~5 Years of Zettelkasten (Winter 2025)

I've been doing this Zettelkasten thing for a couple years now, with the earliest posts I'm able to find from March of 2020. So perhaps let's check in on how we're using it these days.

What is Zettelkasten?

• It's a fancy word for, along with a few core completely optional highly subjective techniques/processes for managing personal notes.
• "Digital Brain", "Second Brain", "Zettelkasten", "Personal Wiki" are all variations/synonyms for similar ideas.

And... How is that Different from Having Notes?

The main differentiation between notes and zettelkasten to me is that a zettelkasten is something you can and must "work within" over time. Notes which are written once and put in a hard drive or a binder somewhere are "dead". If I want notes which are "alive", I need to put in the work of tending that garden.

One reward reaped from having living notes is the ability to converse with yourself across time (e.g., listening to what you had to say years ago and writing a "Hey it's you from the future, turns out this is a really bad idea"). Another is building knowledge graphs over time by revisiting/adding to/rewriting older notes when reviewing new source material - you can see if the new source aligns with your old understanding and make corrections or slot in nuances.

What Do You Use It For?

• Managing Career Knowledge:
• When I have to learn something at work (a common need), I take focused notes including only non-proprietary details, so that I can cleanly export it to my own knowledge base.
• e.g., I need to learn about cybersecurity "secure development frameworks" and software development lifecycles to support a NPI project. The topics are too varied and complex to rely on memory... and also are not usually explained in original source materials cleanly & cogently.
• The material in my ZK is already vetted and organized in a way that makes sense to me (the structure matches the knowledge graph in my brain).
• Managing Personal Knowledge:
• Dog training, techniques, our progress, general philosophy
• Botanical and practical info on plants that are out in my garden
• Cooking ideas, techniques, recipes
• Keeping logs for things
• Journaling
• Newportonian Multiscale Planning
• Linux log (how did I fix that thing? How do we fix pacman update signatures? What on earth is the ebook application called?)
• Lists: Vacation planning, books to read, movies to watch, books/movies I have already read/seen and what I thought of it.
• "Classical" Zettelkasten Stuff:
• e.g., reading papers/books, taking notes, connecting ideas and writing zettels on those connections. Occasionally. Most of my "study focus energy" goes to work-related tasks, and so there's little leftover for scholarly pursuits.

What Tools Are Used?

• I like Obsidian, but my system is based on plain text or markdown files and images and is therefore software agnostic.
• Git for archival and backup - Git repository lives on my desktop, laptop, and VPS server. (VPS is the repository origin and serves as a link between desktop and laptop.) When I want to transfer things between computers, or when I've just written something I'm paranoid about losing, I can just commit and push in git.
• This also inadvertently gets my ZK backed up in 2 physical locations and on 3 different machines.
• Email for sending (non-proprietary) information from work to myself, for incorporation into the kasten.

How is it Organized?

• Single folder with a flat file structure
• Main method of navigating is by search...
• With consistent and meaningful filenames, search by file title is usually adequate. For deeper searches, a proper full-text search is essential (i.e., one that gives a preview of the search hit within context so you don't have to open every file to see).
• As I add notes, if they fit into a logical structure, and once I have enough notes/ideas that are starting to break the law of atomicity in Zettelkasten, I'll create a Struct (table of contents/links to relevant content.)
• Because there are a lot of structs, to help me see "what's out there" and navigate, there is also a struct struct. (A struct with pointers to all the various structs.)

What Are the Pain Points?

• Knowledge availability -- Since my home computers are the canonical knowledge base, and they contain personal information I don't want cloned onto my work computer, I often find myself wanting to reference something while in the office and not having it available.
• Traceability -- In most cases where there is more than one source, I can't tell what information came from what source. (Not usually an issue for personal work, but often in med device there is the question: "Can you show me where it says this?")

What ZK Ideas Do We Not Use?

• Tagging - Just never did it consistently enough to find benefit.
• Reference database - I was maintaining this very early on but found no benefit compared to just putting the source reference in each zettel.
• Not using categories - I prefer a curated list (Structs) rather than searching for tags. However, the category comes after the note is created, and only when/if I think it would be helpful to organize multiple notes.