Zettelkasten 101 Series: What Is a Fleeting Note? | Hacker News Reader

Zettelkasten 101 Series: What Is a Fleeting Note?

writing.bobdoto.computer

56 pointstaurusnoises32 comments

these types of notes are among some of the most important notes I take during my day to day. I'll have a quick thought about something, jot it down and completely forget about it, and come back to it later in the day when I have space to think and it'll jog my memory and send me right back down the rabbit hole.

The key to fleeting notes for me is pairing Obsidian with iCloud to get sync for free. It actually does _just work_.

Over the last year, I've spent *a lot* of time refining my Zettelkasten process and finally feeling like I've nailed down a process (through lots of a trial and error) that works for me:

all "fleeting" notes get saved in Zotero, underneath the article/book/video/audio collection item.

Benefits of the storing the fleeting into Zotero includes:

  - Knowing exactly where the note came from (often I scribble down a note and forget the source)
  - Having automatic metadata (in particular, creation time) associated with the note - I have script that periodically fetches data using Zotero API and plots how long the fleet note has been left unprocessed

>What's to be Done with a Fleeting Note?

Is there a good way to share fleeting notes in a social network? It would be nice if good thoughts could live on their own and spread across the boundaries of minds and recombine themselves without having to be put into a solid form first.

Twitter seems to be a good start but with the focus on followers and trending tags, it seems like tweets are lost in time if they are not immediately getting attention.

Aside from being businesses based primarily in mining usage data for profit, social media platforms are basically fleeting note disseminators for its users. It's allllll fleeting notes (with obvious exceptions). If you're asking how to share your ideas, and get lots of eyes on them, and not have those eyes based on affirmation currancies like Likes and Follows, the only thing I can think of is in the fediverse or some other web-adjacent locale. I'd be curious to know what others think.

What is keeping Zettelkasten from being adopted by a lot of other people is probably the unnecessary complexity and over-commercialization of note-taking systems. Zettelkasten is supposed to be simple and fluid at its core. You don't need to pay 100$ for a course to learn someone else's workflow, and overload your senses with a dozen plugins.

Exactly right. After messing around with this sort of thing for a while, the revelation I've had is: The human brain is much better than the computer at the whole nodes+connections thing, and the process of having/creating/reviewing large well-thought out things as "notes" is superior to a bunch of little scraps everywhere.

I can't say for certain if "little scraps everywhere" are inferior. https://napkin.one is experimenting with this, and a lot of people seem to like it. It's very simple to write and link little notes together with it.

I like the GUI/UX, but in essence Napkin et al are basically a regurgitation of the same app over and over, only varying the UX to appeal different tastes/audiences.

For example, what do these apps do that aren't already implemented in others like OneOne, LogSeq, Obsidian, Dendron, etc?

UI/UX is no small thing. For some people, it can ultimately make or break their ability to get into the work. While it's nice to think we should all be heroically disengaged from the aesthetics and feel of a thing, those aspects have an effect. No shame in that. Different people like different UIs.

Agreed and support your view. It just explains the explosion of choices.

How can having more technologically sophisticated options discourage adoption?

There’s nothing stopping people from doing it on Notepad, or cards like old Luhmann himself.

I was more so addressing productivity gurus and plunging head first into a complex system without building up to a comfortable level, and becoming overwhelmed. Those people would miss the point and say that continuing to write their notes in Evernote is much simpler. At least that's what I think happens.

The trend seems to be towards minimalist UIs at the expense of depth of features. Extremely popular utility apps tend to be very simple ones. The more capable something is, the less popular it seems to be.

Case in point: Ableton Live conquered the DAW market. Do I use Ableton Live? No, it doesn't have sophisticated enough features I need for scoring motion picture or video games.

I defs agree that there's a lot of overcomplexity added to the zettelkasten discussion. That's part of what I'm trying to undo. And yet, as someone who teaches a course on zettelkasten, I don't think there's anything wrong (or unreasonable) about getting a group of people together to learn something that's relatively new to them, and who are interested in being in a community situation with others who also want to learn, and for whom it is also new. Also seems not unreasonable to make some money while doing so. It is labor after all, and often quite bit of it. As far as learning "someone else's workflow," A. who else's workflow would one learn in a group class environment?? And B. classes can be taught in such a way so that the principles and practices empower people to create something truly their own and not ape that of someone else. At least good teachers can do that ;)

> What is keeping Zettelkasten from being adopted by a lot of other people is probably the unnecessary complexity and over-commercialization of note-taking systems.

