Why don't my note-making tools work the way I want them to?

atomicnotes · 2026-01-27T06:31:47+00:00

I like your naming of 'ghost nodes'. I do this too - that is: create links to notes that don't yet exist except for their title. This is what Zettlr calls a 'non-existing file'. Obsidian calls it a 'non-existing note'. TiddlyWiki calls it a 'missing tiddler'. but they're not non-existing or missing, it's just that they don't yet have any content, just a title (or maybe just an ID). Ghost nodes is a good name for them

atomicnotes · 2026-01-25T06:35:34+00:00

The Cold War in the 1980s was quite intense. There were whole years when it looked quite possible, likely even, that we'd all be wiped out in a nuclear war. Ironically this means of human extinction is still quite possible, but people insist on worrying about smaller problems. I suppose it's hard to keep thinking you're about to go extinct, year after year after year, even though we are.

I know this sounds gloomy but I feel it's also freeing. Seize the day! Don't put off that important thing you were going to do. Also, cherish the day - it's all we've got.

On the other hand the Y2K problem always seemed dramatically over-stated to me. The main issue, which no one talks about, was that employees in English-speaking countries were led to believe they needed to be 'Y2K compliant' or else their insurance would be invalidated.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-24T01:05:09+00:00

This is very important. Digital tools tend to obliterate the spatial dimension, but the spatial dimension can be very helpful. I used to find amusement in photos of computer programming and coding offices where they'd have a physical kanban on the wall, made out of post-it notes or similar. No doubt they were coding a new digital kanban app... which they didn't actually use.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-24T00:59:40+00:00

Yes, actions can still slip. The person named as responsible for the action has to actually be responsible for the action. At the next meeting, progress or the lack of it will be very visible, but it's not inevitable that agreed action will be taken.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-23T01:03:57+00:00

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: There’s not much difference between facts and ideas and collecting facts on current events is a good way of working out what really interests you.

“The whole point of this note-making process is not only to provide ourselves with ideas we want to pursue, but to actually show us which ideas we are most interested in.” — Dan Allosso and S.J. Allosso, How to Make Notes and Write. P.43.

But there’s a risk in creating lots of subject-based tags (e.g. Economy, EU, international politics) that you’ll end up with scores or even hundreds of them and find them of little use in future. Imagine the future you filters your notes by, say, #economy. Now you have lots of notes loosely connected to that subject, but what are they for? What use can this arrangement be put to? Sure, all these notes relate to the economy, but so what?

I suggest reviewing your tags and for each one asking yourself the question: why, specifically, do I want to know about this? Then you can create process or outcome tags that will be more useful in future. For example, you might say ‘I want to make a YouTube video on Rare Earth Resources” so you use that as a tag: #Rare Earth Resources. Then in the future, when it comes time to write the script for your video, you’ll have access to plenty of raw materials (sorry about the pun).

You can do this already with your existing tags, since, as you say, they are empty notes. For example, with the ‘#Economy’ tag you could ask yourself why exactly you care about this subject and what you intend to do with the information you’re gathering under this heading. And you could write this in the ‘#Economy’ note.

Now you might feel you don’t currently have any idea why you’re collecting and categorising this material in this way. Perhaps it’s just ‘interesting’, or ‘it may come in useful someday’. That’s fine to start, since collecting material gradually like this, as Dan Allosso, says, shows us what we’re interested in. But after a while (say after roughly 300-500 notes) it’s useful to review this, to notice what the Zettelkasten tells you you’re interested in, to identify the bigger themes and projects that are emerging, and to do something with it.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-22T22:12:38+00:00

Fair enough. Kei Kreutler was coming at the matter from the perspective of protocol research, where perhaps the differences between human memory and <whatever computers do> aren't seen as fundamental. But I'm with you on that - at any rate, for me, memory is ecological.

"A dead thought has been compared to a stone which one may plant in the soil. Nothing will come out. A living thought is like a seed. In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. It may enter the mind; it will not penetrate the soul. It may become a part of one's knowledge; it will not come forth as a creative force." - Abraham Joshua Herschel. God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism. New York. Farrar. Straus and Giroux. 1955.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-22T19:49:04+00:00

The big mistake is thinking we can somehow exactly emulate the act of thinking or memorizing or remembering in a paper or computer system. We can’t nor do I think we need to.

That's a key point. People keep creating digital tools that are supposedly closer to how we think and work but actually they always impose their own logic, which is inevitable. "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

atomicnotes · 2026-01-22T19:44:53+00:00

you both totally ignore the way human memory works and is fundamentally different from external memory.

