After more than eight years tweaking different forms of knowledge organization I’ve never been more pleased than with the resulting Zettel Model that has materialized this week.
The biggest break-through relates to the simplicity and size of a zettel. Discovering the Zettelkasten method really gave me permission to force the most granular possible knowledge organization without fear of missing out on everything that comes from larger compositions.
Zettelkasten says, “it’s not finished, but will be, stop worrying” and that is the permission I needed to make the constraints I have. “It’s all just a bunch of notes, dumb ass,” is how I imagine Luhmann would speak to me (if he had my personality).
This simplicity means, for example, that there is only one heading to deal with, and it happens to also be the title. That every zettel requires a title even if you think it is just a “log entry”. It means there is only one line of tags, the last line, and that there is only one possible image (a figure) per zettel.
“DEAL WITH IT!” (That’s me telling my saner self to stop fretting and keep-it-simple-stupid.)
Having all the links and written references in a single bullet list allows the author and reader to switch into “where can I read more about this” cognitive mode rather than jarring them mentally between that mode and “ooo, this is interesting” flow state while reading it.
🤬 Oh, by the way, hyper linking has always been a fucking horrible idea. I realize that now more than ever (and need to write an entire paper just explaining why; hell I’d do a Ph.D thesis on “failures of the Web” if I could; Hyperlinking fucking suuuuucks).