#type/zk/zettel #a/maturity/seed # [[Middle way between immutability and flexibility in a Zettelkasten]] One of the hardest things to remember is old beliefs. Because X. Yet that's crucial when writing and sharing ideas. It's important to take others on the same journey that you made, because it will be hard for them to jump straight to the conclusion. Remembering old beliefs is something that zettelkasten is very good at. In a zettelkasten you never go back and make changes to core ideas you've written down in the past. You just add new ideas to build upon or reject old ideas. At some point in my own zettelkasten, I gave up on immutability, because it was tiring to have to add new notes every time I figured out something new, and my old beliefs just became clutter that gave extra cognitive load to using my system. Instead I moved to a more [[Knowledge Garden]] type of concept where notes grow over time, and are ever evolving. And I just wanted to rely on git if I ever wanna find my old thoughts. Now I'm thinking I should probably rather find some kind of [[The Middle Way|middle way]]. Relying on git is not great, because it's too cumbersome to look at the history of a note. And it also doesn't give a clear line of thought. But I also shouldn't be as strict as I was before, creating new notes for literally every tiny idea. I think what I should do is something like this. Create one note for each core idea. I can revise the note to add better arguments, to improve the writing, etc. But I should never change the core idea of a note. If the title of a note needs to change in a way that other places that link to it don't make sense anymore, I'm probably changing the core idea of the note. In this case, I should just add an addendum to the note saying I changed my mind and linking to the new note. I guess to a certain extent it should be fine to extend notes with new ideas at the bottom of the note. But I don't know yet where I should draw the line. It's convenient to build a line of argument in a single note. But I guess it only works if I don't ever remove my earlier ideas, and if I don't add so many new ideas that the title of the note isn't relevant anymore. Let's add some examples. If I have a note called "Alaya vs Dharmakaya", I can have a complete line of thought included in this note that I build upon over time. If this line of thought becomes too long, I can split it into separate notes and/or write a summary at the top. This way I'd be following Luhman's zettelkasten more closely, but making a bit more use of the flexibility that obsidian gives and reducing a bit operational overhead for creating and sorting new notes. --- Sowed on:: [[2024-05-22|2024-05-22]] Sources:: [[Tony Ramella, 2024-04-20]] See also:: Related references:: Further reading:: [[Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate (web)]]