The credit goes to Luhmann. Ahrens wrote a book about Luhmann's system, but Ahrens' book was more about the practical side of study habits and the nature of knowledge as much as it was about the practical side of actually using a zettelkasten.
It is too complicated. We just get, save or write something, maybe with some categories, keywords, or tags.
After saving, maybe you need some organization later, but most time they are just there. Most time you search content by categories, keywords, or tags.
I think we need right tools for different requirements.
It depends on how you want to use your notes. If you're looking for a way to store information for later retrieval then what you described will probably work great. Zettelkasten is more about discovering connections between ideas that were not immediately obvious, and creating and discovering new ideas as you work with your notes.
Systems like these made sense in the pre-AI era, where things needed to be organized at the outset to be useful later.
With AI, there's nothing stopping you from dumping a huge pile of information into a single folder and telling an AI what you want to make with it that day.
Actually AI also benefits from thins being organized.
I find Skills to be Zettlekasten inspired or wiki inspired in that sense.
Zettlekast has other benefits for humans though.
If your goal is to grasp lot of knowladge oyu need to do it in atomic way, connect mentally to what you already know and do spaced repetition to internalize.
Zettlkeaste forces you do it it all as part of organizing. Basically by organizing you make it your own.
Yes AI can help today but it also means it does not stay in your head.
Not sure its important if it is in your head or you can call AI at any moment instead of your own memory.
How many people actually find utility from a Zettelkasten system?
I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.
I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.
I found it useful when writing a thesis. It gave me a way to research many ideas, not directly connected to the main topic, but still interesting in my mind at least. I really enjoyed this unstructured approach. I didn't have to worry that I will get stuck, because I always had a way back to the main topic.
So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.
It comes down to are you reading to write, or reading to think?
Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.
Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.
I am in the same boat. And then with full text search, I wonder how much it is truly needed.
But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.
It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye to producing more, you will need to take a lot of research notes and you will inevitably organize them one way or another. If you are a working software developer, your needs are very different. I think most of the HN-blog-ecosystem-adjacent zettelkastens exist mostly for the fun of playing with information.
One of the core ideas - atomicity of notes - is a practice valuable on its own, and maybe the fundamental value of Zettl. It has really helped me to reduce digital note sprawl, and a natural sort of topic taxonomy has revealed itself as I refactor notes and link between them. Ensuring that my notes are atomic means that, as I write, natural fracture lines emerge - and I follow them. I break notes up along these lines, keeping them linked if there’s a relationship - which may be parent/child, peer, or whatever.
Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.
I think your analysis is right, zettelkasten is really good for research, writing and well... Linking ideas together. For projects, I just have a directory with plain text notes, todos, references and links.
I don't follow this system per se, but for me the unlock was to build a a map of my life from the get go, following the PARA system (projects, areas, resources, archives). It has been a game changer because now I willingly take more notes, snip more quotes etc as it's never a struggle to know where they fit.
I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt:
/template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .
It's just so easy.
Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.
I built the AS Notes extension for VS Code (https://asnotes.io) partly because I wanted to be able to write my notes with the support of other VS Code extensions, and because of the agent harness options in VS Code (copilot etc). The key thing for easy zettlekasten management is really good wikilink support in markdown. AS Notes supports nested wikilinking and automatic updating in the index on rename etc.
yeah the maintenance spiral is exactly why I gave up and just dumped everything into a GitHub repo. plain markdown files, no plugins, no drama. only problem is GitHub's renderer is kind of garbage for a real wiki. ended up having to build my own github wiki reader
Can anyone share agent skills that specifically help with the organizing, structuring, and linking of Obsidian files like a Karpathy style wiki? (Eg taking /raw content and processing it following some protocol)
I really want to use Obsidian but it being closed source is a big No for me. I know I can keep all my files in plain text and move on to another platform buy the thing is: if a bunch of files and a FS were enough for me to keep my KB, then ofc I wouldn’t need something like Obsidian. The thing is I need something like Obsidian; a bunch of files lying around is not enough for me
Technically, Obsidian is just a fancy 'browser/editor' for markdown files laying around. Should Obsidian disappear as a functional tool tomorrow, recreating the basic functionality (show, edit, manage links, follow links) would take a sufficiently motivated guy a few hours. If you need the 'petri dish' view, maybe a little longer. In such an event, I suppose enough people would be eager to build their own and OSS variants would emerge within days.
If you can stomach not working in Markdown, emacs' ORGmode exists and has all the functionality Obsidian has, and then some, open source, with a slightly different hypertext format.
Unless you are hellbent on one particular Obsidian plugin, you should be good.
I see a lot of people say you have to use methodology X, or that methodology Y is worthless.
I'm the end, I think we have maybe different uses for notes. Journaling, scratchpads, to-do lists, research, etc.
Take a methodology with a grain of salt. If it doesn't fit, there's a good chance it's solving someone else's problem, but you can always inform your own approach with it.
