One of the things I’ve really struggled with the last few days is figuring out how I want to deal with taking notes that don’t have a narrative structure like I do for my Journal.

I like of imagine my Development Journal as describing a work session or a workday. However, I have many kinds of notes I want to take that don’t fit this structure.

For example, I may want to do some research and write a note about something I’ve come to understand in a particular subject or write an off-hand note about something I encountered. Another thing I also haven’t been sure about how to do are notes on music lessons and other music-oriented learning I’m doing.

One approach I could do is to simply make or modify my notes on the subject I’m writing about. For example, if I want to write about the strategy I’ve determined for a board game or a recipe that I’ve developed, I create a note for it if it doesn’t exist or I modify the one that does exist to match my current understanding.

However, I don’t like this approach because it violates something I really like about my Development Journal: I always have a historical trail of how I’ve gotten to the understanding I have. When I don’t have this history, it’s not clear to me when I’ve gotten to know something, when my mind changed, or whether I have gone down a certain path before. What if I was correct about something before, and incorrect now? I would like some way to rewind back to the correct state more easily.

For the Development Journal, when I want to write about the solution for a problem I’ve encountered, I make a note which describes my current understanding of the problem and the solution if I’ve found one, followed by the history of every journal entry where I’ve talked about the problem so I can see how my understanding has developed.

I would like this same kind of back-tracking for other things I want to write about. To support this, I’m going to introduce two more types of note-taking strategies for this vault: Journal and Zettelkasten Note.

A Journal will be a more general case of Development Journal; instead of being focused on problems and troubleshooting, it will just require a narrative structure. I will use these for my music notes.

A Zettelkasten Note will be my own application of the Zettelkasten principles. In general, using this approach, I’ll create small, concise notes when I want to write about something and link them together as needed.

Whether it is a Development Journal, Journal, or a Zettelkasten Note, I will use these notes as the sources of history for writing Subject Notes. These notes will describe my current understanding of something and then cite other notes as the history to show how my understanding has developed over time.

I’m going to reorganize my notes to follow these ideas and see how my notes develop as a result.

Source: None