I realize this is “anecdata”, but there are echoes of this both in my personal experience and in the experience of others.
There’s a Bible reading plan, for instance. The protestant Bible has 1189 chapters, and reading in chapter units (usually multiple chapters per day) is a pretty standard practice. But a frequent comprehension challenge is in linking the ideas together across books, testaments, etc. (i.e. “systematic theology”).
One of the existing “reading plans” I’ve seen is from a guy who basically divvied the 1189 chapters up into 10 logical sections (at book divisions) with (89, 187, 78, 65, 62, 150, 31, 249, 250, 28) chapters each.
The idea is to read the next chapter from each list each day, for a total of 10 chapters per day. Since you’re just cycling through the lists in order, eventually when you finish the first list (89) you’ll be about halfway through the second repetition of lists 4 and 5, just starting the third repetition of lists 7 and 10, etc. Different chapters constantly showing up next to one another facilitates linking of the ideas in the text, albeit in a rather “brute force” sort of way.
For my own experience, I’ve found that random little pieces of data from other disciplines frequently intersects with stuff I already knew, and allows me to either take it in a different direction or illustrate it more clearly.
Random example - I used “The 12 Days Of Christmas” once as an illustration for explaining the area of a rectangle, and how it changes as length/width scale relative to one another.
By my understanding, “unlinked mentions” would never be discovered in the original conception of the Zettelkasten system until you linked them manually.
So this leaves me wondering if the benefit is in the fact that you’re Zettel-ing, or if the benefit is that Obsidian has a really good data visualization system?
Not saying anything bad about Obsidian or the choice to use it - just trying to separate out whether the benefit is the system (Zettelkasten), the tool (Obsidian), or both.
What kind of notes are you taking? What are the goals of your notes?
Obsidian can help connect and surface notes more easily than other note-taking apps I’ve tried over the past decade or so.
If you have meeting notes, you can connect them to clients, projects, and to-dos. If you have book notes, you can connect to other topics. Daily notes can show you patterns in your life.
If I knew what your old system was or what you are trying to doing, I might be able to give you more applicable suggestions.
Do you use this in practice? Have you modified it in any way?
I’m trying to figure out whether this is just intended for random notes, or whether it’s intended to be a full-system organization method. I’m having a hard time envisioning how it would, for example, allow me to track multiple projects for a single client. Especially since I have a number of clients that require sub-folders for various things.
Yes and no, The main graph does get crowded but there are some interesting anumation things you can do as it gets even more filled out that actually show how your system is growing and changing like an organism. Prtty but not necessarily very useful. However youc an sercha nd sort and the Local graph mis ver valuable. I use the main graph to find orphan notes that need to link somewhere.
I’ve been attempting to do various forms of Zettlekasten (although I didn’t know it by that name back then) for over 30 years. No previous system has really manged the linking in the way Obsidian does for me and none of them supported drawing new and interesting conclusions or even suggesting new areas for research. So the tool is vitally important bcecause the tools you use shape the way you think.
I think it’s both. The idea of a Zettelkasten system is a different way of aproaching accumulating knowledge and Obsidian is a very unique implemetation of that system.