Why on Earth, the chapter “What the Zettelkasten method actually is” doesn’t tell me what is this method? The same with the first result on Kagi. There are several paragraphs without saying anything worth saying. They have a very religious kind of feeling.
I had to force even LLM to answer properly, because it answered the same substanceless way. The only thing helped is to ask it, what distinguishes this to the web, wikis, or HATEOAS.
Having to manage links and tags for every note quickly makes the notion of a note system less than appealing.
Personally, I use a "temporary -Zettelkasten" strategy in my inbox. But it's more that I just timestamp new notes.
The power of obsidian imo is that I can quickly organize those inbox notes into their respective project notes with the touch of a hotkey
And then again in the project note, the Obsidian editor features (mostly around useful hotkeys) allow me to quickly manage my notes how I see fit (no particular strategy here other than being heavily influenced by GTD)
Zettelkasten is great for researchers. I actually don't think it's that valuable for practicing technologists. The general practice of taking notes and connecting ideas together is of course useful, but most technologists don't need such a sophisticated system.
Amid all the fanaticism that grew around zettelkasten method the past few years people have forgotten and de-emphasized the fact that for Luhmann it was not a "second brain" to be referenced on demand, it was explicitly a system to support writing. It is tailored to help researchers write papers. It shines if you actually need a system in which to keep notions coherent and organized so that ideas are clear and citations precise when you need them during the writing process. If that's not you, the overhead probably isn't worth it. Just keep a notebook.
What I'm taking issue in is the many opinions on how to build something really useful yourself. I love Obsidian, because it does what it does great - taking notes, easy and fast navigation, no bullshit. What I don't like is the urge to do so many things with it, todos, libraries, etc. Obsidian wasn't built for this. I had spent months improving my Obsidian setup when finally I realized I don't want to spend all this time on making a note-taking tool do something else. As a dev, naturally, I started developing my own stuff to be perfect for me, but not everybody can do that. Technical users might like spending hours implementing the perfect system for their lifes, but I think for everybody else it should be so much easier.
The article highlights that the real value of the ZK method is in the discovery of the deeper connections that run between ideas that on the surface may appear unrelated.
I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.
I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.
> Large language models can’t do much with raw notes or scattered documents.
Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.
41 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 65.6 ms ] threadAfter saving, maybe you need some organization later, but most time they are just there. Most time you search content by categories, keywords, or tags.
I think we need right tools for different requirements.
My practical guide on setting up a smart notes / Zettelkasten / atomic notes Vault: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-zettelkasten
Also wrote about how it fits into my overall Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault
Edit: Oh, I actually just found the comment from the author here, sounds like AI slop.
https://github.com/skiwithuge/brainstack
With AI, there's nothing stopping you from dumping a huge pile of information into a single folder and telling an AI what you want to make with it that day.
Zettlekast has other benefits for humans though. If your goal is to grasp lot of knowladge oyu need to do it in atomic way, connect mentally to what you already know and do spaced repetition to internalize. Zettlkeaste forces you do it it all as part of organizing. Basically by organizing you make it your own.
Yes AI can help today but it also means it does not stay in your head. Not sure its important if it is in your head or you can call AI at any moment instead of your own memory.
I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.
I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.
So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.
Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.
Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.
But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.
Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.
At some point, these complex systems become a form of procrastination.
I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt: /template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .
It's just so easy.
Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.
If you can stomach not working in Markdown, emacs' ORGmode exists and has all the functionality Obsidian has, and then some, open source, with a slightly different hypertext format.
Unless you are hellbent on one particular Obsidian plugin, you should be good.
Later, if you want to publish the files as HTML, you can use MkDocs.
I'm the end, I think we have maybe different uses for notes. Journaling, scratchpads, to-do lists, research, etc.
Take a methodology with a grain of salt. If it doesn't fit, there's a good chance it's solving someone else's problem, but you can always inform your own approach with it.
I had to force even LLM to answer properly, because it answered the same substanceless way. The only thing helped is to ask it, what distinguishes this to the web, wikis, or HATEOAS.
Personally, I use a "temporary -Zettelkasten" strategy in my inbox. But it's more that I just timestamp new notes.
The power of obsidian imo is that I can quickly organize those inbox notes into their respective project notes with the touch of a hotkey
And then again in the project note, the Obsidian editor features (mostly around useful hotkeys) allow me to quickly manage my notes how I see fit (no particular strategy here other than being heavily influenced by GTD)
Amid all the fanaticism that grew around zettelkasten method the past few years people have forgotten and de-emphasized the fact that for Luhmann it was not a "second brain" to be referenced on demand, it was explicitly a system to support writing. It is tailored to help researchers write papers. It shines if you actually need a system in which to keep notions coherent and organized so that ideas are clear and citations precise when you need them during the writing process. If that's not you, the overhead probably isn't worth it. Just keep a notebook.
I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.
I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.
Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.