Once one has mastered most of a course, they might profitably skim through their notes at the end to summarize outcomes they saw and find most useful and interesting. Those things along with the summaries of their Cornell notes might then be useful zettels to keep in the long run. A zettelkasten practice like that of Niklas Luhmann is more useful when one already has a strong lay of the land and they’re attempting to do the work of expanding on the boundaries of new areas of knowledge.
If you are a student contemplating creating a zettelkasten, then the bulk of your notes probably ought to be short snippets kept with your bibliography notes and should not be individual zettels. By this I mean specifically that you might have a bibliographic note (reference note or literature note) for each individual lecture with some fleeting notes about it kept with that card. Then if necessary, you’ll probably only have one or two zettels or permanent notes out of each lecture. If you’re attempting to create 30 permanent notes a day and interlink them all, then you’re going to find yourself overworked and overwhelmed within just a few days.
What a coincidence. Just these days I was thinking about this. I have a physical zettelkasten, and lately I’ve been thinking that, for learning, maybe the method is not that useful, and it is only for research, writing and publishing. What do you think? Should I use to learn topics that I do not plan to be writing about (yet)? Or should I leave it aside for now, and use a Commonplace Book or a more BASB-like digital zettelkasten?
Thing is, I really like the mobility of an index card (something that a notebook page doesn’t have). But, in the other hand, you know that, in the commonplace tradition, the notebook was the weapon of choice.
I am still confused if I should use my zettelkasten only for writing, or use what I have for learning too (falling a little in sink-cost fallacy)
Practice all the traditions. This is the way.
One option is to use bigger cards / paper slips for reading notes, as Umberto Eco advises in his ‘How to Write a Thesis’. That way, you keep flexibility on whether to use Cornell Note-style, mind maps, etc. I am not a student, but I read a lot of philosophy or legal texts with complex points and arguments, and this requires larger sheets (I use A5, or even A4 that I fold and have a small folio of 4 pages). Only what fits into my general research topics later, after a review, goes into a box of more permanent notes (on A6).
I Wish Bear Hadn’t Wasted Years
I’ve never used the markdown app Bear. But because I can be so productivity and app obsessed (working on it) I ended up reading this post about it.
(As a side note: I’ve never really been interested in it either. It looks like a great app, but I’m not paying a subscription just to sync markdown files over iCloud!)
I’m thankful I did read this post though because I ended up reading this piece of wisdom.
I’ve switched between note taking apps more times than I’ve liked to admit, for various reasons, but one of the things that I always struggle with is how to store my notes long term.
I always imagine this scenario where I want to be able to review all my notes. But I’m not sure why I’m so worried about this scenario because I never review notes that I take.
The reason I never review my notes is that once they’re written, they are no longer valuable to me. Writing is thinking, reviewing is not. Rehashing thoughts I’ve already thought does not challenge me to think through and internalize information in the same way that writing does.
I think this feeling is related to what Chris Aldrich was describing in his latest musings on Zettelkasten for Coursework.
I take notes of things I want to internalize and recall as easily as “2+2”. By writing notes, these things end up being easily recallable, and once they are I see my notes as somewhat useless and feel no need to review them.