Take Useful Notes. Avoid Pitfalls.
A framework for taking smart notes. From Take Useful Notes.
My Zettelkasten is now more than 9 months old. When I started to write my first notes with Obsidian I followed the rule “Start early and learn by experiment.”
But I also learned: Experiments took a lot of my precious time. Here are my top mistakes to avoid when starting your first Zettelkasten:
1. Starting without templates — so that it was hard to build up a consistent note structure I needed later for effective searching.
2. Using tags without rules for tagging — so that building clusters for searching was not very effective.
3. No use of frontmatter — so that meta data and content of notes became inconsistent and confusing.
4. No use of time stamps like “created” and “modified” within frontmatter — so that using backups and changing cloud spaces caused a loss of time information connected with my notes.
5. No use of DataView plugin as a tool for gardening — so that inconsistencies in my Zettelkasten were growing and growing.
All these mistakes lead to intensive re-work of my notes later on.
What about your experiences?
Thanks very much! I really appreciate you reading my work. If you enjoyed it and found it useful, you might also like the related book “TAKE USEFUL NOTES. A simple guide to a complex skill by using Sketchnotes, Obsidian and Zettelkasten”. Here’s your free copy
