What Obsidian gurus get wrong about Zettelkasten
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- Опубліковано 18 кві 2024
- Zettelkasten is a simple yet powerful system for organizing your notes and generating writing content. So why does it get more confusing the more Obsidian videos you watch about it?
In this video, I will unpack some of the common misconceptions and confusion about using a digital zettelkasten in Obsidian.
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The biggest misconception in the PKM bubble about Luhmann and Zettelkasten is that Luhmann did not wrote "atomic notes" or he contrained himself to one Zettel/slip. He mostly wrote longer paragraphs/little essays in longhand often over multiple Zettel.
Exactly, well worth mentioning. Atomic notes are another invention of Ahrens that was never used before. “Atomicty” happens organically, you don’t impose it upon writing a note.
I’m thinking this might need a follow up video because there’s plenty I left out involving misconceptions around “fleeting notes”, something Luhmann also didn’t use.
@@TonyRamellaplease do make a video about fleeting notes. And thanks for this informative video 🎉
@@TonyRamella but didn't you say in the video that you're supposed to impose atomicity by limiting the word count? what's the point of that?
Holy shit. Finally!!! Divergent thinker!!! Yessssss! I was waiting for this like 85 years.
5:20 is gold! AND it flies in the face of the Instagrammized influencer society.
Knowing that the friction serves a purpose AND that the innate messiness of the process serves a purpose is liberating.
Most material describing Zettlekasten is over produced and edited to focus on result, not process. Particularly the habit of overwriting and editing in place.
I would love to see livestreams of people like @morganeua working on their notes, for example
Writing by hand is by far the best way to retain knowledge and arrive at conclusions. The good friction you're describing is what helps us think, and there's a lot of that when you're writing on paper - or even on a tablet, but without editing. I've been a very pro-digital writer my entire life, but the more I write this way, the more I realize I'm just typing things out because I like the process, but not the thinking and processing that writing involves; analog is sure slower, but the speed of digital writing sometimes comes with a cost of quality of your writing and your thinking, and at that point, why even write something.
I really wish your words reached the same number as those of the people with fancier thumbnails. Thanks!
In short, you did the right thing:
I found that Luhmann's information management system is not more complicated, but it is more effective than the influencers talking about taking notes on Obsidian. Because he took notes by hand:
- Studies show that taking notes by hand has a positive impact on many different brain areas.
- Writing by hand is slower than typing:
1) The slowness of handwriting helps Luhmann consider and select important words to write in literature notes. -> he will remember better
2) the brain is relaxed -> the brain is more creative: when writing literature notes -> he will come up with more ideas so he can write permanent notes.
To put it more simply. Luhmann takes notes to find as many ideas as possible to write in permanent notes, then these permanent notes will become a complete essay after Luhmann connects them together. And writing citations, summaries of content and citing sources in literature are just proof that his ideas are correct (ironically, people who make content about obsidian (also Tiago Forte) just encourage copy-paste).
Thus, copying highlights from Kindle to Obsidian becomes useless if you don't understand anything about highlights and don't get any ideas from them. I don't claim that typing makes us stupid, because people who write on computers have a habit of carefully correcting spelling and arguments, which helps them think more deeply = more smart.
Such an enlightening video thank you so much ! This is exactly what I do but I didn’t know it was a thing ! First, I write my thoughts on paper because they are clearer this way, and then I copy them on Obsidian. I didn’t know how to call this way of taking notes, I just thought I was an indecisive person, until you mentioned the word « hybrid » ! Now everything makes sense ! I don’t have to choose between digital and analogue, I can have a hybrid system :) Many many thanks ! Also, before this video, my notes on paper were not proper cards. They were written on random sheets that I threw away after having copied them on Obsidian. Now I will make real filed small cards :) !
the idea of disagreeing with yourself is really interesting
What??!! How do you get through life without re-thinking things and being of two minds about things?
@@chaosordeal294Blame the public school system
Thank god you made your video. I watched ten videos about Zettelkasten, and I have no clue how your supposed to write notes. You laid it out directly
The concept of friction and the way it could relate to discipline really helped recontextualize this whole process, thank you. It reminds me a lot of the bullet journal method. I always did that by hand with a pen and paper, and it always felt effortless; in reality, I was filtering out what didn't matter, and writing only what best served documenting. My current obsidian vault has become a constant daunting thing, because i felt like a maintainer of a productivity system and not a writer. I hope I'll be able to evolve my approach with this new inspiration!
