Two Years Using the Zettelkasten in OneNote
Have the promises been fulfilled, or have I been wasting my time?
I started making Zettelkasten-type notes more than two years ago. I did it for the same reason as most people who do it: because I read “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens. I wanted to get one of the outcomes that the book explicitly promises: to write more texts, more easily. So, after two years, has this promise been fulfilled or have I been wasting my time?
First of all, a disclaimer: even though my oldest Zettelkasten-type notes are more than two years old, I only really understood the importance of linking them a year ago. In my defense, I was using other methods to try to associate the notes: either putting them all under the same tag or placing all related notes as “subpages” of the same principal note. Both of these methods turned out to be very limiting. In short, was I was doing were glorified flashcards.
One year after using the Zettelkasten in OneNote
Has it been any good?medium.com
Since then, I have been as explicit as possible when liking two notes. Specifically, what I do is the following:
If the text of note A references a concept or idea that is described in note B, then link to note B within the text of note A.
In note B, there is a list of “Related”, in which note A can be listed.
Here are two examples of that.
One of the proposals of Ahren’s book is that these notes, each one representing a single idea, can be put into an order that makes sense for a certain text. Then, because several main ideas are already there and in order, one must simply “fill in the blanks”. Unfortunately, this is the one thing that I haven’t been able to accomplish with the Zettelkasten. I have tried several methods, such as copying and pasting all the relevant notes in a separate document, but I always end up losing track of the ideas.
Now, it might very well be that there is something I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m trying to write texts that are too long, or perhaps I haven’t written my notes in a way that they can really fit in any text as independent ideas (assuming that’s possible).
Regardless, the fact remains that such a method hasn’t worked for me. In these two years, I haven’t necessarily written more texts, or written there more easily. So, have I completely wasted my time? Well, not really, because I have been able to extract a different benefit from the Zettelkasten, one that is much more important to me than how many text I can publish in a certain amount of time.
There’s another promise that Ahren’s makes in his book — that by using the Zettelkasten, you’ll gain a longer-lasting learning of whatever you’re taking notes about. In the book, this is treated as an outcome as important as writing more, yet I’ve rarely seen it mentioned in other texts that talk about the Zettelkasten.
When you add a relation between a new note and an older one, you’re forced to think about the older note again, as well as it’s relation to the new idea. For example, are two linked notes. The first one is from August of 2023; it’s about the term “deliberate practice”, as it is used in the book “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport. I wrote the second one in October of 2024, while I was rereading Ahren’s book.
The new note references back to the deliberate practice note. However, Ahren’s book does not use this term, so why did I ended up linking both notes? Before I write a new note, I check with keywords if there are already existing ones that deal with the same ideas. It’s likely that I was going to write something about “trying” or “practice” and found this older note. I realized that both authors were talking about the same thing, even if they weren’t using the same terms, so I decided to link them.
The best part is that I hadn’t thought about this deliberate practice note in months. The Zettelkasten helped me remember something and made it stick for even longer in my mind, by making explicit a connection to a seemingly independent new idea. In my opinion, these types of connections are worth using the Zettelkasten for, especially if you value deep and lasting learning.
It should be more than clear now that I will continue to use this system, even if not the “writing-productivity machine” that I was sold on. Still, the way I use it’s continuously evolving. I wouldn’t be surprised if I do end up finding a way to write more. Perhaps my older methods aren’t a good fit for my writing style. After all, putting notes in a certain order basically pre-fixes the structure that the text should have, something that I’m not very good at following.
I did write this text using my Zettelkasten, but I started it with one or two notes and then continued expanding on the list, instead of having all notes since the beginning. This could be what I was missing; or maybe not. You can find out next year in my upcoming “Three years using the Zettelkasten in OneNote” article.