let me gush about zettelkasten real quick

Okay guys! My now once-monthly post this month will be about a note-taking method that I picked up like a week ago. I've not used it for very long but I genuinely like it so much.

I used to be somewhat interested in productivity back in the day, and one of the hype trains is Obsidian. People were raving about how it revolutionizes the way you take notes because you can link notes together. Unfortunately, I didn't implement this because it seemed rather complicated. I used Obsidian as a repository for all of my writing. It's minimalistic, in markdown (which standard notes, the platform on which I publish these blogs, uses to process text) and works offline.

I tried to change that last semester by attempting to take notes for my classes in Obsidian. I downloaded the LaTeX plugins and whatnot, but I didn't end up staying with it. I'm not as fast typing notes as I am on paper (despite my typing speed, I found myself stuttering over the latex and formatting). I also didn't remember anything I wrote down, and when I went back to look at my notes, they did not make any sense.

This semester, I tried LaTeXing notes again for 18.725 Algebraic Geometry, this time in Overleaf, which is a much better latex IDE than Obsidian is (understandably). However, I ran into the same issues. It was hard to keep up in lecture, and I found myself thinking about formatting rather than playing super close attention to the content I was learning. The super difficult part for me was that the narrative of the content didn't flow super linearly. We were jumping around between ideas fairly often (we would return to concepts introduced earlier and state things that would be proven later), but I wanted my notes to be cohesive and linear. I began writing my notes during lecture on paper again, and then typing them up afterwards. After one lecture, I got tired of doing that and gave up.

As I was doing my pset for this class, I was looking up some concept and I chanced upon someone's notes that looked like a published version of obsidian notes. I cannot for the life of me find this in my history of visited sites, but honestly props to that guy. On the main page, the person who published this explained that they use the Zettelkasten/evergreen system, and so I naturally looked it up. It brought me back to the reasons why people use Obsidian in the first place.

There are plenty of places that explain to you what this system is. In brief, it's a nonlinear way of taking notes. You create "Zettels" for each small concept. You then link this to other Zettels that you have (or haven't, Obisidan lets you create links to places that don't exist yet). The main idea is that you don't force any sort of structure on these ideas; instead, you let the connections emerge. Obsidian has a pretty cool graph view that shows you which notes are linked to each other.

Okay, now here's a list of reasons why it's been working for me so far:

• 90% of what you learn in math is either a definition or proposition/proof. I have a Zettel for each definition or proposition/proof that I come across. I currently have a lot of definitions, but I hope to add more proposition/proofs.
  • The nice thing is that for any proposition about say schemes, I would start each proposition with "Let X be a scheme" and then link the page on schemes to the current note. The structure emerges!!
• My Zettels look like Wikipedia pages atp, but they're helpful wikipedia pages because they're written in my words. I can then keep clicking links because I am very forgetful and forget a lot of definitions. This is much better than flipping back and forth in my notes!
• I obviously no longer have to worry about making sure my notes tell a cohesive story between the ideas. I come out of class with my handwritten notes and reread them, adding the definitions and theorem/props as Zettels. This process is very quick!
• You can search through all your notes with the built-in search function easily.
• If there's something that I didn't really understand during lecture, I can always make the Zettel for now, then come back to it and update what's written so it actually makes sense (it is not uncommon that I just write the wrong stuff down from class). I usually give these notes the #confused tag so I can look for all notes with this tag and go figure out stuff in the future.
• When you open graph view and you see your graph of notes growing and being super interconnected and it's so cool and uwah
• It's doubly cool when you end up connecting stuff from two different domains of math!
• It's also really helpful for my probability class since that's a class where you learn a wide variety of stuff as well.
• No more relearning stuff! I have a bad habit of searching up the same stuff over and over again because the prof didn't define it in class so it's not in my notes, but I don't really know the definition, so I have to look stuff up and parse through the wording to remind myself what a subscheme is.

That's all I can think of for now. There might be more reasons that I don't remember, or not. See you next month lol.