What Obsidian gurus get wrong about Zettelkasten 

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?

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.

What??!! How do you get through life without re-thinking things and being of two minds about things?

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.

So glad to hear it has helped clear things up for you! Thanks for watching!

Thank you! I would hope so, you can’t be helping people develop knowledge by using a bot!

I hope it brings you the instant clarity that it did for me. Let me know how it goes!

And the next idea is a great reminder, this is the essential point, ZK as a partnership, thank you, you have my sub!

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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

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. - ​@@t0dd000

No not at all. Knowledge development is a uniquely human act.

So far

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