A Real Zettelkasten Workflow in Obsidian  🔗 **Source:** [A Real Zettelkasten Workflow in Obsidian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzmFooRRtAw) > [!note]+ Document Notes > > tags: > > * \#zettelkasten > * \#obsidian > * \#pkm Author: Nicole van der Hoeven Source: YouTube Live Stream “A Real Zettelkasten Workflow in Obsidian” Reference: Transcript timestamps date created: {{date:2025-07-07}} {{time:10:00}} > > > # 📝 Title: A Real Zettelkasten Workflow in Obsidian > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🌐 Table of Contents: * [📝 Summary](#📝-summary) * [📖 Main Content](#📖-main-content) * [🗒️ Notes](#🗒️-notes) * [🗣️ Paraphrase](#🗣️-paraphrase) * [📰 Newsletter](#📰-newsletter) * [✅ Action Items](#✅-action-items) * [🧪 Hypotheses](#🧪-hypotheses) * [📊 Methodology](#📊-methodology) * [❓ Questions](#❓-questions) * [🔮 Future Research](#🔮-future-research) * [💡 Implications](#💡-implications) * [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#🧠-learning-styles-assessment) * [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#📊-accessibility-assessment) * [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#🌍-deib-assessment) * [✅ Logical validity](#✅-logical-validity) * [🔍 DARVO Analysis Prompt](#🔍-darvo-analysis-prompt) * [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#🔍-seo-evaluation) * [🎯 Conclusion](#🎯-conclusion) ### References: * Nicole van der Hoeven et al., YouTube Live, June 2025. * “A System for Writing” by Bob Dodo. ## 📝 Summary: The session explores Zettelkasten’s four phases: fleeting notes, permanent notes, linking, and output. Guests discuss digital vs. paper IDs, plugins in Obsidian, and personal workflows. They emphasize bottom-up thinking and organic connections at key timestamps like [06:50](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=410) and [19:54](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=1194). ## 📖 Main Content: Zettelkasten links single-idea notes to form a dynamic network for writing and thinking. * Fleeting notes capture raw impressions. * Permanent notes distill ideas into clarity. * Links forge non-hierarchical idea connections. * Structure notes and output draft writing. Guests share distinct approaches: * Bob uses alphanumeric IDs for context and memory cues. * Trish leverages Obsidian’s plugins like Breadcrumbs for navigation. * Nicole balances links and contextual notes, adding detail when needed. ## 🗒️ Notes #### 📝 Intro & Guests [00:06](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=6) * Nicole, Bob, and Trish introduce backgrounds. * Bob’s five-book authorship spans spirituality to poetry. #### 📖 Zettelkasten Definition [06:50](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=410) * Non-hierarchical note network. * Idea linkage sparks novel insights. #### 🛠️ Writing & Thinking [09:08](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=548) * Writing equals thinking. * Some use Zettelkasten purely for cognition. #### 🔄 Four Phases [15:44](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=944) 1. Consume & fleeting notes 2. Permanent notes 3. Link ideas 4. Make output #### 🧩 Plugin Debate [25:26](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=1526) * Paper vs. digital IDs. * Folgezettel vs. plugin-based linking. #### 🔢 Identifiers’ Value [27:26](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=1646) * IDs reveal train-of-thought clusters. * Sidebar scanning aided by ID length. #### 📄 Structure Note Example [30:57](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=1857) * Pratihara note in Obsidian. * Links to yoga and Christian introspection. #### 🔗 Linking & Visualization [32:47](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=1967) * Uses structured note template with metadata. * Visualizes connections via Excalibrain. #### 🔍 Revisiting & Relevance [36:59](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=2219) * Historical notes inspire new ideas. * IDs evoke personal reflections. #### 🤖 Algorithms & Meaning [42:29](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=2549) * Algorithms craft context through links. * Organic linking over exhaustive automation. #### 🌳 Bottom-Up Thinking [54:44](https://youtu.be/HzmFooRRtAw?t=3284) * Rejects top-down Dewey/Johnny Decimal. * Addresses as labels, not hierarchies. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: > **Original \[06:50]**: “Zettelkasten is at very basic… a network of single idea notes.” > **Paraphrase**: At its core, Zettelkasten forms a web of standalone idea cards linked freely, enabling unexpected concept collisions. > **Original \[42:29]**: “Algorithms create their own meaning…” > **Paraphrase**: Through exploration, algorithms generate context and significance uniquely, mirroring human sense-making. ## 📰 Newsletter: Hey folks! 🚀 This week’s deep dive covers Zettelkasten in Obsidian. We unpack four key phases—fleeting notes, permanent distillations, idea-linking, and output drafting. Learn how alphanumeric IDs serve as train-of-thought markers and how plugins like Breadcrumbs boost navigation. Plus, discover why bottom-up thinking beats top-down hierarchies. Try syncing your highlights with Readwise into Obsidian literature notes and watch your creative workflow transform! 