Tags: notes, zettelkasten, organization
Tim Lavoie
A process is something you do, and can itself be worthwhile.
tl;dr: If there’s no value, you’re doing it wrong
A post recently hit my feeds: Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.
I think it had some interesting ideas, but believe it is only getting half the point. The central thesis is that by writing things down, we can empty our heads of unneeded fluff, which can now be forgotten. The post says essentially that the information you scribble down is typically worthless, and could just as well be deleted immediately. Really, the the comfort we get in having written it down is what lets us relax.
What this misses is a few things:
First, the process of writing enables or enhances the thinking. That is, those loose thoughts that might have relatively little value on their own, are improved and refined by the act of chewing on them enough to transcribe.
Note-taking processes such as Zettelkasten don’t simply stop after that quick brain-dump. Rather, there is the idea that the person goes through from time to time, refining and filtering what was first scribbled in haste.
Finally, a system which enables connections between concepts or chunks of information can be hugely useful when going back later. The original Zettelkasten was literally a wooden box with paper note-cards, but those cards had numbers added to be able to refer to each other. Modern technology extends this to easily-maintained wikis, as well as full-text search that takes pretty much zero time.
Now, I will admit that not everything recorded is valuable, especially right away. When you first write it down, you really don’t know yet. When you revisit things though, and revise those notes, I feel they already gain more value. You are more likely to remember the contents anyway, even if you stopped looking at them, but there is sometimes a need to go back again quite a bit later.
Spending much of my day online, I will often bookmark a page. I use Pinboard, which is an excellent, paid service. A simple bookmarklet makes it trivial to save (and forget, if you like). I have thousands, and truly, some have aged poorly. Using tags however, and the built-in search, it really is quite simple to go back later through mine and find a link that comes to mind later to revisit. I can do this from any of my laptops, or my phone, instantly. Pinboard is a hosted service, and the (one) guy running it does like to joke about being hit by a bus. Forewarned is forearmed, and the service does make it trivial (IMHO) to back up my bookmarks using its API. Mine get added to a local CouchDB database from time to time, and that’s backed up as well as being easily synced between devices.
For things that involve my taking notes, using Joplin these days, there is usually at least a bit of thought up-front. Notes are simply Markdown-formatted plain text, much like I use to write this post. Going through the process of putting words to keyboard, I want to be able to link sources of information, tutorials of note, and that sort of thing. Plain-text files are never really locked down into a proprietary solution, making the time cost less onerous if I feel like changing things up for a bit. And back again, for that matter. With Pinboard’s search, I can easily find relevant bookmarks, pull up the page, and copy the link into my notes. Just like some notes, my bookmarks don’t have to live in my head, but that doesn’t render them without value.
I’ve been having thoughts too about ways that I can integrate these data streams further, since it’s all under my control. Pinboard provides a simple enough web interface for making manual changes to individual bookmark entries, which is fine. I would like to do things though like normalizing the tags used, and providing a status field to more obviously flag those with dead links or redirects. I will likely do that on the database on my end, and can then push changes back up. They could also be exported to a directory of local notes files as well, for trivial cross-linking with notes, by tag, and all that.
With resources such as this, if the conclusion you reach is, “duh, this isn’t good for much,” I think it’s just showing that you haven’t really invested any time to improve the process so that it works for yourself.