What is keeping them is that even the original version is labor intensive.

Most people are forgetting that ZK is a tool to organize knowledge for the purpose of writing papers. When the craze began a few years ago I dove deep into it and discovered a few things:

- 95% of people/sites talking about ZK are not following the ZK principles (atomic notes, with forward and reverse links).

- It is time consuming. When you write a new note, you have to put in the effort to make multiple notes to make them atomic, and spend time figuring out the appropriate links/chains to insert them into. This often requires examining a lot of previous material you've written to ensure there is not much overlap. It's a much slower note taking process than anything else I've used.

- Those that do follow it say you need to stick to it for a long time (at least a few years) before the gains start to compensate for the labor. I recall one particular academic who started doing ZK during his grad school years say it took about 8 years of following the ZK discipline before it began to pay off (and it keeps paying off years later). Think about it: All the knowledge accumulated stored in the form of ZK notes, and it didn't pay off until quite a bit after his thesis defense.

I don't doubt ZK is worth it, but I simply don't have the time. One has to factor in opportunity costs. Unless you plan to become a prolific writer/essayist, I would not recommend this approach.

> I don't doubt ZK is worth it, but I simply don't have the time.

Rings very true. I'm trying to leverage ZK and incremental reading for better learning. So much content, that I read, that I simply don't retain. Or retain passively. If I can't use the knowledge was it worth reading in the first place?

I'm experimenting with reading half as much, but taking pains to remember the salient points. I'll let you know in 8 years if it's working :D

I think that while Zettelkasten may be useful for people who primarily want to publish writings, I decided that it’s the wrong approach for me. I don’t want to publish. I want to be able to organize my data so that I could easily reference later, whether it’s what I was doing for a particular customer, or what my kid likes to eat at a certain restaurant. “Linking Your Thinking” works much better, for me, for that use case. Same deal there: you don’t need a whole course.

100%. I recommend LYT to people who aren't looking to publish all. the. time. There's no need to work the zk if writing isn't your main interest.

People dont understand that the whole graph-first note taking is not even ZK.

The best way to deal with fleeting notes is a pen and paper.

The next best solution is Tap [0] (disclaimer: I am the founder).

I had a few revelations related to these kinds of notes:

In order for them to get collected, they need to be collectable from anywhere (if not pen and paper: email, sms, browser, whatever).

The note system should accommodate many different types of information: links, tasks, events, transactional information, formulas, etc. Plain-text doesn't work because over time you'll develop more and more sophisticated systems. Without a standard notation system you will lose the ability to process and analyze your notes and the information they contain.

[0]. https://www.tatatap.com

The best method for fleeting notes is literally whatever you have closest to your fingers in the moment you need to capture something. It's silly to suggest it is "best" to capture a fleeting thought with pen/paper if you're holding your phone and the pen/paper is in the other room. This is bad advice.

I'm going to disagree. All of my fleeting notes go in 1 place so I can look at them all later. Having them in my phone, notebook, napkin in the kitchen, etc etc is not ideal. I'm certainly not going to forgot what I need to write down if I just need to go to the other room and grab my notepad.

Let's say that, ultimately, it's personal. I have no problem whatsoever taking fleeting notes in a variety of places. As do many other people I know who run this game. But, others I know also feel the need to have a single entry point. To each their own.

Step 1: Carry a small stack of index cards with you at all times. You can stuff these into a binder, into a notebook, in your satchel or purse. Have stacks at your desk / kitchen / in the car / airplane / submarine / starship / Tardis / ...

Step 2: When an idea occurs or noteable fact appears, write it down.

Step 3: File that card with others in a single central storage location.

Fleeting notes still happen. They end up in one place.

I agree, with the caveat that whatever you use also needs to get funneled into the box at some point. So a cocktail napkin is fine, unless you forget to take it with you. Having a limited set of places that you know you have notes makes this easier.

