System note types

• Feed pages

• Wiki

• Journal

• Zettels

• wbox

  • Address differences between wiki/reference notes and compact zettels. How to decide when to use one over the other?
  • Address outline notes, and whether they should be inside the zettel of wiki subsystems
  • Wiki notes and how they mix in with zettels; how should large, technical material be broken up into smaller conceptual notes (if at all)? In some ways, Wikipedia does this, distinguishing between concepts that I would think deserve only one page (like groups and group theory). Perhaps something similar could be adopted, and still match the zettel philosophy (and let the larger field note take the form of an outline note).

With the four main note types, there are some sensible standards for creating and managing new notes in the system. Here is a basic pipeline addressing each of the note types:

• Daily notes: serve as arbitrary entry points for anything and everything. They are the canonical place to go for thoughts and ideas, and everything you write can be linked into the rest of the system.
  • Here we encourage jotting down anything that needs to be noted, and leave the actual placement of those notes for a later time. This allows thoughts to get onto the page first, and if necessary, we worry about location later.
  • Along this line, an important note: Canonical source content belongs on that page itself. I don’t like the idea of backlinking to content that should actually be inside that page’s boundaries. Instead I want backlinks to be from within their own respective pages, but to link related discussion points together in a meaningful way. That said, there are times where an informal thought as a daily note is related to a particular page, but doesn’t really belong there as canonical content; it is just a development thought. These should stay in the daily note under a link to that page. This is precisely the distinction I want to make for backlinks: while these notes in the daily aren’t canonical content, they should be linked in a way that allows travel back the idea at a later point in time. Otherwise, canonical content first written in daily should be moved to the page in which it belongs.
  • The daily note can also track simple, informal daily todos (i.e. that aren’t tracked by the larger Taskwarrior system).
  • More involved linkage: I’ve observed the pipeline of some Roam users and noticed that they will add page tags that don’t necessarily fit in as terms within the sentence they’re writing (e.g. tagging something with “ideas” at the end). You can tag things freely, they don’t have to be grammatically correct.
• Wiki notes: more formal notes on pretty much anything that’s not directly from a source (see feed), a contained thought chain (see zettels), or a daily note. These are intended to more long-term references that are built over time. You can liken this section to the KB of the Notion system, with some additional flexibility.
  • Feed notes vs wiki entries: what’s the difference? See 2020-03-13 for some greater discussion on this. Basically for now, notes are to be taken on resources in whatever way works best. Read as you follow along, jot down thoughts as you go, etc. When separate thoughts or ideas or areas worth expanding further are salient enough, break them into a Zettel. A Zettel is just a compact note that is highly connected to other Zettels, and serves mostly as an individual link in a chain of thought.
  • This process allows us to maintain notes from the original document (important for classes when you want to build what you learn into the greater system, but you also want to keep the specific information separate so you can more effectively study the target material), while breaking branches off into the Zettelkasten system where possible to expand on a greater linked web of thoughts and ideas at the edge of the mind. This information later gets distilling into the KB for more long-term reference and canonical publication on the site.
• The Resource archive is just a collection of sources with proper metadata, and each source contains whatever notes were taken on that source. They can be heavily linked around to other Zettels, resources, wiki entries to increase the action potential of the information discussed.
  • Like the video mentioned in 2020-03-13, notes are to be taken on resources normally, and salient thoughts/ideas can be pulled into Zettels during or after the note taking process. Important/canonical concepts from resource notes can be linked to the appropriate wiki page, or pulled in and refined as that wiki page’s content later on.
• More on the Zettel subsystem: chains of idea files
  • Liking this idea the more I think about it. When parsing some content, or thinking about something, make a relevant titled note inside the zettels directory. Jot down that thought, link around where necessary, and include a link to another relevant zettel. Run back over this video for some more concrete details. This also makes it totally seamless to just transfer small paper notes or other things straight into the system.