Now allow me to explain this further with examples.
#Example of smart notes archive
An important feature of the Zettelkasten system is that it is not meant to simply be an archive of notes, rather it is meant to be a system of inter-connected notes to think with. Permanent notes is the main set of notes for collecting and generating ideas. Literatures notes are notes made while reading papers and other material. Reference notes is a collection of all research papers of interest. There are three main types of notes in the Zettelkasten system: permanent notes, literature notes, and reference notes. I follow the Zettelkasten system to organise all my research notes and ideas, adapted from Sönke Ahrens’ excellent book linked above. This includes notes from papers and textbooks I read, lectures, projects, and my to-do tasks. While I use Remnote to hold notes from all aspects of my life, I will restrict myself to research notes in this post. I will now try to explain how in more detail about how I organise my notes inside Remnote. I generally go through my practice queue on Remnote once or twice during the in-between moments of any day such as when I’m eating or walking. I also sometimes use it to make flaschards about quotes and ideas from any non-fiction book that I’m reading, or even some interesting works of fiction that I want to be reminded about again.
#Example of smart notes code
I currently use Remnote to mostly make notes and flascards about the research papers or textbooks I’m reading, and some code API which I might need to use again. If used properly, they can help with retaining fundamental concepts and forming a strong base, understanding new topics deeply, and re-discovering old ideas and sparking new connections. While flashcards are generally used to remember raw facts or cram for exams, I think they have a much bigger scope.
This is similar to the Anki app, but unlike in Anki your cards are not disparate objects but instead belong to your notes which in turn belong to your knowledge graph. Based on how well you answer a card, the app decides when to show you the card the next time. Remnote implements this by automatically converting your notes into flashcards that goes into a daily practice queue. This is a far more effective strategy to understand and learn new topics, and also retain them, than passively re-reading them. Active recall and spaced repetition, as you probably already know intuitively if not the names, is the practice of actively testing yourself on topics and trying to retrieve them from memory in increasingly-spaced intervals of time. The great thing about Remnote is its tight integration with active recall and spaced repetition. I invested some time playing around with Roam Research, Obsidian, and Dynalist before finally converging to Remnote. There has been an explosion of such apps in the last couple of years, which I think can be traced back to this great talk by education researcher Sönke Ahrens in a developer conference where he first advocated for the need of such apps (and his book). This actively encourages interest topics to be formed bottom-up and connections to be formed between different areas. You take ‘daily notes’ and as your notes accumulate, you reference your old notes and form links between them which results in a ‘knowledge graph’.
Non-linear note-taking apps turn this structure on its head by giving you a blank slate to start with. Such a setup can also introduce a lot of friction as you need to carefully decide about which ‘note book’ a particular note needs to go into. While this form of linear note-taking works well for some type of notes, it can be very rigid for areas like research where the boundaries aren’t well defined (and for good reason). For example, they are organised starting from the top-most area, to the subject, to the topic, and then finally to the note. In regular hierarchial note-taking apps like Notion or Evernote your notes are organised in a tree-like structure.
And probably the biggest one out of them was discovering the (rather niche) category of non-linear note-taking apps. While most of the content I consumed was noise that I could’ve done well without, I did fall into a few rabbit holes here and there that eventually did improve my quality of life. Like a lot of people I spent far too much time doom-scrolling through Twitter and Youtube, and constantly checking the news. 2020 was generally an unproductive year for me.
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