Analysis of my Zettelkasten after the Bachelor Thesis

Posted on 2023-03-05

My bachelor thesis is now almost finished, I just will need to hold one presentation about it next week. This is why I thought about analyzing the usage of my Zettelkasten (still not sure if I am doing it right to really call it a Zettelkasten, but I'm just going to call it like that) after the bachelor thesis.

(If you don't care about the actual analysis, I would still recommend reading the conclusion and recommended reads if you are somewhat interested in note-taking in general.)

Total Notes

I currently have 605 notes (excluding daily notes, templates and books I have read). From these, 255 were created during the semester of the bachelor thesis. 102 notes are tagged "bachelor-thesis" and were therefore part of my bachelor thesis.

This is fewer bachelor thesis notes than I expected. Comparing this to another lecture I had this semester with 110 notes, I thought the bachelor thesis would take much more information gathering.

All following analysis will only contain notes regarding the bachelor thesis.

By Tags

All notes are tagged with bachelor-thesis (as this is the tag I am filtering for) and semester7 (which is a super-tag of bachelor-thesis) and university (which is a super-tag of semester7). I also saved many abbreviations in the Zettelkasten (I hate it while reading something with many abbreviations forgetting their meanings, and then searching where it was defined (praise the papers with an abbreviations-glossary)). I also prepared notes for the meetings about the bachelor thesis, pretty much one for each week during the semester. Furthermore, I have some structure-notes for some literature I used, some topic-specific tags (hypatia, ns-3-leo, energy-networking), one note where I did some interesting analysis of some data using nushell (the program I am also doing this analysis by the way). I also have two notes of persons that are related to the bachelor thesis (what do you mean it is weird taking notes of persons? It's not, trust me. Nothing weird in these notes).

Overall, looking back I maybe should have also added some tags that are literature-specific, maybe one tag for each literature.

Outgoing links

Most of my notes have one outgoing link. This was most of the time a note I took from a literature and linked back to the literature-note that was used. I also have notes with an excessive number of links, these seem to be either from meetings, the overview of the bachelor thesis or the structure-note for the entire bachelor thesis.

Timewise Distribution

This section highlights at what times the most notes was done.

By Time of Day

Nothing too surprising to see here. I like to sleep long, that is why my first notes were taken after 11 o'clock. My last notes were taken at 19 o'clock, which also matches the expectation as I like to watch TV or read a book after 20 o'clock.

By Weekday

It seems that the work is somewhat evenly distributed amongst weekdays. What does not surprise me is that Sunday has the most notes, as this is the day that I often drove to the university by train and had nothing else to do. Furthermore, the slight excess on Tuesday is also not majorly surprising as we often had meetings on Monday where the next work was planned; Tuesday was the next day I really had time to actually do the work. I am a bit surprised about the few notes that were created on Wednesday though, I think this may be because I had another lecture to attend and take notes.

By Week

The week I got a hint about what my topic was the 33rd, that can also be noted in the table with a higher spike in the notes. The semester then started in the 42nd week, this is where another spike can be noticed where I had a high amount of data to ingest. This slowly ramped down to the end of the year when most of the data was already ingested and I started simulations where notes were not really required. After (and also during) the simulations, the bachelor thesis was written, this also was not really write-heavy on the Zettelkasten, but some notes were really useful in this section.

Conclusion

To be honest, I have no idea what to conclude of this analysis. It certainly was interesting to see histograms of the data, but I would not say these histograms are able to improve how I use my Zettelkasten in the future.

Regarding the bachelor thesis in combination with the Zettelkasten, I think it is mostly a pretty good fit. Nevertheless, I feel like most notes (except for the meeting-notes and maybe 10 others) were write-once-read-never. I would not say this is really a big problem, as I feel that the act of writing it down alone already improved my ability to hold onto the information until it was actually written down in the thesis. I also think that my Zettelkasten is not really suited for ingesting notes from some papers and then reading the paper never again and instead put trust in my Zettelkasten. I am not entirely sure why this is, but I would maybe say it is the combination of two different things. Firstly, I mostly felt like I know what to write about and I just needed a place to quote the information from; here it was in my opinion easier to search in the PDFs about the keyword I was looking for. Secondly I sometimes had the feeling that when re-reading parts of a paper with improved background knowledge, some parts became a lot clearer and also a lot more interesting compared to reading it the first time; this may for example be just one sentence I did not think was important on the first read, but on the second read clarified that a problem I was having with some program was also noted in the paper.

Recommended Reads

Today, I have two recommended things to read.

I previously mentioned that I am not sure my Zettelkasten should really be called a Zettelkasten. I have found another interesting technique that (in my opinion) seems much clearer (while not being exactly a Zettelkasten).

Molecular Notes: Principles

While this still does not exactly match my Zettelkasten, I think it is a good metaphor to think about notes either as atoms or molecules. Actually, I have already used a similar pattern in some of my notes without me ever noticing. I will try to integrate that thought into how my Zettelkasten works.

Another interesting read (while also being critical about Zettelkasten):

A Note on the Cargo Cult of Zettelkasten

I pretty much heavily agree with the points mentioned here, but would like to add a few points. Firstly, I don't really know if reading entire books about note-taking would really improve on the note-taking one is doing. I think the main way to improve on that is just starting taking notes and let it grow into something that you like, not anyone else likes. Furthermore, I am not quite as critical about the blog posts or YouTube videos about Zettelkasten. I would say some of them contain good ideas (like the one I mentioned above), but one should not just take all of those ideas and throw them together in ones Zettelkasten; instead one should take these ideas, think about if they are useful for one self and what modifications should be made such that it fits in with the current note-taking to improve it (e.g. I am interested in the metaphor about atoms and molecules, but am not really interested into the topics-section that is introduced in the above blog). The last thing I want to say about this is that one should be clear on what to expect from creating a Zettelkasten; I would say to expect no great changes from creating a Zettelkasten. If you think a Zettelkasten is greatly increasing the productivity and you will only get a mediocre gain, you will be disappointed. If instead you don't expect anything, you will either be happy with the Zettelkasten (for any reason which may or may not be increased productivity) or be unhappy and don't have any problem with actually dropping the system altogether.

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