I often procrastinate by reading all manners of productivity literature. There is, of course, all the ways you can use Obsidian with Zotero, the productivity universe that includes concepts like deep work, optimized writing Markdown workflows, and the organizational schema that comes with systems like the PARA method or Johnny Decimal, which I've written about here. The one system that I've long admired is the Zettelkasten system. Zettelkasten, for the uninitiated, is a system created by sociologist Niklas Luhmann to assist his research and writing process. It's famously led him to write prolifically: over 70 books and nearly 400 (!) academic articles (at least according to Theo James and Wikipedia). The general conceit is that you write down atomic ideas on index cards (or individual Markdown notes), link them together, which creates an associative archiving system where notes are not organized hierarchically. Instead, notes are linked through tags and wiki-links, which allows you to create a network of related ideas that you can continuously mine as you write. Andy Matuschak, an independent researcher who works on malleable software, famously "works with the garage door up" by sharing his polished Zettelkasten online in an amazing sliding notes format, where he calls each atomic unit "evergreen notes" -- more polished versions of what other people might call Zettels or index cards.
Despite my best attempts, I have never really been able to make the Zettelkasten system work.
Part of it is that my brain loves hierarchical organization (much like placing individual note cards into specific folders that they live in, rather than floating around with tags), but another part of it is that I've never really been able to commit to a good note-taking system (beyond assiduously posting notes from seminars I attend). Now that I'm under pressure to finish a book by the end of the year (lol), there's a part of me that wants to buckle down and really milk this system for all it's worth -- while another part of me argues that this is all an illusion, that it's just the newest form of productive procrastination. Yak shaving at its finest.
That said, I do think that I'll try for a couple hours over the weekend to reorganize my note-taking system yet again (time boxed into those few hours). Part of it is actual motivation for writing the book, which is how I'm justifying it: I have so many notes about everything everywhere that it'd be useful to be able to recall them in the process of writing when I feel like I have nothing useful to say. Another motivation (bad positive reinforcement?) is that I revamped my writing environment recently -- I've been really enjoying the process of writing academic stuff in Markdown (as opposed to Overleaf or Google Docs). Google Docs, while great for collaboration (i.e., the main reason why I'd been using it), locks all of your content into the Google universe, which is scary since I've had files unceremoniously deleted without warning from my Drive. Markdown addresses this problem head-on by giving you a local-first option that is portable and future-proof since you're never locked into any one editor (I started out using Zettlr, for example, and might move permanently to Obsidian). Overleaf solves the collaboration and local-first problem by letting you link your online content to a GitHub repo so that you can edit the LaTeX docs locally before syncing it to a collaborative workspace. In some ways, I think that using Overleaf really is the best of both worlds, but the problem is that you end up having to write in LaTeX, which can be kind of a drag. (There are ways now that let you write in Markdown, but as far as I know, it does not support citation using pandoc cite-keys). This makes things really difficult re: collaboration, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where LaTeX is an acquired taste that few have the incentive to pursue.
Collaborative options are useful once there's actual content to collaborate on, and the point for me now is simply to produce as much volume as I possibly can: I've been trying to write (even in outline form) around 700 words per day, which is onerous but doable. 700 manuscript-ready words would be a different beast, I think, but just getting some stuff down onto paper is still worth doing. So, in a fit of trying to churn out as much writing as possible, I'm taking away all ways of fidgeting with formatting (even though there is, of course, the option of "refining" the writing process). I will say that I think I've refined it enough such that I don't feel the impulse to do that, but time will tell.
What is this workflow, you ask? While it's totally possible to simply get writing (and, surprisingly, I actually have been since I've curated this system), it's improved by a few Obsidian plugins: Daily Statistics, which counts the number of words written each day and displays it on a calendar (it's nice to use it alongside Pacemaker, which I've written about before); Longform, which helps you concatenate files into an ordered manuscript (so that you can write in multiple Markdown files and then compile them all at the end); Obsidian TODO, which collects all outstanding TODOs from across your vault and presents them in single lists; Pandoc Plugin, which gives you commands to export using pandoc inside Obsidian without having to open a terminal; Pandoc Reference List, which displays a formatted bibliography for each file you're working in; and of course, Zotero Integration, which lets you insert citations and import notes and PDF annotations from the best citation program in the world.
I'm sad to leave the wonderful open source program Zettlr for Obsidian, which I've primarily used for note-taking, but exporting via pandoc using LaTeX templates (via this complicated workflow) was simply too much of a headache. I'll probably still come back to Zettlr if and when I decide to write journal articles in markdown and submit with a specific format -- I might decide then that figuring out the formatting is worth it -- but for just pumping out words and having them export nicely to Word and PDF, I think I might stick with Obsidian for now (thanks to Jamie Wong for the encouragement and insight as to how to set up this workspace). We'll have to wait and see -- I've resisted using Obsidian to Actually Write because I've seen it as a repository for notes and incomplete thoughts, not refined manuscript-ready writing. Alas, the siren call of the plug-ins proved to be more than I could resist.
But what about Zettelkasten? For now, I've been trying to stick to literature notes in Zotero (something that I've used for much longer than I've been using ZK) and then importing them into Obsidian so that I can write split-screen with reading notes on one side and manuscript on another. When I synthesize ideas by stringing them together, I might create new thematic notes that I can use later in outlines and actual chapters. I think the process I've created has enough complexity already that it's probably best to stick with things that I've already done -- a kind of James Clear-style habit stacking instead of a system that is radically different from a more familiar workflow.
At this point I think I've written more about the process of writing than I have actually written, which is a common pitfall of procrastinators everywhere. This is a reminder that I've gotten all of the tools in place, so there's no need to further optimize: between this tool-based workflow and this emotionally and intellectually grounded one (h/t Marah Gubar and the Inkwell retreat), I've got all the tools, notes, and mindset in place. Now it's just time to breathe, click, and flow.