🔗 [Get started with Bob’s “A System for Writing”](https://example.com) and join our community chat for live tips. ## ✅ Action Items: * Tell me to **review my current Zettelkasten IDs** and verify at least one link per new note for the next month. * Search for **Obsidian Breadcrumbs plugin tutorials** and summarize best practices. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. Consistent use of IDs increases idea recall by 30%. 2. Regular linking sessions yield 20% more writing productivity. 3. Bottom-up note creation improves retention over hierarchical indexing. ### 📊 Methodology: * Recruit 20 PKM users. * Randomize between ID-use and no-ID groups. * Track note retrieval time and writing output over 8 weeks. * Analyze via mixed-methods (usage logs + interviews). ### ❓ Questions: * How much linking is optimal before note overload? * Do paper-only users feel less creative than digital users? * What cognitive load arises from ID assignment? ### 🔮 Future Research: * Study long-term burnout in Zettelkasten communities. * Compare structured note vs. free-form linking impacts on creativity. ### 💡 Implications: Better ID systems could streamline academic writing workflows and inform PKM tool design. Plugins could integrate smart suggestions without bypassing human insight. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: * **Visual**: Limited diagrams. *Improve*: Add flowcharts of the four phases. * **Aural**: Live discussion audio. *Improve*: Provide an audio summary. * **Verbal**: Rich examples. *Improve*: Add analogies for kinesthetic tie-ins. * **Physical**: Few interactive tasks. *Improve*: Suggest hands-on note-linking exercises. * **Logical**: Step-by-step process. *Improve*: Include problem-solving mini-cases. * **Social**: Live chat involvement. *Improve*: Add breakout group prompts. * **Solitary**: Reflection on personal workflows. *Improve*: Offer journaling questions. * **Naturalistic**: Minimal. *Improve*: Use nature-based linking metaphors (e.g., root networks). ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: * **Screen Reader**: Uses semantic headings. *Improve*: Ensure alt-text for plugin screenshots. * **Keyboard**: Obsidian supports it. *Improve*: Include keyboard nav guide. * **Contrast**: Clear dark text on light. *Improve*: Verify plugin UI contrast. * **Text Resizing**: Responsive markdown. *Improve*: Test on mobile zoom. ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment: * **Cultural**: Yoga and Christian examples. *Improve*: Add non-Western knowledge workers’ perspectives. * **Inclusive Language**: Uses gender-neutral terms. *Improve*: Define technical jargon. * **Neurodiversity**: Breaks content with bullets. *Improve*: Shorten blocks further. * **Representation**: Three diverse practitioners. *Improve*: Include more voices. * **Psychological Safety**: Encouraging tone. *Improve*: Add disclaimers for sensitive workflows. ### ✅ Logical validity: * **Strong Inductive**: Linking IDs fosters productivity (data pending). * **Logical Flow**: Clear four-phase outline. * **Sound Deduction**: IDs → clusters → recall. * **Fallacy Check**: No **false dilemma**; authors note multiple tools. * **Enhancement**: Provide empirical support for claimed benefits. ### 🔍 DARVO Analysis Prompt * **Deny**: No denial of critique. * **Attack**: No personal attacks. * **Reverse Victim**: Absent. Tone stays collaborative, not defensive. ### 🔍 SEO Evaluation: * **Keywords**: “Zettelkasten,” “Obsidian” appear in title and headers. * **Meta Description**: Absent; add “Learn four Zettelkasten phases in Obsidian…” * **Title Tag**: Clear, under 60 characters. * **Headers**: H1–H3 used properly. * **Content Length**: \~2,000 words—good depth. * **Links**: Internal to video, external to Bob’s book—add more authoritative PKM links. * **URL**: N/A * **Images**: Add alt text for plugin screenshots. * **Mobile**: Markdown is responsive. * **Engagement**: CTA to community. * **Schema**: Suggest article schema. * **Social**: Recommend share buttons, Open Graph tags. ## 🎯 Conclusion: This session shows how Zettelkasten in Obsidian blends human insight with tooling. By mastering fleeting notes, IDs, and linking, you unlock a fertile creative network for writing and thinking. Continuous linking and periodic reviews sustain growth and spark fresh ideas. Start small—one note, one link—and build your personal knowledge forest. <!-- deep-read:sections end --> [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/A Real Zettelkasten Workflow in Obsidian|Full Document Contents]] ## Highlights - And we're live. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the channel. It feels like I was just talking to you last week because I was. But today I have different friends on the show with me. Um, first I think I actually met you first, Trish Oton. Welcome. Thank you so much. Uh, it's lovely to be here. My first live stream, Nicole. Can you believe it? First live stream ever. That is kind of difficult to believe. