My Zettelkasten Note Types

Related: Zettelkasten

Note types

Eventually, I came to the following system of note types for different purposes:

I tag them using tags in [[Obsidian]]. See: Obsidian Note vs Tag

Daily Log

Daily notes are taken as a part of my daily journal, where I write anything that comes to my mind mainly related to what's going on in my life. I don't do it exactly every day, but I still quite often.

This is a kind of my personal news and thoughts that are relevant to a current moment in time. Things that make me happy or bother me at the moment.

These daily journal notes sometimes provide soil for thoughts and further notes to take.

Inbox

Inbox notes are used for capturing random thoughts and brief ideas and description that come to my mind on the go. I write them on my iPhone, then they are synced through iCloud and get to a separate Inbox notes dir of my notes vault on my Mac.

Later on, I review and update them to my common notes template format, add tags, perhaps some todos, and so on and eventually move to the main notes dir.

It also serves as my "read later" inbox.

Reference

Reference notes content is usually a link to a source with a brief description and probably some additional context.

"Reference" is a kind of reading list item, which is more common for articles on specific topics that can be already linked to other notes in my Zettelkasten and has a very high chance of being processed in the near future.

Maybe

"Maybe" is very similar to "reference" but has a lower chance of being processed in the near future and it's usually applied to books, podcasts, etc. It's literally a read-later list.

When I get some book or podcast recommendation it's almost guaranteed to be eventually turned into a "maybe" note.

It may also contain some brief description, links to topics, context, and name of the one who has recommended it.

Both "Maybe" and "Reference" notes are located somewhere on the invisible border between a reference manager and bookmark junkyard. See: [[Collectioner's fallacy]]

Highlights

Highlights notes are worthy takeaways from books and articles, that mainly imported from my Kindle Highlights.

Distilled

Processed notes contain retold ideas from 3rd party sources, like articles and books but in my own words. Then it gets connected to other notes in my vault. Zettelkasten folks usually call them Literature notes

AI Distilled

AI Distilled is for the case I was too lazy to process the whole thing myself.

Notes

It's just notes that usually contain my own thoughts and ideas. There is no status or any end goal for a note. It's evergreen and can evolve infinitely over time. These kinds of notes are typically called "permanent" or Evergreen Notes.

References