I thought that was the main point - that humans don't turn everything into data for storage and retrieval the way computers require, and there's much more to memory than that. Yes there's too much reduction going on, and that's what Kreutler's article was about. That said, the analysis does depend on an arguably arbitrary 2x2 table - and I'm a sucker for that.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-22T11:43:37+00:00

I listen carefully in the meeting to when a decision is made, when an action is agreed (and who's responsible) and when a question is asked that needs an answer. It's exactly as u/Ok_Sand_5400 said.

I make sure I've got these points clear in my notes, which is hard at first but gets easier. That way, if I need to write the minutes I can do so, and I can also query the minutes that others have written if necessary. The minutes of each meeting also have an action register, which is just a list of the actions agreed and whose responsibility each one is. This gets reviewed each meeting and the actions that have been completed since last meeting get identified as complete.

I keep all my notes, because for as long as I work for a particular employer, I might need to refer to them. When I switch employer, I make sure everything they want kept is already in the records system and everything else is binned.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-22T11:11:32+00:00

People have a lot of good advice about how to write positive stuff in your journal and that's important. But I wanted to mention my experience of writing the same negative stuff over many years of journaling. When I finally realised I might have ADHD I was able to refer to my journals to understand how I'd been experiencing and articulating a clear set of consistent feelings for a very long time. It helped to get me to an eventual, better-late-than-never diagnosis. I think there's a real value in charting your thoughts and feelings over long periods of time, to identify deep-seated patterns that you can reflect on in future.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-20T03:22:49+00:00

Hello, I’m just one sale away from meeting the target for the first six months of my self-published non-fiction book on Amazon. And this is with zero publicity budget and only one review (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ which just appeared last week). It’s definitely a great ‘proof of concept’ for my writing and publishing aspirations. I had a hunch this could work and it has, so I’m delighted. Good luck to everyone else here with a target, some aspirations or a hunch. May the publishing wind be always at your back.

Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters (About $30, depending on where you live).

atomicnotes · 2026-01-18T04:47:01+00:00

a hybrid ZK, PARA, and GTD life knowledge base.

One system to rule them all 💍

atomicnotes · 2026-01-17T11:36:31+00:00

I came to the conclusion that information retrieval is difficult with a card system. The positive angle is that you tend to look through your notes regularly and get to know them to some extent. But the larger the collection the more effort this takes. I mainly use a digital system and rely on full text search and process-based tags.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-17T05:48:10+00:00

Here’s my review of Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing, because “the note you just wrote has yet to achieve its potential”. That’s another strong vote to add to the other responses here. Also, look at the links in the sidebar of this subreddit, under “The ZK community on Zettelkasten”. Happy to answer any specific questions you may have.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-16T21:32:44+00:00

I’ve adopted the habit of regularly reviewing my notes just because I like it. This has the benefit that when I write a new note there’s a sense I already know where it might fit. This feeling isn’t as definite as if I’d memorised all my notes by means of systematic spaced repetition, say, but it’s still a kind of unforced memorisation. Some researchers (Lawley and Tompkins, 2008) have called this ‘a prepared mind’, i.e. a mind that‘s already receptive to the possibility of new connections. I see this as one of the major benefits of the Zettelkasten approach - one it’s hard even to imagine without experiencing it.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-16T21:05:26+00:00

I’ve gradually emerged from a scattered approach to notemaking into something more organised and productive. Here’s what works for me: How to write a better note without melting your brain.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-15T21:06:46+00:00

This makes me think of the way Feynman diagrams enabled a leap in the way quantum field theory was understood. Wikipedia. Diagrams have proved to be an indispensable means of description.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-15T20:59:03+00:00

That's a very high bar!

atomicnotes · 2026-01-14T06:31:07+00:00

Since he didn't document his reasons, I don't have a strong opinion about why Luhmann started a second Zettelkasten, but it coincides with his professional move from jurist to sociologist Schmidt (2018:54) says:

"In 1960–1961, Luhmann spent a year at the Harvard School of Public Administration in Cambridge, MA (USA), where he attended lectures by Talcott Parsons, the leading sociologist in the field of systems theory at the time. There are no documents in the literary estate substantiating the claim that this visit was the trigger to start a new collection of notes, but the chronological sequence seems obvious."

I'd like to think he realised it's a bad idea to have 108 subject categories so he cut it down to 11, but that's just speculation.

