I am researching a few topics, like AI and work from home, and I am trying to figure out what system would be best. E.g., I may find some news articles, or journal papers, or reports, and so on, on a topic I am interested in. One option would be to create a note with the topic name, say "AI, and then just put the links into the note, maybe separating them with headers. Would it work or is there a better way? I was also thinking about a kanban board, but not sure if it is worth the trouble. Anyway, I would appreciate your tips!
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Sorry for my english. Here’s what i usually do:
- kanban as read-list and task tracking
- introductive note to a topic with backlinks to other notes (subtopics)
- a directory with all the subtopics notes, backlink to index note.
I don’t like atomic notes or Zetelkastenn methods enough, but be sure to check these methods. If you’re more visual, then you may use the canva plugin.
The best system is subjective, try different things and find what works for you.
Thank you for sharing your experience! May I ask a bit further? So how do individual sources (say, a news article) are represented in the vault? As individual notes? Do you organize those materials on the topic somehow? E.g, news, reports, etc?
Yes sure! For your first question, it depends on the source, for example a book or a paper usually is a note because i like to resume or quote interestings idea or discoverings from them. Blog posts and news rarely are notes but usually they’re put at the bottom of a note or link with title or one-two line description.
Books, video essays and so on are located inside a directory of resources. I usually add these resource notes as additional sources at the bottom of the topic notes, and/or quote what I find interesting fron the source.
Every note in my vault is tagged, this helps to find “hidden” connections between notes. As said before, not using systems like atomic/evergreen notes with strong atomization of content, full text search is essential for retrieving in my system. I use different vaults only if I need a strong separation between content, for example I have one for study/work, one for more intimate and general purpose stuff and one for preparing DnD campains.
Thank you so much for a detailed reply. This helps a lot. Tagging is another thing I’m trying to figure out.
Ideally you would create a new note with the content of the article. You should then go through and put double brackets around any important terms or concepts. Click on each of those new links so a new note is created for each term or concept. If you do this for multiple articles, each new note you create will begin to have a list of backlinks to each article that mentions that term/concept, acting like an index. You can even add your own thoughts about that term/concept on the note, expanding it’s usefulness. I find this method of interlinking files to be very useful, resulting in a ‘living index’ of your vault.
Thank you for sharing your approach. May I ask further to understand it better? So, I am interested in a topic, say, AI. Then I find an interesting news article about this topic. So I would create a separate note (named how?) with a short summary (and maybe a URL) and reference [[AI]]. But would you organize the sources somehow? Articles, reports, news, etc? And where do you put all those separate notes? Just in the root folder or have them in the AI folder? Sorry if I might have misunderstood your system, just trying to get it better.
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Hey, thanks for sharing. I am also trying a folder structure for things I know should belong in a folder, like notes on a project.
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