Zettelkasten Note

A note-taking-strategy where each note contains a single unit of information which can be composed into larger notes. It should:

• Have one concise, complete piece of information. Making notes in this fashion allows me to connect and disconnect relationships between notes freely, allowing them to be composed together to form larger ideas. (202305281753)
• Be written in my own words. The note should always represent my current understanding of what I’m trying to learn so that I can both understand it in the future and so I can see how my understanding has developed over time. (202305290605)
• Link references. This prevents plagiarism, lets me revisit the source material in the future, and makes it easier to cite sources when I decide to write something on that subject later. (202306012353, 20240724201208)
• Be immutable. This will allow me to see how my understanding has developed over time and revisit old understandings that might actually turn out to be more correct than my current understanding. If I find that my understanding has changed, I should link to the old note when writing a new one and explain how my understanding has changed. (202305290611)

My Zettelkasten note strategy differs from the norm in that it is an immutable note-taking strategy. Because of this, links to other notes from within Zettelkasten notes are generally not present. Instead, Zettelkasten notes are linked from Subject notes. (202305290556, 20240724210051)

I adopted this strategy because I wanted the ability to look back upon how I arrived at an understanding, something I found lacking with Mutable notes. (202305280429, 202305290628)

One unfortunate characteristic of this strategy is that it can sometimes be hard to find Zettelkasten notes as they don’t have names. However, I’ve decided against naming them in favor of creating Subject notes where the information about something can be collected. (202306031656)

At first, I also used Journals in addition to Zettelkasten notes to record this kind of information, but I eventually found it easier to use only Zettelkasten notes because they tended to fulfill the same kind of role. (202308060215, 20240724200049)

Most of my older notes lack a timezone, but I wrote some javascript code can be used to look up the appropriate time zone. (202306032133)