Zettelkasten

Welcome to my Zettelkasten! This is my collection of notes inspired by the Zettelkasten principle. I started it quite recently, so it’s still sparse, and it’s a very random assortment of topics. It also doesn’t have a graph visualization yet, that’s on my to-do list.

Selected Hub Notes

Hub notes are notes whose purpose is to collect to other notes from a specific topic complex, so you more easily navigate through the Zettelkasten and find what you’re looking for.

Here are some of my hub notes:

• buying decisions
• coffee
• handwriting
• ice cream making
• shop lists
• sociology
• web technology

Motivation

While its main purpose is to be my personal knowledge base, I still publish it in case something might be useful to other people. I have stumbled over other people’s similar note collections when researching in the past and found very helpful information there, so I want to “return the favor”, so to speak.

My goal is to write down all pieces of knowledge and chains of thought in this Zettelkasten when I encounter them, so I can easily find them again when I want to get back to a topic.

In the past, when doing research about a topic, I often ended up with a collection of dozens of browser tabs I didn’t want to close just in case I wanted to get back into that topic again. The result was that having those tabs always staring at me stressed me out, only to still close them at some point. And then, months later, I did want to get into the topic again, only to find myself stumbling over all the same websites and information I had already visited long ago. I hope that getting into the habit of jotting down research results and links here will make it easier for me to put my thoughts to the side and still get back into them when I want without having to retrace all my steps.

Also, I have a huge pile of “almost finished” drafts for blog posts flying around, often about stuff I think might be helpful for other people, but it’s very hard for me to actually get something polished enough that I feel comfortable publishing it as a blog post. My hope is that this Zettelkasten will make it easier for me to structure the information and thoughts a bit and have it in a public place, so people can already find it and I can link to it.