Take Note!

Five months ago I wrote something on reading and note-taking and made mention of the Zettelkasten Method, Evergreen Notes, Digital Gardens, Smart Notes and Second Brains.

Let me try to provide some context and background to that:

The Zettelkasten Method is a method of making notes and thinking about things and committing these thoughts to writing using slips of paper or index cards (zettels) that are stored in boxes or cases (kastens). The word zettelkasten as a whole essentially means slipcase.

The individual notes (which contain one specific idea) are indexed and then linked or cross-referenced to other notes so they can be readily located and the connections between notes (ie. ideas) easily seen. This review, indexing and linking of ideas is the heart of Zettelkasten and the engine which drives its use.

The creator or developer of this method of thinking and storage is Niklas Luhmann. Niklas was a German sociologist from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s. His Zettelasten system contained 90,000 zettels and allowed him to write in excess of 60 books and 400 articles during his career with little to no research assistance. He continued to publish books after his retirement, and his system was so comprehensive that, reputedly, further books were able to be published from his Zettelkasten after his death.

His method was purely paper-based. These days development has gone into Zettelkasten-style systems that are computer based. Just a few of these are Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq and flowtelic. Some of these are free, some are subscription-based. Some are cross-platform and others are limited to Windows and/or Mac and/or Linux.

What I find of the most interest in this rabbit hole is that Niklas Luhmann stated¹ that his zettels are not recorded so he can think about an issue later, or to record the results of his previous thinking, but his thinking is done whilst he is writing his zettels. On the contrary, if I make a note of something it is either to record a discrete idea that I have finished thinking about and am now recording for posterity, or to capture a concept or idea of something I want to give more thought to in the future. In my case it is almost never the thinking process in and of itself. Fascinating!

So I have tried some of these electronic Zettelkasten systems over the past six-or-so months. I used Obsidian for a couple of months but discarded it because it doesn’t really suit the way I think or need to use it. More recently I have been using Logseq. The main things I want to record are thoughts/ideas/questions/comments on Bible passages, and almost wiki-style notes on things I have had to do in various Linux distros or apps by way of special installation, configuration or editing. The later is ideally suited to electronic recording and storage because I am clearly in front of a computer when undertaking these tasks.

The way I currently use Logseq is to record whatever I want to make note of in the dated journal section, use indentations to note subsidiary thoughts, and tag the top level note so that I can access it later.

A sample note may look like this:

Friday 31st December 2022

• Today I was thinking about [[logseq]]. The double brackets will create a tag that I can view to collect all of my notes on that tag. I can also tag this line using #logseq
• These tags [[logseq]] and #logseq work identically in Logseq, but differently in Obsidian.
• I can click on a tag and be taken to a page that collects all of my notes with that tag.
  • I can make additional notes about that tag on the tag page, or keep my notes in dated journals.
• Logseq seems to work best when you use indentations to create structure and hierarchy.
  • Logseq works best whe writing using bullet points rather than flowing paragraphs.
• Subsequent lines can also contain tags, and any line of text (called a block) can contain multiple tags such as #tag #Logseq #[[bullet points]]
• You can also create hierarchy using tags that are nested by forward slashes such as #zettelaksten/notetaking

I have watched some videos on using Logseq by OneStutteringMind (Dario da Silva) that provide a helpful introduction to the software.