Reflections on Writing 1000 Notes

I’ve now written 1,000 notes since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. You can see my reflections on writing 500 notes and here are my thoughts since then.

While the first 500 was about building the habit and getting a feel for making notes that are useful to me, the second 500 was about putting them into practice. I used Zettelkasten to reason about several startup ideas and started a company. I wrote more starting from outlines of notes. I followed my curiosity and added many new notes about a wide range of topics including economics, physics, philosophy, racism, remote work, and many more

I also struggled to keep up the pace of adding more notes. I added less per day than the first 500. While I’ve read many books, I don’t take the time to translate literary notes into permanent ones (although it’s still valuable for improving recall).

I’m spending less time on the meta game of note taking (filling up notes about how to do it and reading about it constantly). It’s a smell if I find myself overly concerned with tools and process rather than practicing.

I improved the published notes to make it a more enjoyable experience to browse. I added full text search. I redesigned the layout and typography to be more modern while still hitting a score of 100 on Lighthouse. I still love hitting the ‘random’ button and reviewing old notes that way.

The same benefits cited everywhere still hold true, but the effects of note blogging on SEO did not continue increasing at the same rate as it did when I started. I still get more eyeballs on my public notes than I get impressions on tweets, but that’s mostly because I don’t tweet that often.