Zettelkasten is about breaking down concepts into networks, which is an incredibly powerful way to “think out loud”. I’ve written, journaled, and captured notes for a long time, but in my experience, there’s nothing like Zettelkasten for clarifying thought.
But I don’t think it’ll make much sense until you’ve done it awhile. It’s not about learning the system—it’s about really coming to embrace the idea of networked knowledge. After that, everything else starts to fall into place. I’m still coming to terms with a lot of the things that didn’t make sense to me at first. It’s mostly a process of letting go of the complexity I wanted to bring to it, and getting comfortable with simplicity.
I’m trying to move in the direction of primarily using iOS, but I haven’t found anything to rival The Archive on iOS yet. Currently, I use iOS for capture and access, and MacOS for analyzing and breaking down.
My normal use case is journaling or capturing a note on paper, and then transferring it into my digital system. In this case, I usually manually timestamp it when I write, and then use the same timestamp digitally. This is more of a “linking in” scenario, where going through my paper journal would point me into the digital.
But to “link out”, I would make a digital note corresponding to the timestamp, and say “See journal XYZ”.
My most frequent case for doing this is actually documents or books that are in my personal library. I’ll create a digital note in my system, spell out the relevant details, and describe where or how to find the physical object.
Thanks for pointing this out!