Thank you, I'm so glad this inspired you. I could totally relate. My initial experience with Obsidian was to make it this all in one productivity system. I soon realized without the intent of writing outputs, it quickly becomes an endless information maintenance system and another source of overwhelm. The challenge of digital is constantly fighting the collector's fallacy because its so easy to effortlessly capture information based on some artificial encounter with it. Then we start to think that just by organizing and linking that information, we have advanced our learning. No, that is just making personal wikilinks.
Thanks. My interpretation of fleeting, literature, and permanent notes are as follows. Fleeting keeps quick ideas. Literature is writing an idea from my source in my own words. Permanent linked to a literature note uses my ideas or questions. I like your take too.
I love it when all the Obsidian gurus call each other gurus.
Hahaha my thoughts exactly. Great video though !
Thanks for clearing up my confusion around Permanent notes.
Many thanks Tony. This was so welcome for me, as I also have been confused by the same explanations of digital Zettelkasten on UA-cam. As a fellow 'Hunter' type I can all too easily be drawn into refining (editing) existing notes, each time I revisit them to create a link. I am going to re-watch this video many times over the coming days until I can write it up in 50 words or less :-) Please keep this content coming - its having a genuinely beneficial impact.
Hey friend, I am so glad to hear that. Thank you for the kind words! I definitely plan to keep the content coming, stay tuned.
@@TonyRamella I surely will.
Beau has a really good workflow of this in roam research
OMG! Dude thank you so much! It finally makes sense now. I like you scoured the Internet for information to learn about how to do zettelkasten, got confused and gave up. You brought me back to life concerning zettlkasten. It makes so much sense now. Keep the content coming because I subscribed to your channel and got rid of all the other confusing channels!👍
This video brought more clarity on these misconceptions than any other video on the Zettelkasten out there. Thank you for sharing it and helping.
on updating existing notes, I see many benefits with adding new note that refute existing note. first time I read about zettelkasten being the thinking partner, I have no idea what everyone talked about. then I read an essay titled "niklas luhmann card index" by johannes F.K schmidt where he describe Luhmann's slipbox as an intellectual autobiography. from there everything make sense now
I feel that people are also missing that the unique identifiers capture the (or at least some) order of the thought process. I find that important for when you're writing, because it provides a structure in addition to the links that can be followed.
Best explanation, thanks
Wow. It’s like you’re speaking for me. I’m very much relating to this video. Thank you for putting it out there.
On my initial introduction to Obsidian I came across zettle and realised that it doesn't work with my thought process
Tony, this is such a good video! thanks for sharing!
Analog Zettelkasten definitely helps, obsidian doesn't click with me neither, but once I tried adopting physical notes, the whole process become clear, although it takes more time. From choosing cetain types of note cards to customized slip box. And what the most valueable thing to me is that I can play with these cards and arrange these cards in the orders that I want to.
Great, this clears up a lot, thanks.
Excellent content... Thank you so much for your efforts...
Wow there's a LOT of great insights here, many things are finally clarified!
Thank you a lot. The best description of the system. Sweeping out all the complexity that was never the part of the system I believe. Thank you one more time!
So glad to hear it has helped clear things up for you! Thanks for watching!
I really like your view of positive friction ! Because you are constraint, have to focus on what you want to write down. And this is certainly one success or Twitter at the very beginning. You have to think of the right words to fit the 160 characters of a tweet. From contraint comes creativity. and because you have to focus, you will remember the content more easily too. Thank you !
You explain this with more clarity than ChatGPT thanks a million!❤
Thank you! I would hope so, you can’t be helping people develop knowledge by using a bot!
great explanation my dude.
I subbed because nobody discusses this at all. Thanks x
How can I give multiple likes or a BIG heart to this video? 😊 Excellent in-depth analysis! Thank you for the clarification!
I have a hard time with constraining a note to 80-100 words. Many of the notes that I have related to my day job are technical in nature, and I'll keep enough information there to either produce process guides, or other long-form content. That's a me problem that I need to work out. That being said, I'm really glad I found this video, it's cleared up a few things for me. I had pretty much given up on Zetteling because it all just felt so subjective and wishy-washy. Thanks for taking the time to walk through it concisely.
I can agree. I got discouraged by those videos. My Obsidian Zettelkasten was overloaded, too complicated and the system did not fit me very well. Then I wachted a video that presented a differened idea. Just make notes and connect them via that wonderful obsidean tool + some index notes. I really can encourgae you to start very simple and add tools as you go along. I quickly noticed what I need and added those few tools.
My current system is a speration into litarutre notes and simple notes. So in literature notes I write down book title, author etc. but also the notes from the book which are generally quiet long. In my main notes I trya to extract key ideas from texts i found interesting and I also add own thoughts.
