The other day I was checking Ali Abdaal’s You Tube feed for new videos and I happened to see an older video that I’d watched earlier. It was about how Abdaal uses Notion as a resonance calendar. When I first watched it, I thought it was interesting but it was before I had started reading Sönke Ahrens’ book on the idea of a Zettelkasten. What Abdaal is talking about is exactly that: implementing a Zettelkasten with Notion, although he doesn’t use that term.
As I’ve mentioned before, Notion is a nice app but prudent users will avoid it because you lose control of your data. The better solution is to use Org mode, which provides essentially the same functionality albeit without the fancy GUI.
If you’re an Org user and watch Abdaal’s video, you will be struck with how easily the things he’s doing translates almost directly into Org mode. I’ve looked a bit into Org-roam and it appears to ease the linking of ideas—although this can be handled manually in vanilla Org—so, once again, you can implement Abdaal’s procedures in Org and maintain control of your data.
The video is very useful because it mainly discusses how to take an idea and link it to other related ideas based on context. That’s the very essence of the Zettelkasten method and something that much of the literature glosses over. At least for me, seeing examples of how an idea is added and linked to others is very helpful in understanding the Zettelkasten method.
The video is 13 and a half minutes so it’s easy to watch and definitely worth your time if you’re interested in the Zettelkasten method.