The Zettelkasten: growing my own digital garden, update (1)
It's been a few months of experimenting my own personal knowledge management vault, the deliciously named Zettelkasten. I'd been using bullet journals for more than a year and while it's a spectacular tool for personal organization (I don't think I'd be nearly as functional without it nowadays), it felt a little bit lackluster when it came to large projects' thoughts and data.
Nothing beats thinking on paper. I still jot down extended block of texts regarding Lampyre or otherwise, but they tend to be slowly buried by all the content accumulating. The efforts required to skim through different notebooks makes it unlikely for me to come back to them - to reflect, to expand, or to have new insights (yes, even if they're properly indexed). So you're writing extensively, but it does not feel useful in the long run.
I came across the concept of Zettelkasten through a few media. First, I had Obsidian being recommended as an note-taking and organization tool (while it's not a Zettelkasten-specific tool, one of its most prominent feature is the graph view, allowing you to see the full extent of all your notes and how they connect between each other - and that's extremely useful to the method).
Then, I stumbled across Bob Doto's A System For Writing book during one of my regular harvest of free kindle samples. The technique described intrigued me. I also read the introductions of Sönke Ahrens' How to take smart notes and Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain which are both inspired or directly related to the original Zettelkasten method. In the end, I preferred the straightforward and clear tone of Sir Doto and bought his work to properly start building my own idea vault.
Roughly put, the Zettelkasten is a personal stash of numerous and independent notes you accumulate over time (either physically, or digitally). Each note represents an idea, a concept, a reference, formulated in your own words and connected to any related note(s) already existing.
Writing them and sifting through the vault is a fabulous way to get new insights and to see, at any time, a large extent of what your personal universe gravitates toward. It lets thousands of ideas coexist and interact in some kind of controlled chaos without being forgotten (hence the "digital garden" expression often used to describe it).
A few more online resources got me hooked up and I got my Obsidian account running in no time (see the end of this article for a few useful links to get your own Zettel started - no need for any book purchase). I began to fill out daily notes and cementing them into permanent little pages connected through tags and links.
How I began to fill it and what I though it would be useful for
I though the Zettelkasten would be the most useful for my story writing. As notes accumulated and aggregated into a blob coming to a life of its own, I immediately felt the method was extending my capacity to connect apparently unrelated ideas. It exposed concepts I would never have thought of through pages scattered across regular notebooks - things I can use for plot and scene building.
The more connections a note has, the bigger it becomes. It helps to see unforeseen pillar of thoughts in a story or in your personal reasoning. The vault already made me uncover logical relationships between plot elements and organic ideas to build scenes that I never would have thought of otherwise (no, I won't spoil any - you'll find out when the novel is published !).
The method surprised me the most when it came to game design and personal productivity ideas. By reformulating and linking book concepts, they are no longer quotes or motivational prompts you hope to remember a few months from now on. They stay perpetually fresh and can be compared to new ideas you stumble across. It's mindful reflection made easier.
What I messed up
I got the hang of the "atomicity" principle pretty fast - letting a note be a single, self-contained thought, having it rely as little as possible on context (which means an idea you develop for novel writing can suddenly be relevant for a blog post or a game pitch).
But I did make one mistake - it was trying to create a note for every single item, place or concept in Lampyre, akin to a complete encyclopedia. Having a note for "almonds" or "linen" just because the people of your fantasy world use them is cumbersome and uselessly floods your thought web. It does not help further idea association. So, yeah, I stopped making a systematic inventory of all the little things in Lampyre and when I really need to keep track of individual elements, I gather them in separated resource sheets or on a region note.
Keeping the garden growing
Nowadays, Obsidian is perpetually opened on my computer desktop. I use it for all these activities:
- I record any interesting reference, idea or concept that comes across my mind during the day
- I take between 5 and 20 minutes each day cleaning up fleeting notes and creating new ones based on what I want to remember
- I used to keep mood and feelings journaling limited to my bullet journal, but I find myself using daily Obsidian notes more and more these days (again, they're a little bit more convenient to access and can be directly seen along my habits tracker)
- I use it as a game dev tool and journal, detailing code sprints and functionalities lists that I can mark as completed along my progress
- I use it for my novel outlines, reflexions and reference sheets
- it stores my blog article ideas
- it also holds my reading summaries
- it tracks my key aspirations and habits in a fast, minimalistic and elegant way
It may seem a lot, but my vault folder structure keeps thin. The vast majority of pages are kept in a general permanent notes bucket where they harmoniously swim as a prolific swarm of thoughts. I can take pleasure reviewing it in a handful of seconds, any time.
As I said, the bullet journal and its migration system is too much of a boon to be digitalized. It has a hold on all my personal, "real-life" organization. But for all the rest - the fast editing, the instant and lightweight note connections, the graph view, the centralized little page to see all my important goals progressing day after day - I'll have Obsidian support my slow and thoughful thinking to keep developing a game I love and stories I enjoy.
Going forward in 2026
I mentioned in my latest motivation-related post on game dev how I felt a slight dip in my drive to code at the end of 2025. I took some time to evaluate what was working and what was not, reading Jame Clear's Atomic Habits again and sprinkling it with some Tiny Habits (BJ Fogg) simpler framework.
With goals renewed and intentions cleared, I've engaged onto the path of habit tracking - making sure I stick to a mindful creation process and that I don't get stuck in drive ruts anymore. This far, it worked wonderfully.
I intend to keep expanding my ideas web and let my Zettelkasten answer me back when looking for insights and reflection (and that's why I should probably back up this vault before losing years of progress like a dummy).