How to take smart note

Organize notes in folder with structure

Ref: The Knowledge Worker

• Thoughts:
  • three types of notes are kept isolated from one another in different locations:
    • Inbox - the temporary location for fleeting notes that are being processed.
    • Reference System - for literature notes, also called reference or source notes.
    • Slip-box - stores all permanent slip-box notes.
    • Project Folders - for project-specific notes such as reminders, to-do lists, outlines, drafts, etc…
  • make note-to-note connections
  • develop a topic by creating a topic note

ref: Artem Kirsanov

• Thoughts:
  • Files are organized in 4 folders:
    • zettelkasten / slipbox: contains atomic idea notes
    • refenrence: used to reference books, articles, etc
    • files / assets: containers for images, other filetypes (.doc, .pdf)
      • I prefer to upload images to imgur or imagekit, other filetypes to box, then embed direct link into notes
    • templates: container for template notes

Use combination of Folder, Tag, Link to make interconnection between notes

ref: Obsidian Community Discord, Logseq Community Forum

Credit: Obsidian Community Discord

To understand why journals are useful in PKMs like Logeq and Roam it is important to understand the power of tagging in this new generation of note taking applications. When you write a tag it doesn’t just add some extra metadata that can be used for filtering your notes (like Gmail or Apple Notes), rather it creates a new page devoted to that tag. That page can itself have additional notes within it. The power of this approach comes from the existence of a special section at the bottom of the page which lists all the blocks that link back to this page. The end result is that you magically create a page of all the linked text.

Use hierarchy:

• example: create [[contact/family]] and [[contact/business]] to differentiate pages with different kinds of contacts

How to use and organize Tags?

ref: Obsidian Community

I choose using tags for Zettelkasten with three different goals in mind:

• to build up an index
  • The terms in my index are leading me to important entry points in the slip-box
  • tags for indexing should link only a few important notes, the entry points for further investigation
• to define clusters
  • The terms which define clusters are leading me to a number of similar notes that belong together
  • tags for clustering connect larger groups of notes with similar focus
• conceptual/idea tags that are never actually used for searching and only function as psychological reassurance that you’ll be able to find things again

Two figures below listed the most typical tags used by Obsidian community.

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Backlinks

• Obsidian
• How do you organize your notes?