Yeah things like the inbox used by Getting Things Done productivity system handles that need, whether a physical inbox, or an email inbox, or a note to self IM channel, or even a page on a note taking program.

Setting systems aside, if you define and use a queue, you don't lose things when ideas and information page out of the wetware's RAM (l3 cache?)

Pen and paper is the "best". Not for everyone, everywhere. But, for most people most places.

There is nothing as cheap and fast as a pen and paper. That said there are huge drawbacks to pen and paper.

For one thing, in order to use those fleeting notes in a systematic way they need to be organized. And in many cases will need some standard notation system. It could be as simple as writing "todo" at the top of a post it note.

Randomly scribbling stuff on scraps of paper here and there might work for somebody, but even a little system will go a long way.

Obviously once you start using a computer a whole new world opens up.

In my practice I focus on the types of things I need to capture, I make sure I can capture them all using the same tools and also that they end up in the same place.

After I've got them collected, some just stay where they are. Others get processed according to their purpose. For example: I have my tasks emailed to me every morning and my reading list emailed to me on the weekend.

>"for most people most places."

This is, to say the least, not something you are able to speak to with certainty.

As someone who has been note-taking in a variety of formats, via a variety of mediums for the better part of my 40+ years on this planet, I can assure you, the system that works best is the one that works best for the individual. Universalizing something as intimate and personal as idea capture is, again, silly. I have been a writer my whole life, friends with writers most of that time, a graduate of two writing degrees at two different schools, and a teacher of writing. If you think you've somehow unlocked "best practices" when it comes to note-taking, you're way out of the convo. There ain't one.

Regarding what works best for the individual: I completely agree!

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm not suggesting there is any universal solution to note-taking. In fact, my work is all about enabling people to build different systems.

I'm curious whether more notes are taken by hand than typed or otherwise. But, this is much less interesting to me than what is done with the things that were written.

> There is nothing as cheap and fast as a pen and paper.

Talking. Simply talking is much faster than pen and paper.

I tried writing. I'm bad at it. And even though I tried, I never improved. I'm a slow typist, no advanced keyboard, spellchecking, auto-correction, or editor with extraordinary features helped me get better.

My handwriting is awful. If I try to write in a manner that I can understand it later - makes me way too slow. If I write fast enough - I can't decode my scribbles later.

Recently, I installed a nice audio recorder app on my smartphone. And now, I would just talk and record my thoughts. Files are set to immediately sync to the cloud and stored outside my phone. My next step is to set up a speech-to-text engine to transcribe them.

Past related threads, minus the ones complaining about too many Zettelkästen:

Denote – Simple Emacs Zettelkasten (by Prot) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066513 - July 2022 (16 comments)

Zettelkasten, linking your thinking, and Nick Milo's search for ground - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31507132 - May 2022 (31 comments)

Show HN: Flomo – a minimal note-taking tool based on zettelkasten method - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30373393 - Feb 2022 (21 comments)

Zettelkasten – Luhmann Style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003241 - Jan 2022 (8 comments)

A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996037 - Jan 2022 (89 comments)

Antinets (a.k.a. analog Zettelkästen) and the power of tree structures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639147 - Sept 2021 (17 comments)

The Zettelkasten Method (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28218288 - Aug 2021 (90 comments)

Org-roam-UI – graphical front end for exploring your org-roam Zettelkasten - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025491 - Aug 2021 (44 comments)

My Second Brain – Zettelkasten - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802277 - Jan 2021 (103 comments)

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24916536 - Oct 2020 (73 comments)

Luhmann's Original Zettelkasten Digitalized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24794569 - Oct 2020 (6 comments)

Remembering what you Read: Zettelkasten vs. P.A.R.A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068 - Aug 2020 (62 comments)

Zettelkasten note-taking in 10 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23445742 - June 2020 (124 comments)

Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386630 - June 2020 (300 comments)

Ask HN: Thinking of using Zettelkasten , recommend software/platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22979257 - April 2020 (5 comments)

Luhmann's Zettelkasten - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837 - Jan 2020 (83 comments)

Zettelkästen? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208196 - Oct 2019 (90 comments)

Saved you a click:

1. Have a thought

2. Write it down

3. Don't consider this note to be the final note

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