Somewhere between chill AF and Type A notetaker: Zettelkastens, Obsidian, and Personal Knowledge Management.
I'm not a hoarder (not typically, anyway.) My mom was a hoarder, and when I left my childhood home, I SWORE I would never be the same. So, and now, as an adult, I'm QUICK to throw out anything that isn't actually useful (or something that actually brings me joy, as Marie Kondo would put it).
But if I'm being really real with myself...I wasn't able to fully avoid the hoarding gene; it just manifested in a not-so-obvious way: digitally.
I obsess over my Zettelkasten and feel intense satisfaction when I can add more notes to a system that already has hundreds of notes in it.
When I first started taking Zettelkasten notes (also sometimes called "Atomic Notes"), I took them on index cards, by hand, just like Niklas Luhmann (the guy who popularized this particular note-taking system).
I did it all: I had different subsections for different topics and followed a strict numbering system, so each note had its own special number and could be "linked" in an analog sense.
(Image caption: my old Zettelkasten index box, with topic dividers and a strict numbering system for each individual note.)
After accidentally dumping out my box of HUNDREDS of index cards and having to refile them, I was done with the analog system.
So, I painstakingly typed each note into Notion (which, at the time, was great note-taking software before it shifted its focus to AI). But I still kept that intense numbering system, which was so complicated, I started going months without taking a single note. (I felt more like a librarian who was bad at her job, rather than an organized person filing away important info to use later.)
I fell exactly into a trap that Oliver Burkeman describes. He's a writer who blends productivity and human mortality in a way I never needed. Besides books, he also writes a bi-monthly newsletter I love called "The Imperfectionist," and one of his previous posts was called "How to forget what you read." Which, as an AVID marginalia person, this title made me want to break out in hives.
In the post, Burkeman talks about how it's very popular for folks to be obsessed with their fancy, complicated note-taking system, but if it's so complex and energy-taxing, then you're likely to abandon it.
Ding-Ding-Ding, that was exactly my problem with my Zettelkasten.
Eventually, thanks to my overly complicated system (and Notion's desire to focus more on large companies and to develop its own AI), I once more decided that I needed a change.
In what I hope is my last major move for me and my bulk of notes, I switched to Obsidian, because the notes I add to my account are stored on my computer as Markdown files, rather than stored on the company's servers (not to mention, there's no AI involved with this).
(Image Caption: This is my "Graph View" on Obsidian. Each dot represents an individual note, and each light greyed-out dot indicates a note that I haven't fully created or migrated from my old Notion account. We'll see if all of these grey-ed out dots get filled in eventually!)
So, here I was again, about to manually move hundreds of notes into a new system, all the while wanting to add new notes in as I read. But this time around, I made a few changes, including ditching the complicated numbering and filing system I had before.
Now, all my notes live in a basic "Zettelkasten" folder in my Obsidian, and I link any relevant notes inside the note itself, not based on the unique number.
I'm still working on migrating all my notes, but I'm doing so very slowly and methodically.
Similar to how Marie Kondo wants us to ask ourselves, "Does this bring me joy?" when it comes to all the stuff in our homes, I'm looking at each note and asking, "Is this note worth moving over?" or another useful question, "Will I regret not migrating this note?"
The type A/note hoarder in me always immediately screams "YESSSSS!!!" when I ask these questions, but I'm trying hard not to let that voice win.
Doing so makes my "Personal Knowledge Management" system feel much more curated, even though the process is going SOOOOOO slowly.
Cheers to learning and the attempt to retain a sliver of what we learn 🥂
Monica
