Obsidian, Zettelkasten, and The Holy Grail
Aka an update on my Obsidian refresh and making it more Zettelkasten-y
I started on re-arranging my Obsidian vault back in September of last year. Back then my goal was the same as it is now: to really embrace the Zettelkasten method of note taking. A couple weeks in, I thought “hub notes” would be a big part of getting things a I want them. Here’s what just the very top section of the Cyber Hub Note looked like:
Hub notes didn’t work out, they became hard to manage and keep updated pretty quickly - and since they were a big piece of my thinking around how to revamp Obsidian to be more Zettelkasten-y (apologies to the Zettelkasten gods for sticking that y on there) it was a back to the drawing board moment.
I thought again about what I wanted most from the revamp, and I read a handful of things to help with my reset process. I read several good long form articles, watched some videos, and also the “How to Take Smart Notes” book by Sönke Ahrens. This reading helped me define my goal with a little more detail. It’s something like this, in terms of where I am able to:
Use Zettelkasten almost exclusively for all my notes in Obsidian (the only exceptions being journaling type daily notes and scratchpad type notes)
Have templates that work well for the three types of Zettelkasten notes - fleeting, literature, and atomic
Really(!) embrace the idea of bottom up note taking (as opposed to a top-down folder structure)
Arrive at a structure that provides a consistent - and easy - way to create and triage notes through from fleeting (quick capture) to literature (reference and building blocks for atomic notes) to atomic (single idea per note and always in my own words)
A space where connections between notes and connections between ideas, surface easily
My update on all of this is: I’ve made some progress, but I’m not “there” yet. I feel like along with that status I should say …
“It’s not you Obsidian, it’s me”,
Obsidian makes just about all my goal bullet points easy to do. I’ve tweaked my Zettelkasten note templates several times and landed on this format that I’m happy with, shown on a literature note:
The Obsidian home page and structure are much cleaner now. It’s down to 9 folders, and three of those are built-in (templates, attachments, and daily notes) and one is to sync Readwise highlights to.
Notes are back to being just notes again; none of them are serving as hubs. Instead, I make the effort to add inline links and tags to all my notes, and Obsidian does a great job at keeping backlinks updated, letting me view notes by tag, and more. More includes graph view, and local graph view for individual notes, like so:
That’s where I’ve got to so far. I think the new structure I have in Obsidian ticks my boxes that set me up for doing better with and getting more from Zettelkasten. The rest is up to me. I need to put the time in to make the most of notes and the thoughts in them.
Of course I reserve the right to be back here in 6 months struggling with this again :( Do any of you use Obsidian? Use Zettelkasten, or something similar? Have any great tips on how you make your setup work?
I kept waiting for a reference to this long word: Zettelkasten? Was is das?
I really recommend looking at Bob Doto’s book 📕 Systems of Writing.
This has somewhat replaced how to take smart notes for me as the recommended Zettelkasten book that I tell beginners about. Or even other experts because it’s just so much clearer here, and it is more functional instead of being focused on academic writing.
For me, I’ve been trying to implement the idea of a sleeping vault which is where you put notes that are in your inbox, but you don’t really wanna process them and you don’t really want to delete them either. It gives my mind a space to just let go of the notes.