I ignored the "dont build your own wiki" advice you talked about. And I think thats why I did not really used my main notes as much. I often edited and changed things and at the end I spend more time "fixing" my old cards than doing what I really wanted to do in the first place. I think making them permanent indeed and to contrain them to 80-100 words is a great idea. I am going to implment that right away.
I would try out my own analog Zettelkasten but buying everything for that seems to be too expensive at the moment.
Nice video, greetings from Germany.
@@thetom449 an analog box only costs as much as a pack of index cards to start, so about $4 max. If you order them on Amazon it will likely ship in a box you can use as the zettelkasten. I would encourage you to at least use note cards for writing source notes, it’s incredibly effective and helps you become a better reader.
As far as avoiding building a wiki, a good rule of thumb is don’t write notes on things you can easily find with a Google search.
I think its really unique how you approached the zettlkasten system by 'goinig back in time' and experimenting with the actual constraints of the slipbox / note card system. I am unsure whether there is an advantage to this limitation but it seems sound, especially with the idea of creating dialogue within the system. Thx boss
Thanks for this. It really clarifies some of what's really going on in a ZK. What some people don't get about one idea per card/note is that multiple ideas will break the linking logic of the whole system. If a note has 2 ideas, then some notes linking to it will be linked to thought 1, some to thought 2. This dilutes the clarity of how/why two notes are linked, and the other notes linked to those. Add a third or fourth thought on a note and it gets exponentially worse.
Great video. Thank you. Do you agree with 'fleeting notes'?
I was the 1k like video!!
No editing after is filed! Indeed.
In the end, if you get the idea down and it is linked sensibly, then you are on the right track. The notes didn't have to be perfect, just finally findable.
Thank you for the clarification with this. I have a mostly analogue brain and trying to learn this digitally has been a nightmare.
I'll be buying some notecards and a box.
I hope it brings you the instant clarity that it did for me. Let me know how it goes!
yes true, i dont not use obsidian for task or project management, it is solely for notes. if i want to do task management i use todoist, project managament id use notion or trello or something.
It have sense, but i don't agree to have inaccurate information for example if law change i change how it relying to other laws.
Heyo! I got the notecards, I got a box, I've got things to read and extract from.
And I realized I'm not sure how to make the indexing code system that goes on the card. Is this in one of your videos and I'm not finding it? Or is it super obvious and I'm just being a dunce?
Look up Folgezettel. Scott Scheper's channel is a good resource for analog ZK although I find his top down categorization approach to the numeric alpha cataloging adds too much friction for my liking. You could start real simple and just give your first note number 1. From there you go 1a, 1a1, 1a2, 2b, 2b1, 2b2a, 2b2a1, etc.
Luhmann himself wrote: It is not important where you store a Zettel as long as you can reference it from every other point to the Zettelkasten, so don't overthink the numbering, just index keywords/concepts and reference the catalog number.
I realized everything you said 3 years ago and as a writer I only got out of the infinite loop of knowledge hoarding of my own thoughts when I decided I have to have the purpose of writing to publish and not writing to learn. Learning happens along the way but if it’s my main goal then I will never publish a thing.
"Knowledge hoarding of my own thoughts"
This part really caught my eye. Could you elaborate, please? Do you mean writing down thoughts that have no long-term value?
@@Alex5000148 sure I can explain for me but of course it’s subjective for everyone.
I love to write a lot and realize that writing helps develop your speaking voice and builds confidence so I don’t think any form of writing is a waste but I do think if we aren’t intentional about our writing and not prioritize WHY we are writing then we can end up in a self imposed prison of collection and learning knowledge but doing nothing with it. Similar to how people watch/read productivity or self help content everyday and they learn a lot but they do nothing with it….they are hoarding information mentally and some hoard and put it that information away in a note taking app but to actually DO something with that information many don’t because the dopamine hit of collecting was what they were after.
We see this with people who obsessively buy clothes, cars, and are material things…they collect and collect or rather hoard those things but once they have them they don’t do anything with them or take care to nurture and fully develop them. Like with writing I have seen people in this niche (I used to be one) hoard and hoard away through excitement, all the free knowledge on the internet and obsidian, logseq, or whatever notes app is there home where they’ve done nothing with what they collected. Systems don’t help to organize your collection of knowledge when you don’t prioritize WHY you are collecting in the first place.
I saw myself doing this with my own thoughts and studies and insights and would write more and more daily because I was excited to learn and study the world around me but I got caught up and forgot to just hit publish to DO something with those writings and now I don’t do that anymore.
