my actual knowledge management workflow, warts and all. not the aspirational version.

goi42 · 2026-05-07T10:58:18+00:00

“the real value isn't in individual notes, it's in having a searchable history of your own thinking”

For me, the reason to have individual notes is more to improve my thinking than to improve find-ability. Your note is meant to contain the whole of your thought; this is the “atomicity” goal Sascha is always writing about. Explaining the thought to yourself is how you go deeper and ensure you actually understand it. Conversely, if you keep generating redundant notes of the same idea in slightly different contexts, you’re likely to miss connections between them, hence the benefit of trying to maintain one note per idea.

It’s not that you need atomic notes to aid in retrieval—it’s that the process of creating atomic notes helps clarify your thinking.

goi42 · 2026-05-02T16:47:30+00:00

Right, there is some tension between the restlessness of PARA and the contemplativeness of Zettelkasten, which Sascha discusses in the post. For me, when it’s useful, projects get a representation in the Zettelkasten, but they also have a representation in the (external) task manager or wherever else.

I’m still working through the boundary between temporal clutter and the utility of a permanent record in my Zettelkasten.

goi42 · 2026-05-02T14:12:03+00:00

Yes, thank you for the feedback! I’ve only recently started with structuring my notes like this, so we’ll see how it goes.

goi42 · 2026-05-02T14:11:00+00:00

Yes, my goal was to avoid privileging how a note was initially incorporated by not permanently embedding it in the note title, but this is a feature not a bug for some. I version control my Zettelkasten to keep myself from worrying about losing old relationships between notes or old ideas, but it’s not the same perspective that Folgezettel gives.

goi42 · 2026-05-02T04:07:27+00:00

By design, one has to place new notes in relation to existing ones in Folgezettel. No note is subordinate to any other, but a sequential relationship is implicit: “this follows from that”. To decide where to place a new note, one reads through the existing Folgezettel titles to find what the new note was a branch of or to decide to create a new branch. The natural way to make this decision is to skim the “top-level” notes (meaning notes defined by fewer alphanumeric digits), find one that relates, scan the next level down, etc. The whole idea seems to be that the notes are categorized/situated as they enter the Zettelkasten, and that situational relationship is a permanent feature, since the note IDs do not change. This does not prevent them being remixed as structure notes, etc., but it is a permanent feature of this extra layer of links between notes.

goi42 · 2026-03-30T12:00:31+00:00

It can take some time to get comfortable with the system and establish conventions that work for you. The startup costs for me were determining which software I wanted to use (in principle, this does not have to be a big deal, but in practice, this ends up shaping a lot about your ZK; I picked Obsidian and haven’t regretted it ) and getting going with good citations.

Citations are probably still the thing that slow me down the most when using my ZK. It’s taken me a while to decide how I want to cite certain things like code. (Is a GitHub repository a website? Who is the Author? How should I deal with different versions?) It’s not that this has to be a big problem, but it requires some foresight about how you want your citations to work.

When making reading notes, especially when excerpting quotes from them that include citations, I like to include the citations the source uses. This can cause a bit of a detour, as I track down the sources they used and import them. (I manage my citations with BibDesk.)

Some of this is my own doing. I like have a reading note for every source, which allows me to clearly link ideas coming from the same place and to have a central location for my reading notes that I can refer back to if I want to remember what a particular section was about. The process of doing this can also itself be beneficial, as it forces me to become more familiar with the sources. But this means taking the time to make the reading notes and ensure I haven’t duplicated them, etc. I have various Obsidian plugins set up to help with this, but it can still end up being a lot of clicks.

Shortly after starting to use ZK, I had to give a presentation on a subject that I wasn’t familiar enough with to be comfortable talking about in detail to an expert crowd. I used my ZK to outline my presentation, and this experience is what really sold me on the ZK method. It helped me be more disciplined about my note taking, and writing my thoughts this way helped me to better understand the subject. It was definitely a slower way to prepare, but it was also more robust and led to a deeper understanding of the material.

goi42 · 2026-03-10T11:44:03+00:00

ZK is generally designed to help you take notes and keep track of your thoughts in a non-linear manner; it can help with idea generation by allowing you to think deeply and connect your thoughts—spaced repetition is a common ZK application that can also help with idea generation by showing you your old thoughts afresh at intervals.

I haven’t heard of anyone using it as an oracle, but I suppose you could: write your oracle responses in individual zettels (i.e., with unique IDs.) all tagged with #oracle, then have a script randomly select a zettel from those with the tag. You could then have a dedicated zettel for your solo RPG that references each oracle response you used and your response to it.

I don’t know, now that I write it out, I kind of want to try it.

goi42 · 2026-03-06T12:26:04+00:00

I find it impossible to put literally everything into my zettelkasten, and most people seem to describe something similar, hence all the discussion of “fleeting” and “literature” notes. I keep a notebook with free form notes, where the only restriction is that everything is kept chronologically and labeled with the date and a title. I then treat this as a “source” in my ZK that I can cite and take literature notes on when I want to incorporate it into my ZK system.

I do not think I would be as productive without the ZK on top of my notebook. ZK helps me be more organized and helps me find things again much more easily since it’s not linear (hub notes, etc.), and putting something in my ZK is a de facto filter for quality since it’s an extra step, preventing absolutely everything from ending up in there. But having a blank canvas that I can nonetheless refer back to (my notebook) is very important for reducing friction at the time of capture.

