I spend a lot of time working on my note-taking system, as it contains thoughts on future blog posts here, podcasts, books to read, and much more. It’s taken a long time to put together, but it’s become an amazing tool for me.
I create regular backups of it just in case, but what would happen if it were to get completely deleted? I’d be super upset, of course, but I still would have found the time that I put in to be worth it. The act of processing my notes is where a huge amount of my learning comes from, so losing the final result (while very painful) would still have been worth the effort.
Zettelkasten
I’ve mentioned a few times (such as here) that I loosely follow the “zettelkasten” method of note-taking. If you’re not familiar with it, here is what that is:
The basic idea of a Zettelkasten is a system where every idea/note is a separate card in a slip-box, and all of those cards are linked to one another. It was popularized by German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann, who had roughly 90,000 cards in his system when he passed away in 1998.
As such, I follow a number of zettlekasten-focused sites, and a recent post from Sascha Fast on zettelkasten.de opened up my thoughts on this topic. It was a long post, but here was his key line:
“If you would destroy my Zettelkasten, the work building it would be still worth it.”
I’m going to continue to back up my notes diligently, as losing them would be awful. However, the effort I’ve put in has been worth it for the learning alone, and being able to use the notes every day for additional research is just icing on the cake.
