R/Zettelkasten - Strategies for Connecting Notes
R/Zettelkasten - Strategies for Connecting Notes
Bibliography
Highlights
- This is something I used to really struggle with, but after around a year of building a Zettelkasten, I think I’ve found a good rhythm with this.Initially, I would rely on Obsidian’s automatic backlinking functionality to tie notes together. After a around 100 notes, that started to fall apart because I ended up with too many contextless links. I didn’t know which links were important and which weren’t. In general, it’s better to manually add a few well-explained links to a selection of notes than trying to link to every related note.My next attempt consisted of adding every note I wrote to some explicit index of related notes (essentially a structure note). That way, I was confident that I could find my way back to related notes, so I didn’t have the fear of forgetting about my notes. This approach lasted until I had around 1,000 notes or so. It started to break down, because these indexes became bloated – there were too many links to notes, many of them with duplicate information, and therefore I didn’t actually want to use them. It also made writing a new note a huge chore, since I’d always have to find a relevant index to add it to so I wouldn’t “lose” it.The approach that I currently use essentially follows Luhmann’s Folgezettel. Whenever I create a new note, I always choose some “location” for it. It doesn’t have to be the best possible place, or even be that relevant, but I will always pick a location. At this location, I insert a link to the new note (usually at the bottom of an existing note), and from the new note, I also make a link back to the insertion point. Browsing the Zettelkasten consists of picking a random note, and then following both the “backlinks” to previous notes at the top of the note, and the “forward-links” to following notes at the bottom of the note.The advantage is that every note in the system is now reachable in some way from every other note, so I never have to worry about “losing” them. It’s not a chore to add new notes, since I can just add them where I think of them (there is no need for an inbox with this approach); I don’t need to worry about finding exactly the right spot; and I’m not incentiviced to add a massive amount of semi-irrelevant links to enable browsing through backlinks. It also enables serendipitous discovery of old notes, which is what gives the Zettelkasten its “conversation partner” quality.I still use structure notes, but I add only a small selection of notes to the structure notes. I don’t try to add every note related to a topic, and I specifically avoid having multiple notes with closely related content in the same structure note. I think of structure notes as essentially a sort of “wormhole” that can tie otherwise distant notes together, but I rely mainly on the organic tree structure created from Folgezettel for actually navigating my Zettelkasten.This approach seems to be working well so far. Hopefully it’ll last me at least until I hit 10,000 notes!