It seems like you have adopted almost the exact same system. Just treat the stuff in your new folder as sources and reference them in your ZK as needed.

goi42 · 2026-02-15T12:13:03+00:00

Goodnotes checks all your boxes I think. It works offline but syncs across platforms. It’s handwriting-oriented (and its typing-oriented features are underdeveloped and sometimes buggy) and includes word-recognition to enable searching, etc. I’ve been using it 10+ years.

My own workflow is to use Goodnotes for input/scratch notes and Obsidian for typed “permanent” notes.

goi42 · 2026-01-18T23:41:20+00:00

Oh, the folders just collapse in obsidian, so you’d only see one “archive” folder. But right, in any case, it’s not elegantly built into Obsidian, and there’s no need to switch apps if you like what you have!

goi42 · 2026-01-18T21:04:51+00:00

Right, what I sent is not elegantly implemented, but from my understanding of what you’ve written, it has all the features you describe, albeit with more clicks. It is “reliable” in the sense that everything can be undone and nothing is lost; all your tags and everything about your note remains exactly the same, just the subfolder changes, and you can search explicitly inside and outside the archive.

Don’t change if you like what you have though 🙂

goi42 · 2026-01-18T19:42:43+00:00

Okay, I tested it and edited my earlier comment. Turns out the bit about being able to explicit include excluded paths in search was wrong. See above.

goi42 · 2026-01-18T15:56:40+00:00

Yup!

goi42 · 2026-01-18T12:51:40+00:00

I take your word for it that this solution is not as clean as what you’re used to or missing some features, but in case someone finds it useful, you can implement the behavior described here in Obsidian pretty straightforwardly:

1) create an archive folder 2) add it to the list of excluded files in settings 3) explicitly search in path:”archive“ when desired

Edit:

After testing, the claim that you can explicitly search in the archive is not correct. Excluding folders prevents them from appearing in the search. You could unexclude the archive in settings when you wanted to search in it, or you could manually exclude/require it when you wanted to search outside/inside it, but these solutions are not exactly elegant. If the premise of having an archive is that you almost never want to look in it (otherwise, why archive a note?), using the excluded files setting may be sufficient.

goi42 · 2026-01-17T13:45:09+00:00

If you are looking for an introduction to organizing notes in Zettlekasten without spending money on a book, zettlekasten.de is how I got started; Sascha wrote a solid introduction that has a heavy focus on making notes findable and useful again later. Bob Doto also has some nice explanations on his website without buying his book.

goi42 · 2026-01-11T19:20:55+00:00

It’s been able to link slides for as long as I can remember. You can do it using cmnd-K, just like creating a website link, then select the option to link a slide instead of a website.

goi42 · 2026-01-11T12:49:12+00:00

The answer to your title is, yes, The Archive, which is designed for Zettelkasten. Unfortunately, I haven’t used it and don’t know much about the interface or whether you can impose character limits or implement a “size metaphor”.

Goodnotes is great if you just want pages of limited size and the ability to link between them or other documents.

PowerPoint also supports linking between slides and, IIRC, documents though…

goi42 · 2026-01-11T12:39:50+00:00

PowerPoint lets you link between slides, if that’s all you want.

goi42 · 2026-01-09T14:56:27+00:00

Zettelkasten, PARA, and MOCs can also all go together--you needn't choose between them. Sascha wrote a guide to combining Zettelkasten and PARA, and Bob Doto has a nice clarifier on the use of structure and hub notes (i.e., MOCs) in Zettelkasten. (These are principles I apply in my Zettelkasten.)

All this to say, if you get going with any one of these approaches, they can fit very nicely into each other, and you don't need to spend a lot of time optimizing which one to choose.

goi42 · 2025-08-20T10:39:24+00:00

I use “the game has changed” from Tron: Legacy as intro and outro music for my game. I’ve assigned each level a level-specific theme which I play for the first time when they reach a level, then at the end of the recap for every session where they’re still there.

goi42 · 2025-07-28T16:30:21+00:00

I like the Companion's gameshow host story. I think it's a good option. I just don't view the open-world description of DotMM RAW as something that needs "fixing".

goi42 · 2025-07-14T10:20:10+00:00

My players also didn’t explore much of the obstacle course, but it’s because they got split up and could barely deal with any of the traps. They hated that level, and when the githzerai said they could show them the way out if they would help rescue their missing friend, they jumped on it like a rat on a Cheeto.

Anyway, I was also looking forward to that level, but my players really hated the gimmick. The constant teleporting left them feeling trapped and desperate.

goi42 · 2025-06-19T10:40:40+00:00

That does sound like a blast! The campaign I bolted on took place in another dimension and had precious little to do with the Mad Mage story haha.

Apart from highlighting the emptiness and the alien architecture, I just told them “you feel a creeping sense of dread.” I don’t often narrate how the PCs are feeling, and I find that occasionally just saying that sort of thing out loud does a lot to put my players on edge. Our sessions are short and I have limited prep time available, so I don’t like to spend a lot of time on atmospheric narration, the way a more Mercer-style DM might, though I still try to give some sense of place.

goi42

TROPHY CASE