(2020-08-08) Milo In What Ways Can We Form Useful Relationships Between Notes

Nick Milo: In what ways can we form useful relationships between notes?

Main Ideas
Top-down categorizing has gotten a bad rap. It has a place.
Bottom-up creating is great, but it needs a bit of top-down structure as your library grows. But using just folders is the WRONG way.
Maps of Contents (MOCs) are game-changers.

Let’s examine the known— and lesser known — ways we form useful relationships between notes.

Direct Links

direct links alone are not enough. They do not allow for easy, dependable high-level navigation

Folders

Folders are rigid and exclusionary by their nature

What about for projects?

If your goal is to manage projects, folders are great — maybe even ideal. You might decide that you want your projects to be actively walled-off units. But once they are final, you take the extra steps of reformulating any good stuff into your main digital library.

retreating too much into project-based folder management will cripple your long-term thinking partner (i.e., your zettelkasten) from growing complex, dynamic, and interesting cross-genre connections. (associative)

Tags

The problem is that tags alone don’t scale.

A partial solution is to use multiple tags

Tags with Saved Boolean Search

Proximity

There are 3 basic levels of proximity.

Organizing by Proximity in the main folder:

2. Organizing by Proximity in the same subfolder:

3. Organizing by Proximity in an MOC (Map of Content):

Higher-Order Notes

Map of Contents (MOC)

Using MOCs is like being in your own warehouse full of workbenches, where each workbench contains a selection of highly curated index cards for you to engage with.

MOCs are Evergreen notes, just at the next level of emergence.

A Home Note

Think of your Home note as the highest-level of your zettelkasten / digital library. It has links to the main MOCs in your library