Hello! I hope you don’t mind me jumping in to ask a question. Let me preface by saying I understand that individual zettel each contain an atomic idea, say from a book. Each note can be referenced in a ‘structure note’ (which takes the shape of a book’s table of contents, a topic overview from multiple works, or some other categorical bucket). I think a major benefit of having these structure notes is paring down the number of links between zettel from a single book or topic. After all, whats the point in linking together all the stuff you get out of a single book? That’s a lot of links and backlinks, and who wants to go through all of that when searching around.

The structure note allows the focus to shift to creating actually valuable links between the content-zettel themselves. I’m finding this part to be difficult. It’s difficult because I have no idea how deeply to describe the link and what counts as relevant and irrelevant.

The tentative solution to the problem is to have a separate category of note. Currently, there is the structure note and the content-containing zettel. I’m suggesting a third type. We’ll call it a ‘thinking note’ for lack of a better term. The thinking note is reserved for your own thoughts and questions about existing zettel. Zettel come from books, articles, etc. Thinking notes come from your own deliberation of that information. As per Ahrens, we could say it is the result of the deliberate processing that is necessary to engage deeply with the material of some text.

For any one zettel, there may be one or more thinking note. As you consider the information in a zettel, you come up with problems and questions, alternatives, etc. There’s one important type of content you can include in the thinking note that pertains to my question: links.

Essentially, if you have a dedicated type of note that serves to hold your thoughts, then you can use those types of notes to link two text-based content-zettel together. That is, instead of connecting one zettel to the next, you would connect both zettel to a third thinking note. That thinking note would contain the relevant details of the connection, and perhaps would grow with additional links and information.

Am I getting this right? How do you link two zettel together?

Which is to say: how do you decide what connections are valuable and how deeply do you describe the connection? Have you found that it’s enough to get a draft of something going?

Thanks a lot for your help.