit their needs.

Not important, I’ll crawl back in my hole.

#16

Absolutely - a point I’ve hammered on other threads (there are a LOT of zettlekasten threads bouncing around right now).

Please don’t. Did not intend to be overly harsh - the Obsidian forums (here and on Discord) are a great community of thinkers trying to figure out their own best practices and I’ve gotten a lot of value from it.

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#17

I’ve been noodling on the idea of permanent notes versus just plain notes as I’ve been stuffing things into Obsidian for the last 2 weeks. There is overhead associated with doing the thinking and linking, but that’s also where the future value is created, if I understand Zettelkasten correctly. I’m trying to develop the habits of doing this thinking and linking even for more mundane stuff – project review meeting notes for a project that won’t be relevant to me 5 years from now, for example – so that the process becomes ingrained. I know which stuff is more important to my permanent knowledge, but I want the act of note taking to be thoughtful as a matter of practice.

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#18

No worries… and I totally agree that it seems a great community!

I learn something new nearly every time I stop in :slight_smile:

#19

I liked Christian from Zettelkasten De two paragraph explanation, so here it is

In short, the Zettelkasten Method is all about working with knowledge: you capture ideas, connect and interweave them, and thus facilitate coming up with new ideas. The process makes it easy to keep an overview of complex topics and also work on hard problems for a long time without getting lost even after week-long interruptions in your work.

At base, the principles are to create atomic notes and links between them. To find out what this means and how that works, have a look at our curated article overview, and make sure you visit the forum and get to know the amazing people there.

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#20

ZK is a research/writing tool, not a PKM system.

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#21

Genuine question: Please can you explain your reasoning, and more specifically how would you define a PKM system?

I’m unsure whether I need a more “traditional” app for, what I assume could be deemed more PKM notes, such as recipes, lesson notes, people CRM etc. and something more lateral like Obsidian for research/writing. I don’t yet know whether Obsidian can hold it all.

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#22

Oh boy, that’s pretty difficult to define because everyone is using their system slightly differently. Everything you mentioned you can—and probably—should try to do that in something like Obsidian. YMMV, but you may be pleasantly surprised

#23

Thank you @nickmilo. After posting I did some more research into Zettlekasten and have decided to throw it all in the same app. I think I’ll be pleasantly surprised, as you mentioned, in years to come when I’ll likely see some really abstract links between things. I excited to see it grow!

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#24

This is actually a very good point.
I’ll try to expand on this with my own understanding of ZK which is heavily influenced by the book “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens that I’m currently reading.

Zettelkasten is primarily a tool to support writing. “Writing” in a very broad sense and as a circular process rather than linear (more on this below).

If ZK is “only” used as a PKM system, it stops short of its potential. The goal shouldn’t be to just collect knowledge. The goal should be to come up with new ideas, to write about them and share it with the world.

In that sense, ZK supports writing because by the time you have some permanent notes and connections between them, few things have happened:

  • you developed your thinking about certain ideas by condensing them into permanent notes
  • you created relationships by connecting the notes and from these relationships, new ideas can emerge

ZK enables you to alwas have ideas for what to write about and never starting from scratch. This is how the process is circular rather than linear: you don’t start with choosing a topic, sitting behind a blank screen and then writing. The topic emerges from the relationships and you have a headstart on your writing with all the notes you already have.

I think it’s a mistake to view ZK as collecting knowledge. It’s really supposed to be a supporting structure for writing and thinking.

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#25

For me ZK means to make connection between my notes/things I read, learned, understand, found interesting or mind blowing and at the end to make meaning out of all of these learnings and my life in general.

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