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you for being here. And then also over here is Bob Dodo. Welcome to the channel. Thank you. Thank you. I met Trish first, I think virtually, but I've never actually met in person yet. That must be arranged. And funnily enough, Bob and I live way further away from each other, and we've met twice already: once in New York and once in the Netherlands for PKM Summit. Mhm. That's right. Well, I am not a real PKM YouTuber, content creator, what have you. I'm a fraud, an imposter. You know what? People are going to call You all sorts of things regardless. So, you know, just own it. Um, Bob is the author of five different books over a variety of subjects. I think it's very luminescent actually because I was looking through the titles, and it was like one on settlement, which of course is what we're talking about. There's one on acupressure, on stretching, on spirituality, and on poetry. Like, what is happening here? Are you really that interested in all those things? Sure. Yeah. I, I uh, I'm kind of a, um, if I'm interested in something, I need to write about it, kind of person, um, in most cases. So, it's not uncommon for me to be jumping around different subjects. I mean, those subjects are subjects that I actually explored quite extensively to some regard, you know, like I, I was a, and still am to some degree, a, um, like a body worker, you know, doing Chinese sports medicine called Twina. Um, I went to graduate school for poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Um, Zettelkasten obviously is what I do a lot of these days. Um, and the margins of spirituality have been my kind of bread and butter writing. For, I mean, since I was 15 or so, a long long time. So, yeah, there should be more books coming out on different subjects, but right now, I'm kind of stuck in my Zettelkasten reading and writing phase. Well, that's good to hear because we need experts, and you are definitely an expert. You know, you have the book, so that makes you an expert, right? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Without a book, who knows what you are? And Tris, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit for those who who don't recognize you because you're showing your face? What? Right. Yes. This is a bit of a big step for me. So, I have a YouTube channel called No Boiler Plate, which started off being programming focused, and then very quickly went off the rails into anything that I was interested in. Um, I've done videos on ADHD and autism, which I'm particularly proud of. Um, but anything anything that I'm so passionate about that I keep talking to my friends about and boring them, that seems like a good video topic to do. Um, so, did you even mention your channel? Uh, the channel is called No Boiler Plate. Um, it's very generous of You know, I’m also—I've also got four podcasts, by which I mean audio fiction podcasts. I’m not used to doing talking heads without a script stuff, so this is all very terrifying; but I’m delighted to be here nonetheless. Before that, I was a software engineer for 15 years. It will definitely show, I think, in the course of our conversation that I am a software engineer at heart. There’ll be lots of technical things, especially if we talk about Obsidian. But I've always wanted to be a musician, and I think now that I’m sort of a performer, I sort of am. At least, I’m certainly in the creative space I’ve always dreamed of, so I’m delighted to be here. I’m already hearing that that’s a similarity between the three of us because we have a lot of interests. Yeah, and we all use Obsidian as our primary tool of choice. Is that right? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36s7h4zss41ckya8fvbdeam)) - It is. It’s your fault that I use Obsidian, Nicole. Your videos are very Is it really? Wow. That’s actually an honor. A pleasure. It’s, uh, I think I've—I've gone off the rails with um With Obsidian. Perhaps I need some sort of intervention. Maybe that's what we can do tonight. Yeah, absolutely. So, the reason that we're actually here is because Tris and I were talking and Tris said, "I've figured out Zettelkasten." I'm like, whoa, that is a bold claim. I mean, that Zettelkasten is one of the things that got me into Obsidian and PKM and Rome research at the time. But I would not say I figured it out. And Tris said, "Oh, you know, have you read this book, A System for Writing?" How embarrassing. Sorry, Bob. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Bob doesn't have a copy of his own book. We do have my signed copy, though, special edition. Yeah. And I said absolutely. I reviewed it. I loved it and I got my signed copy as soon as I could. So I feel like I wanted to get the three of us together because I think we're in very different places. You know, Bob is the expert, literally has written the book on Zettelkasten. Tris is a relatively recent convert, but super passionate about it. I'm a bit of a Skeptic. I've read the books. I may not have read all of the books, but I've read the books. I'm a little bit more skeptical. And you know, let's just talk a little bit about Zettelkasten, shall we? Let's do it. Fantastic. I think it was only right that Bob do the intro. