Zettelkasten, or how to take smart notes

A short intro to Zettelkasten the structured notes it provides and why you should be interested in taking these kinds of structured notes.

Transcript

1. Zettelkasten or how to take smart notes Björn Andersson
2. Why? • I want a way to go back to the research I did to come to a conclusion • To improve your learning and understanding of things • Focus on writing notes in your own words, rewritten from the source • If you recast something into your own words you have to understand it • A closure is a lexical scope where you can read outer bindings • In Python, a function declared inline can read all the variables available when the function was getting declared • Communicating with an absolute novice in the subject: a future you who has forgotten about it
3. What? • A somewhat formalised way of taking notes • Your personal graph of information you fi nd interesting linking across them, keywords(tags) that sets the context when I want to stumble upon this information again • Part of building up your own personal Knowledge Management System
4. How? • Start taking notes • “Brain dump” notes, I want to remember this. This is how I understood it. While reading, listening to a talk, etc. “literature notes” • Nuggets of information you’ll want to refer back to, aka “permanent notes” or “evergreen notes” • When reading something have a notebook at hand to take notes • Distill your notes into permanent notes which are things you’ll want to make sure you remember in the future • Example: Redeploy an old version using the exact same pipeline that did that version originally, because it’s then done using the same con fi g
5. A couple of weeks ago 
 we watched “Tidy fi rst?”
 
 This is my rough notes from listening to that talk.
6. And these are my takeaways. 
 
 The things that I may turn into permanent notes.
7. What I’m doing • I use Roam which is an app that does notes but also tries to help you organise your life overall • Stores my “clean notes” (transcribed from my notebook, I like my notebook) • I store random things I fi nd in a day and try to attach tags when I’d like to see them in the future • Add todos and put dates for when I would like to see them in the future and make sure they’re done. Often follow-ups on things I did • I’m looking to use my permanent notes as SRS as the stu ff I used to put in Anki is pretty much the same thing
9. References • TakeSmartNotes.com: the book I have been reading about the subject • RoamResearch.com: the note-taking tool I’m using to store my notes on the computer • https://www.youtube.com/playlist? list=PLralmZwl_8jJuJMIebWFqm6K5I20a5Qve: Playlist by Shu Omi who got me into using Roam and gave me a quick intro to Zettelkasten