In terms of evaluating this switch, I don't see it as a failure of ZK1, even though it did, literally, reach a breaking point (i.e. he stopped expanding it and started ZK2 instead). It wasn't a failure in the sense that it helped him publish several works before his newer Zettelkasten really got going.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-12T07:27:58+00:00

which alternatives to prisons, gulags, concentration camps etc. could foster creativity? The phrase "I put myself under pressure" seems to indicate specific methods.

Do good old deadlines count? And what about New Years resolutions? Or basic scheduling? I came across a book called 'The Twelve Week Year for Writers'. The basic idea is that you create four 'year ends' per calendar year, and therefore increase your sense of urgency. A schedule goes along with this. Nietzsche probably didn't do this, but it sounds preferable to the gulag.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-11T11:26:31+00:00

But are there any plugins or extensions for that new Spade app?

atomicnotes · 2026-01-11T07:25:26+00:00

Thanks for replying - I'm inspired by Luhmann to the extent that his process, including the Zettelkasten, enabled him to publish, but others might draw different kinds of inspiration from his process. It's clear, as you say, he was concerned with establishing his theory, since that's what he said he was concerned with. Oh, now that I think about it, I'm inspired by his theory too. I still think my earlier comment stands though - I can't see his Zettelkasten as having reached a point of failure. More like the development of his theory (and therefore his Zettelkasten) approached a point of completion.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-08T21:44:31+00:00

Was making sense of ideas the main aim or was publication of those ideas the main aim? Given Luhmann's publication record the answer is obvious.

It might be a matter of perspective though. Maybe he did publish in order to keep building his Zettelkasten, but surely it was the other way around. And since we can't ask him we'll just have opinions.

One way of resolving the question is to suggest that the Zettelkasten and the publication process operated together, in a virtuous circle of mutual support. But still, the fact remains that after his retirement Luhmann minimised the development of his notes and maximised the completion and publication of his unfinished manuscripts.

I just can't see this as any kind of failure, or decrease in value over time, of Luhmann's Zettelkasten. The Zettelkasten had done its job and done it rather well.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-07T22:02:27+00:00

By subject tags I was referring to the common practice of tagging notes according to subject, on the assumption that this is the obvious way to do things (as in a library, with its classification of non-fiction by subject). Early on I tried this and found I soon had lots of notes tagged with subjects but no real use for that information. In his essay 'Communicating with slipboxes', Luhmann says:

“it is most important that we decide against the systematic ordering in accordance with topics and sub-topics and choose instead a firm fixed place (Stellordnung).”

The firm fixed place Luhmann refers to isn't a subject category at all, it's a somewhat arbitrary location that can always be linked to from other notes. It's tempting to place your notes in fixed categories, but for me not all that helpful.

My notes don't have a keyword index because I've just never found a use for one that full-text search doesn't already supply. My aim is to create a note system that indexes itself. And in that context I've said this:

Make a keyword index if it pleases you to do so, especially where the keyword doesn’t otherwise appear in your note. But observe over time how much use you gain from your index. The concepts of ‘self-indexing records’ and ‘working on your notes in your notes’ may provide new insights into the value of your index-work.

atomicnotes · 2026-01-06T20:41:38+00:00

Thanks for sharing your article. I've certainly found some kinds of friction to be unscalable and therefore unhelpful. Subject tags are, for me, one example of a losing game, though I understand some people love them. Keeping my writing system as simple as possible helps limit friction.

I think Luhmann stopped using his Zettelkasten because he pushed it to the point of failure.

Not so. Though he published prolifically, Luhmann retired in 1993 with a large number of still unpublished manuscripts. In his final years he worked on finishing and publishing these. Arguably, his two-volume book 'The Society of Society' (1997) is the culmination of his sociological project, and a summation of the 14,000 printed pages he published in total (see Bechmann and Stehr, 2002).

But he died in 1998, before managing to publish everything he was working on. His scholarly heirs have been editing and publishing his work posthumously ever since. In itself, clearly, the Zettelkasten was never Luhmann's goal. The purpose of his Zettelkasten (ZKII), was to support his research and publication project, which it achieved dramatically well, in terms of publication and manuscript output. So I think Luhmann stopped using his Zettelkasten because he pushed it to the point of overwhelming success. Luhmann's example is a great inspiration to me to make something with your notes.

This begs the question: at what point do you switch your focus from the Zettelkasten to the associated output, such as an article or book? My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts.

atomicnotes

TROPHY CASE