Five years of a Zettelkasten: what I would do differently

I started my slip-box in my first year of the PhD. It now has about 9,000 permanent notes. Things I wish I had known:

1. Titles are claims, not topics

"Memory consolidation" is a topic. "Sleep consolidates procedural memory more than declarative memory" is a claim you can link to and argue with. My best notes have claim titles.

2. Links need a reason

A bare [[link]] tells future-you nothing. I now write one sentence about why it links: "contradicts", "extends", "same mechanism in mice".

3. Do not migrate everything

I spent a summer turning old notes into permanent ones. Most were never opened again. Migrate when you touch something, not before.

A slip-box is a conversation partner, not an archive.

What would you add?

Point 1 changed my legal research notes. 'Contract formation' became 'An acceptance by email is effective when sent, not when read' — and suddenly I could link cases to it.

Point 3 is the one everyone needs to hear. I have a folder named inbox-2021 that I will clearly never process.

As someone who just imported 3,000 notes: thank you for point 3. I was about to spend a month on it.

I was about to spend a month on it.

@tamsin please don't! Let them be a quarry, not a backlog.

Would love a follow-up post on how you structure the 'reason' sentences. Do you use a property, or inline text?

Inline, right before the link. Properties felt like filling in a form, and I stopped doing it within a week.