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Comment by BlackVanilla | Hacker News Reader

Is Zettelkasten better than 'the big .txt file'? [1] Sure, the example here is about productivity, but I know it can be used for general notes. Anything from your to do list, to notes from books, to ideas you want to remember. You want to remember what you wrote about a book on gardening? Seach gardening.

This seems to be a low effort, high reward way of doing things. What extra benefit does Zettelkasten bring and is it worth the additional effort?

EDIT: Another consideration is that you don't want the time you dedicate to sorting a productivity system to be especially big. You want to make stuff. The big txt file doesn't take up a lot of time to organise and allows you to spend time doing good things.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184 (entitled 'My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file')

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>> Is Zettelkasten better than 'the big .txt file'?

Might be but the ROI certainly isn't. That's why I use one large text file also. One relevant detail is not to consider that file read only, you must tree shake it regularly. Noise will be less and relevant stuff will be easier to find.

How have you found yourself organising your big text file? Do you use tags to make searching easier? Do you date things?

What's the best way to go about it in your eyes?

I use sections (materialised as markdown titles so I can easily navigate through them in a text editor) for recurrent subjects (so in some way this is my tagging) and never date anything unless is relevant to do so.

I don't dive into "implementation details" but you might find something here: https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system#hamster-flow

I tried using a text file for quite a while but being restricted to text was too limiting. Often a photo, voicememo, or sketch is the most efficient way to record something.

I use it to 1) store ideas, concepts, etc. in a markdown format. So, if I'm studying something - say backpropagation for neural networks - I create the note, search for material online, study it, and add links, images, formulas, etc. to the note so I can merge several good sources of information that would otherwise be scattered in PDFs, stack overflow, wikipedia, ... Then afterwards I can go back and read my note and maybe visit the links I used to obtain the initial understanding. It's really great so far.

2) I can link the notes to create a sort of personal wikipedia. So far I'm pretty happy with Zettlr for this purpose.

I find that even if I don't have to go back to many notes or actively walk through the graph it's really useful for distilling knowledge.

Zettlekasten was designed as a research tool, not a productivity system(for that I use task lists and progress bar).

Anyway, I used grep too, but I also navigate by following the links in my notes, which can sometime take me to different location. That can be a single file too or multiple files. That doesn't matter. What matters more is organization(or rather lack of).

With Zettlekasten, you build a concept map of topics that you wouldn't otherwise get if you write your notes linearly or chronologically.

So yeah, zettlekasten doesn't make sense as a productivity system, but that isn't its intended use case anyway.

Sure, to be clear, I meant using a big txt file as a place where you store notes from books, or your own ideas. Sure, you can also use it as a calendar or other organisational tasks as well, but is Zettlekasten better than a big txt file for storing (and referring back to) notes?

I don't think zettlekasten is necessarily predicated on "lot of files" afaik, but atomic notes.

This is a false dichotomy: you can create a Zettelkasten in a single TXT file. The implementation (e.g. using multiple files, one per note) is just a convenient way to see your stuff in a file listing and note taking apps, for example. But as long as you can link between notes, you're good, and a single-file Zettelkasten works just fine.

> Is Zettelkasten better than 'the big .txt file'?

I tried it, and for me it is not.

The ideas stored are too granular, and the linking becomes unwieldy after a while.

I'd rather store small ideas in a linear big txt file (I use Google Docs), revisit parts from time-to-time and collect/coalesce similar ideas and rewrite them into bigger ideas.

This process of reviewing and rewriting has allowed me to cluster ideas and gain clarity over time. Inspiration is lumpy so everyone needs a cache of thoughts. But these ideas also need to be regularly iterated upon and synthesized into coherent narratives if they are to be useful.

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