(Thanks for the attention from Hacker News; Can you kindly please follow me on Medium? I’m still way behind my goal of reaching 200 followers :D )

With the Zettelkasten method, your notes can naturally cluster. Not only are they visually appealing, these clusters also serve as an inspiration of creativity as they bump into each other.

I’ve been using Obsidian for 2 years. Here’s the graph view of my personal notes today:

May I take you for a tour?

The biggest cluster centers at one huge note, “Journal”. Every day, I append an entry that answers 3 questions:

• What did I learn/achieve today?
• Who did I talk to today?
• How is today special?

These questions nudge me to notice the bright sides of each day, making COVID lockdowns more bearable.

If the day has witnessed something spectacular and I’d write a lot, it usually warrants a separate file.

A good habit I picked up from workplace is to keep notes for one-on-one conversations, which resulting into this huge cluster of “Chat with people”. Unless you write some scripts, text itself can’t jump out spontaneously and remind you to catch up with individuals. For this reason, I’d recommend using a “personal CRM” tool for managing relationships. A good starting point is this Notion template.

The “distinguishing between” tag marks notes where I learn concepts by comparison. These notes are generally disambiguation pages (or comparison tables) between synonyms. Exact themes vary from day-to-day topics (like lager-v.s.-ale) to technical concepts (like dummies-v.s.-mocks).