Mix that with being a experfectionist and in didn’t want to hit publish because I always needed to tweak and add something to my writings (since I was always building on it) so my writings were never “finished” according to me….which led to more hoarding and not sharing of my knowledge.
So I stopped trying to make a vanity glorified notes graph and notes vault and just share what I got and add onto what is published and I feel better 😂.
Publish what exactly?
Good. And what you said up to about 4:00 is that you need to be aware of collector's fallacy, isn't it? Many good zettel-gurus say that, no big deal 😅
And the next idea is a great reminder, this is the essential point, ZK as a partnership, thank you, you have my sub!
I think zettelcasten was needed when the only option was to write notes on paper. Relationships should help with finding needed notes. But now we have ability to do text search in almost every application
Unless you have a proper tagging and/or cataloguing system, you're losing it after some time anyway. It becomes a pile of files, notes, paragraphs or whatever else. Digital is just faster to write, edit, share, and delete, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's better to write to think in digital.
But a tomato is a fruit
Why is it bad to have a personal wikipedia?
It's not, it's just that Zettelkasten isn't for that at all. Zettelkasten is Zettel-first, or note-first, meaning that you collect these ideas, talk to them, store in a way that makes it easy for you to access later, all for the purpose of comprising all of that thinking into a final product, like a book or an essay or some sort of conclusion for yourself.
In a way, Zettelkasten, as a method we largely understand today, is just the means. You can use that means, for example, to build a proper wiki for yourself, but no wiki is a Zettelkasten - because Zettelkasten is for somewhat raw bits of your thoughts that you may turn into something bigger and more defined later, maybe even out of dozens, hundreds of individual notes.
Notion / Obsidian / Logseq / etc. all suck because youre stuck in their ecosystem ... the most important piece is that you take the information and *do something with it* and thats the messy bit doing any of these dZettle ... unless it becomes easy to create a workflow that allows for referencing, outputting in different formats, and finally *publishing the information*
I will add that with Obsidian/Logseq you are not quite stuck in their ecosystem like you are with Notion. Obsidian is just a plaintext editor. You own the markdown files and do not depend on Obsidian to read/write/edit them. However, the more plugins you become dependent upon, the more your notes rely on the Obsidian application. I completely agree that a zettelkasten is a publishing machine. Thanks for watching!
Obsidian (and my favorite, Joplin) are really flexible in how you organize and link things. Cuz, the notes and hierarchies are rather simple.
Example. You have a 10000 notes Zettelkasten. And you decide to let me use it. I have ONE idea and ONE note to put it in to your Zettelkasten. I have no idea what your Zettelkasten is about and which notes it contains. I do not know any relations existing between notes. I have no idea about the context surrounding each of your notes. Just BLANK MIND. How do i put my note in your Zettelkasten so it will be mindfully connected to as much of your existing notes as it can be?
Please describe a step by step process of my interaction with yours Zettelkasten.
I'm not sure why this situation would ever occur but I'll entertain it. You would have to browse through the index of my zk and find the key words/concepts that relate most to your note, then you can link it from there.
@@TonyRamella so the index cards are like maps of content or like the title of a book? And after i put my note i need to put the information about it in to the index? Is that correct?
@@emotionalmindedstateyes so you can refer back to it when looking for it later or when you need to connect to it in the future
I have watched several videos on Zettelkasten and they all basically said the same thing. Obsidian can be used however you want, so people Zettelkast a little bit differently. I use Obsidian daily and here's how I Zettelkast: I don't, ever, not into it. It would be a waste of time for my purposes, and I already have a method that is very useful.
Jordan Peterson says you have to put things in your own words . If you copy/paste, you miss the point.
Peterson is an idiot, but he's right on this point that he picked up in notetaking 101.
Jordan Peterson also said that Canada is a communist dictatorship and that autistic people are hypermasculine
Jordan Peterson also said that Canada is a communist dictatorship and that autistic people are hypermasculine
Agree, same as small peterson that talk fast. Both of them sound smart but then they talk about something you know you see how much of idiots they are. -
P.s. ask gpt-4 who is it, it answer that small Peterson in Ben Shapiro @@t0dd000
@@t0dd000 lol
Sounds like AI can help with this process
No not at all. Knowledge development is a uniquely human act.
So far
What are your thoughts on file naming? If notes are ordered more by reference indexes, it probably doesn't matter what the individual notes are called. Giving them a creation date string as a name might be the best method: 202405152108. I don't know if you've already made a video about this subject.
I use folgezettel to give main notes a unique alphanumeric ID based on their relation in a sequence of thought. Using dates as unique IDs defeats the purpose of this. I just finished recording a video on this, stay tuned.
@@TonyRamella Cool, thanks