Obsidian Refresh - Zettelkasten and Progress
I started on a cleanup and refresh of my Obsidian setup a couple weeks ago. My two big goals:
Cleanup - doing some badly needed weeding out of old notes that were no longer relevant or useful and combining notes where it made sense.
Make it Better for Zettelkasten- I’ve tried lots of different methods for organizing my notes and Zettelkasten is the one I keep coming back, the one I really want to get better at. Here’s a good concise overview of it from ChatGPT 4o (when I prompted it to frame it in terms of our digital world (since the method was developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in the 1950s):
The Zettelkasten method is a personal knowledge management system designed to capture, organize, and interconnect ideas to enhance learning and creativity. In the digital age, it involves three key types of notes:
Fleeting Notes: Quick, informal jottings of thoughts, ideas, or observations captured on the fly. They are temporary and meant to be reviewed and processed soon after creation.
Literature Notes: Summaries or paraphrases of key points from source materials like books or articles. These notes distill essential information in your own words to aid comprehension.
Permanent Notes: Core, standalone notes that encapsulate a single idea or concept clearly and concisely. Written in a way that makes sense independently, they are interconnected with other notes through links or references, forming a rich web of knowledge.
By consistently creating and linking these notes, the Zettelkasten system builds a dynamic and evolving network of ideas that supports deeper understanding, critical thinking, and creative output
I highlighted that last sentence because that’s exactly what I’m after with my note taking.
The Progress Report
When I wrote about the Obsidian refresh 10 days ago I had gone from a count of “way too many” folders to 10 ‘hub notes’. Give that post a look if you want to see how hub notes work. I’m also down to just 328 total files in my Obsidian vault.
Now I’m down to 5 hub notes, as you can see in the top-of-post screencap, and the first three are the three Zettelkasten note types (I just like the name ‘atomic’ better than permanent for the third type). And making Zettelkasten work well in Obsidian is feeling more do-able now.
Here’s a look at the sidebar and Fleeting hub note in the Obsidian Mac app:
I think I’m done with changes to Obsidian for now. The trimming, shaping it for Zettelkasten, and the magically great Smart Connections plugin have got in great condition, and I’m hopeful that it’s a setup I can stick with long term.