notes workflow with zettelkasten system
2 years ago, I jumped into the personal knowledge management craze, especially the #zettelkasten system, as implemented in Obsidian or (in my case) org-roam on top of #Emacs .
How did it go?
I've actually kept using it this whole time!
How do I use it? Mainly, when I learn about a new topic, I make a new note for that topic. For instance, I got obsessed with Lagrangians towards the end of 2020 and made a note about that. I later made more notes for "Lagrangian biomechanics" and "Non standard Lagrangian". The new thing here is the concept of "backlinks". Each of the 2 notes above link to "Lagrangian", and so just by going to "Lagrangian" note I can see the notes linking to that. It's really magic! I often rediscover notes I wrote months ago and almost always find what I stashed away.
I find this most useful for literature reviews or just to recollect my thoughts about specific subfields. I also have notes for books, admin stuff (like one with all the zoom links), ideas for stories, class notes, and notes on how to do things.
One revelation about the zettelkasten system I got from browsing Scott Scheper's materials, https://zettelkasten.de/posts/introduction-antinet-zettelkasten/ , is how useful it is to have a full tree hierarchy, rather than a set of interconnected notes. I do this in org-roam by linking to the "parent" at the top of each note. This makes the graph so much more browsable and naturally interconnects subjects. Just go up and down the hierarchy to see links!
notes workflow with zettelkasten system
here's a demo where I zoom in and out on my full knowledge graph. It's growing quite a bit, at 633 notes already!
