My dad, wisely, read to me when I was young.
He had whole Dr. Seuss books memorized as many times as he'd read them to me.
The title of this article is a hat tip to On Beyond Zebra!, which describes many of the wonderful letters beyond Z.
The Zettelkasten “alphabet”
A pure “canon” Zettelkasten has:
- Fleeting notes (quick notes to be elaborated upon later)
- Literature notes (which record and rephrase an idea from another source)
- Permanent notes (the heart of the Zettelkasten containing the original thoughts)
These, and some structural notes that index topics, are all Niklas Luhmann used during his lifetime to author 70 books and 400+ scholarly articles on sociology.
Content creators could use more
As a content creator, my currency is less books and more blog posts, short-form posts, and digital products.
I use more kinds of notes in my Obsidian vault.
Knowledge is still useful even if it's not distilled to a collection of single thoughts.
Sometimes the mood strikes and I write an article.
Other times I brainstorm a bunch of items on a particular topic.
I have different kinds of notes for each of these things, which I'll describe now.
Index Notes
I use index notes to collect links to other notes on a particular topic.
Examples of index notes I have are titled:
- Consistency
- Delivering Value
- Growth Mindset
- Kindness
- Obsidian
- Routine
- Side Hustles
The entire list I have was built organically as I went through my notes.
List Notes
List notes are just that: lists of things on a common topic.
I brainstorm or collect things on a particular topic, and the list can stand by itself and be used for fodder on other content.
Journal Notes
My daily thoughts, mostly imported from 750 Words (where I have a 150-day streak now!)
Not everything in my journal notes will be useful to link to, but some of it is.
Sometimes I'll use it to draft an article. Other times it will be short-form posts for Threads or Substack.
I view these notes as my own source material for other content.
Table Notes
Table notes can be used for information that has several fields.
One use I have for these is external links. Each link has URL, title, and keyword fields.
For YouTube links, I also have a playlist field.
Article Notes
I have a lot of these.
These are formatted with subheadings, links, bullets, everything.
Putting my new articles into Obsidian gives me control.
No worrying about whether I'll lose access to them.
They're files on my computer and backed up in the cloud.
And it's easy for me to put them into WordPress, and then on Medium.
Boom, boom, done!
Structure needs to match your workflow.
These note types help me out.
I encourage you to try them out, but always adjust them to suit your needs.
You're doing different things than I am, and have different goals.
If you want a starter kit like I use for my Obsidian vault, check here:
Obsidian Starter Kit for Content Creators
Photo by Jeff Griffith on Unsplash