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. No pressure or anything. No pressure. Yeah. I mentioned this talk in my newsletter the other day and I said, "Look, I did no preparation for this and I intentionally did it. I actually really like to just kind of be off the cuff a lot of these times. So this would be that very much. So what would you like to know about the Zettelkasten? Well, what is the Zettelkasten? What do you think the goal is? I mean, I'm kind of asking a leading question because I've read your book, but you know, it's a fun topic, like all things that people get very passionate about. Even this question can be hard to answer or at least hard to answer in a way that makes everybody happy. Uh, right. So a Zettelkasten is very basic; it could be considered a note-making or note-taking system that is utilizing Non-hierarchy, non-hierarchy, or leveraging non-hierarchy through the connection of single idea notes to create a network, a vast network for a lot of people to think and create from, think in, and create out of. I was thinking about this today. It's kind of like defining a chair and you end up defining a stool, a chair, a table. That definition I gave could define many different things, especially today with the platforms we have and the way we think about how information is connected and leveraged. But for me, the Zettelkasten is that, right? It's a network of single idea notes that are connected in a non-hierarchical way. Sometimes we call it a rhizome or rhizomatically. And through the connection of these ideas, we encounter unique or sometimes novel insights that we didn't expect to find. And that, of course, informs how we think about things. If you're a creative writer or a creative person who does output, this becomes a very fertile ground for output. But yeah, ask any, you know, have Someone on tomorrow and they'll give you a different definition. So, would you say that the goal of a Zettelkasten, at least yours, is to provide output, or do you think it's the thinking itself? For me, I use it for writing, and because writing to me is thinking. It's where, you know, I think it was before we even got on here, or maybe it was in my intro. I forget. But where the line was when we started, and we're not started yet. But, uh, for me, I think through writing. If I'm interested in something, I will probably write something about it or at the very least I'll take notes on the thing. Um, so for me, a Zettelkasten is highly tethered to writing. For other people, it can be strictly a thinking, ruminating, pondering environment. And I know a number of people who use it for that purpose. They have no intention of writing from it. But for me, it is strictly for writing again, which is through which I think, and that's why the book is called A System for Writing, because that's my primary focus. What about you, Tris? What is your Zettelkasten for? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36s80jva197a5m98qxfb8dc)) - Well, I originally thought that a Zettelkasten was a system for note-taking because that is what all of the other books talk about—organizing notes, building a system of linked thinking. As Bob said in the book, it's a system for writing. As soon as it was recommended to me, I thought of the YouTuber who I saw a video on and who recommended it to me. As soon as it was recommended to me by him, I knew immediately that this was the missing piece for me because Bob chose a very good title: it’s a system for writing. Now, compare that to other books in the area—very good books such as Atomic Notes. Top Notes is a very good book. I've read it; I like it. But the focus, by the very title, is on note taking and only as sort of an afterthought. What are you going to do with those notes? Whereas the thrust of Bob’s book and Bob’s way of explaining it worked very well for me because the goal is very clear from the first page. You’re using this to produce output, to produce writing. As a YouTuber who writes scripts all day and every day, and as a fiction podcaster who writes fiction all day and every day, that’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted something to help with that and organize my thoughts and so forth. So, I will say that my own understanding of Zettelkasten is as a system for writing just as Bob has described. Um, whereas I think you see, you two have to be very careful. You’re in the PKM space and you can make, you don’t want to make enemies. But I do not work in that space. So I can say things like other people are very confused about what is and isn’t Zettelkasten and what it should have. And I think the confusion—let me, let me back up and be more positive about Bob instead of negative about other people. It was clear to me reading your book, Bob, that you understood what was going on because you had almost nothing to say. It was, and what you did say was extremely clear. You didn’t talk around the subject. You were just like, “This is exactly what works.” And hearing what I read was new information to me: that you’ve written so many books. Attentive. That is wonderful seeing this. Seeing this that you have come to Zettelkasten through an interest in output, in writing, and so forth makes perfect sense. That gets me very confident and makes me very, very happy. You're not some other reviewers and creatives who said, "I've tried Zettelkasten for two weeks." Let me tell you what I think about it. Oh, I hate that. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k36s86c5vfzwxyby2p9yxj97))