Note taking should enable the development of ideas across projects
Date created: 2021-09-06
If you only take notes for a specific project and never allow yourself to be side-tracked, the value of your notes will be limited over time since they don’t transfer. For every new project you’ll have to start over again.
The Zettelkasten allows you to build up an ever-growing archive of ideas through your Permanent notes since Zettelkasten notes can be used in multiple projects.
References
NessLabs - How to take smart notes
The second typical mistake is to collect notes only related to specific projects. On first sight, it makes much more sense. You decide on what you are going to write about and then collect everything that helps you to do that. The disadvantage is that you have to start all over after each project and cut off all other promising lines of thought. That means that everything you found, thought or encountered during the time of a project will be lost. If you try to mitigate the effect by opening a new folder for every potential new project whenever you stumble upon something that might be interesting for that, you will soon end up with an overwhelming amount of unfinished projects. If that in itself does not become a drag on your motivation, the task of keeping track of them will. But most importantly, without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of time because you are restricting yourself either to the length of a single project or the capacity of your memory. Exceptional ideas need much more than that. LOCATION: 822