What Goes into a Note?
This is a broad question, as it depends on your objective. As I noted in the last post, I use the Templater plugin to insert customized templates for my notes. See Templater Plugin for Research Notes for a quick overview. Now, if I open a new note (hotkey ⌘ + N) I will get a blank note with ‘Untitled’ as my identifier. With hotkey shift + ⌘ + N, a new note is populated with my Zettel note template. This hotkey command and the associated template are set up via Templater. This is very effective for research as it populates pre-designed properties and fields I want in this note (Fig. 1-3). A helpful tool that saves time.
What content goes into my Zettel Notes? Well, everything. The key is that a Zettel note contains a singular idea. A concise thought that can be articulated in four or five sentences, maximum. Compared to my Literature note, which contains all my annotations to be processed from a book or article. The four to five sentences are not a steadfast rule, but they are more of a guideline I try to adhere to. It really depends on the idea/thought. Many of my notes have quotes from an article or book (usually in a callout block, fig. 4), which have inspired the thought/idea for the note. These do not count toward my sentence parameters.
The Zettel note breakdown is quite simple: 1) Properties (the metadata of the note), 2) Tags (I will discuss this in another post), 3) Key Idea (where I write my thought and any direct quotes), 4) Citation, 5) Related Links (Other notes in my vault that I believe are related or applicable to the current note) and 6) Linked Mentions (Links to this note from other notes). In the following posts, I will discuss each section in more detail.
