It's only the latest hype around digital Zettelkastens that tout the supposed benefits of mass-linking notes or generating fancy graphs (which I find to be a gimmick with little practical value).

Like any note taking system: Your potential output is what and how much you put into it. No note taking solution - digital or analog - magically produces results without countless hours of input.

Normal notes are fighting complexity by creating smaller and smaller categories of notes

Example:

splitting "engineering notes" to "software notes" and "technical writing notes"

and then "software notes" to "java notes" and "design notes"

And this way the notes get deeper and deeper in your notebook and you stop interacting with them.

This described well my personal experience.

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Zettelkasten fights this complexity by much more up-front work when adding and linking note, instead of a tree structure, you have a network.

I'm not a big fan of Zettelkästen for this reason, there is no need for those if you go through note refactors and make it a yearly routine (I combine it with OS reinstalls and trying new programs). I don't care about note program longevity for this reason, I'm not bound to a particular program because refactoring also means rewriting many notes from scratch, based on older notes and current knowledge.

This refactoring/rewriting is also a good refresher and helpful for really internalizing broader concepts (which you then can apply to other seemingly similar areas).

So instead of "java notes" and "design notes" you add the "java" and "design" tag, etc., so you can approach your notes in any direction: you can find "java" notes and then narrow the result sets to design notes (so java+design), and vice versa.

And you can add links too between the nodes, so you can also walk them in any order you define.

Existing tools can do this already, it's just a matter of using them.

Is there any more to zettelkasten? Its author invented the same thing on paper notes, but digital tools provide this naturally.

Zettelkasten is very simple and that is the point: You create small and connected notes. This constraint turns out to be useful for research and writing for some people.

There is no trick or secret to it.

i.e. you use one note document for 1 specific book and it might be 1500 words. but instead of linking the documents, you link specific words/paragraphs to other notes/paragraphs?

The gist is focused and self-contained notes, linked together to form structure and connections. A personal wiki with attention of recontextualization.

It takes effort to support this workflow. Notes have to be self-contained and of a somewhat permanent relevance. You don’t put raw reading and meeting notes there.

I wonder if I am doing it wrong. I certainly organize my notes into tree format when I am doing intensive reading on a book. This is to keep my head straight on what topics had been touched on by that book.

On occasions, I do opportunistic linking, however.

Most of the time, it’s more be beneficial to file notes according to the situation in which they’ll be useful rather than where they came from: If you’re going to have a tree structure, the original sources should be out at the leaves as external references rather than the root. This manifests in many forms from lots of different people giving advice:

In Getting Things Done, Allen spends a lot of time on the importance of organizing your todo lists by where you’ll be able to do the actions.

Luhmann used his original Zettelkasten to store passages that he could pull to make drafts of papers, and cross-referenced them to other passages that could be included together.

In How to Write a Thesis, Eco recommends writing a preliminary outline of your thesis and then tagging notes with the section number they’re relevant to.

In his MasterClass series, Chris Hadfield emphasizes the benefit of collecting summary notes organized by the interface you’ll see when actually performing an activity.

I generally take notes on paper and very rarely look at them afterwards.

I note down some thoughts or tasks every day and carry a journal around for that.

I usually get more value out of (work) meetings if I do take notes. I usually take notes but prefer not to if I'm chairing/leading the meeting.

I rarely take notes on what I have read, unless it's something I am actively learning.

Your goal is to learn things, apparently. Memorize what you wrote on the notes.

Zettelkasten's isn't. Its goal is to produce great books and papers.

- It forces some retrieval practice of the notes you’ve taken before, which reinforces all the ideas involved.

- Most of the benefit comes from the act of writing, but there’s an inevitable sense of futility that comes about if those writings are inevitably lost to time. By giving each note an ongoing purpose (to be linked to), the Zettelkasten system dodges this particular trigger to stop writing notes.

(1) as used by Luhmann; not necessarily any of the electronic tools

A better approach is also difficult, ie. asking yourself, do I need better note-taking and memorization of topics? Due to Dunner-Kruger effects, we rarely ponder this. Nowadays, a websearch is a very quick and accessible cop-out and, in many cases (not all), more effective.

Research typically show that pencil and paper works best for memorization. In my experience, I never refer to these notes later however. Wiki was a good idea in 1995, but taking notes shouldn't require arcane knowledge and have arbitrary implementation limits. Markdown is slightly better. As a tool, I prefer WYSIWYG into an accessible format.

For TODO-notes, a simple text-file serve me well. However, for note-taking that I want to refer to later, mindmaps works best digitally in my personal experience, both for memorization and reference.

A free version, though a bit limited, is FreeMind. Works well enough to navigate to find what you need, provided proper node names and structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann

The main reason it's so hip because Luhmann used it.

So, if your work is similar to Luhmanns and your cognitive profile is similar to Luhmans it makes perfect sense to try it out.

But I have no idea how you could test it's effectiveness in any sense that would provide results that are scientifically or statistically sane in any way.

Personally I've tried a "zettelkasten light" and I've found that I can keep my personal random research findings better organized that way - so instead of having just a page in a notebook, building an actual index of the notes as well, and linking thematically identical topics together seems to keep my thoughts better together. Been doing it only for a few months, though, need to see what I think about it in few years.

But, once more, this is anecdotal recall.

A similarly structured contemporary book is David Fleming's "Lean Logic: Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It" [1]. A true masterpiece of composition IMO, and a work that took the author 30 years.

Interestingly, this work ethic also links to Luhmann's views on the time span of research relevant to him. Quoting a paper I found on the matter [2]:

" In 1962 he received a scholarship to Harvard and spent a year with Talcott Parsons. In 1968, he was appointed professor of sociology at the newly established University of Bielefeld, where he worked until his retirement. Shortly before his appointment he was asked on what subject he wished to work at university. His reply was: “The theory of modern society. Duration 30 years; no costs.” He consequently realised exactly this theoretical program. At the time of his death in December 1998, at the age of 70, he had published an oeuvre of over 14,000 printed pages."

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Logic-Dictionary-Future-Survive/...

[2]: https://www.academia.edu/17063506/The_Legacy_of_Niklas_Luhma... Reference: Bechmann, G., and N. Stehr. "The Legacy of Niklas Luhmann. Society, January/February 2002.