Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them. That’s because you want to find connections to things you did not expect, not what you already know (otherwise you would have gone directly there to begin with).
To improve links, every note should have links to a more specific idea, a more general idea, and a related topic.
A good test of the quality of the links between notes is to see how often you search directly for a note vs follow a backlink.
Read Make Your Notes Work for You: the Secret Sauce of Zettelkasten.
See also:
- In reflections on writing 500 notes, writing notes as definitions of terms is also not useful and it’s better to write as if you were making claims.
- This works for personal notes, but it is not enough for multi-party content—hyperlinks as a foundation for distributed knowledge fails because it lacks transclusion.
Links to this note
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Here’s how to write permanent notes based on How to Take Smart Notes.