In Defense Of Tags In My Zettelkasten
Andy Matuschak claims that Tags are an ineffective association structure for use in a Zettelkasten. I agree with his general sentiment that explicit associations should be preferred to implicit associations, and tags don’t provide anything more than a grab-bag of notes, with no explanation for how those notes fit together. However, if you’re starting to build your repository of evergreen notes and don’t yet know how your notes fit together into one story or are worried that by trying to connect ideas cleanly, you’re not going to be able to take rapid notes in the first place (and thus limit your thinking, because writing is a way of thinking 202204102301 TODO: Fill in from taking smart notes), then tagging as an easy way to find discover associations between notes is a great practice. This also connects to the idea that there are two different types of note collectors 202204101911, which is also from the taking smart notes book. TODO: Fill out this link too). I would much rather be a writer, who is more concerned about being able to effectively retrieve notes when needed (which I know I can do because of how good the search functionality in The Archive is 202204102121), than concern myself deeply with setting up a perfect structure in which to take notes (because premature optimization is the root of all evil 202204101914).
uid: 202204101843 tags: #zettelkasten #notetaking