This day a year ago, The Archive became publicly available for sale!
To celebrate, we chopped 50% off of the regular price for 5 days.
You can now also purchase a license for a friend, colleague, family member, or your favorite pet by using the new Gift Purchase option in our store.
Dr. Christopher Foley is a piano teacher based in Toronto, Canada. He set up The Archive to write, send, and curate lesson notes for his piano students. Read “How I Use The Archive and My Music Staff to Create Engaging Lesson Notes”.
Christian’s Comment: I’m familiar with programming and the humanities, but I always wondered how a Zettelkasten could work for fine arts – or music, for that matter. I’m looking forward to hear progress reports by Dr. Foley that go into detail!
Sascha’s Comment: I think that shows the power of a plain text approach. Basically, all you need to do is to manipulate text. That means that you should set up a system that makes your manipulation abilities so powerful that the bottleneck in your workflow is not determined by your fingers but by your thinking. Great work, Doc. :)
Lorenzo wrote an article about how to use iA Writer for macOS as your Zettelkasten note archive. Apparently, iA Writer has a sufficiently quick search for large archives (10,000 notes big, in fact), which surprises me.
As a native macOS app, you can use iA Writer to sync with Dropbox, iCloud, and other folder-based sync services and either use their mobile or Windows counterparts, or whatever else you like. No boxing-in.
Have a look at Lorenzo’s review for all the juicy details. Great work!
Jai of The Appademic wrote a blog post about The Archive and the Zettelkasten Method in combination, how The Archive superseded nvALT for him, and how he found the Zettelkasten Method to go with minimalism and portability of data.
Beck Tench recorded 45min worth of inspiring “Literature Review” video showing her current workflow with a Bullet Journal and the app Tinderbox for Mac to implement the Zettelkasten Method.
I’ve never used this hypertext writing environment called Tinderbox. In the end, I’m a proponent of the plain text approach and keeping your knowledge portable, so there wasn’t much appeal in trying out the app. But its community looks nice, the developer is a cool guy, and the app looks solid and makes people happy. Maybe it can make you happy, too.
Anyway, make sure to take a look at Beck’s blog. The posts’s illustrations are tasteful and I find the topics to be very interesting, too.
Update: Reader Russ pointed out that Tinderbox files are XML, which you could use in your own scripts or 3rd party tools. So you aren’t really locked in.
When people ask me, “Christian, what’s the best Zettelkasten Method-compatible app on iPads and iPhones?”, I always tell them about 1Writer. Its search is good. It syncs files with a ton of services. It handles #hashtags.
And now it also supports [[Wiki Links]].
That makes it an even better companion to our very own macOS app, The Archive, and the plain text productivity techniques we encourage people to use.
In the nearby town of Paderborn, there’s a community-organized meetup called “MacMittwoch” (literal translation: “MacWednesday” – guess when they meet :)). These fine folks produce a podcast, too, and their Farid Mésbahi and Gordon Möller visited Sascha and me in Bielefeld for a very nice chat. The result is Episode 15: Der Zettelkasten.
We talked about The Archive, but even more did we talk about the Zettelkasten Method in general, about emerging structure versus folder management, and why we value software agnosticism above all. Farid and Gordon are very welcoming and curious hosts, and Sascha and I are pleasant to the ear as always, of course, so you will want to listen to this episode (1h 8min; German only).
When I search in my archive for the tag #diet I get really annoying results. I don’t only get notes on diet. I get notes on carbohydrates, insulin sensitivity and many other. “Why is that a problem?”, you might ask. “All the above topics are relevant for diet, aren’t they?” No, and here is why.
There are two different types of tags:
The difference between these types of tags is very easily understood. If I use tags for topics I would tag everything that is relevant for the topic of diet with #diet. A note about carbohydrate intake and insulin sensitivity would definitely fulfill this criterion. If I use tags for objects, I would only tag notes with #diet when these notes are specifically on the concept of dieting. I would not tag the note on insulin sensitivity with #diet. But I’d use the tag for a note on metabolic flexibility as overarching concept that connects diet and fasting.1
When I work on the topic “diet”, I work on a plethora of concepts: post-workout nutrition, blood sugar stability, metabolic flexibility, hormonal changes and so on and so forth.
Let’s say I write a note on insulin sensitivity and carbohydrate intake. Then I want to connect it to other notes for integration into the web-like structure of my archive. First, I go to existing structure notes. They are notes about notes, and therefore they map structures in my archive. After that I want to ask myself and my archive how this integrates into the concept of diet. I search for #diet and get a buttload of notes. Some don’t even contain the word “diet” apart from the tag. I have a note on the paleo-historical consumption of grains but it is tagged with #diet. The search for tags gets really messy really fast.
One could argue that I shouldn’t limit my search to #diet but include tags as additional qualifiers. Like #diet #insulin if I want to search for the interconnection between those topics.
This also, after a while, gets complicated and annoying to use. The issue is that these searches are not enabling what I really want to do. I already integrated the note on insulin sensitivity and carbohydrate intake into my structure notes and put it into my outlines for my books. I don’t want broad general connections because they are not very useful in the long run. The connection in itself should be a piece of knowledge that adds to the value of my archive. A precise, lucid, and insightful connection should be placed. For that I need precise search options. Not this broad topic stuff.
Only tags that are specific to the objects I use and mention in a note are worthy: To take precise actions over a long distance I need a sniper rifle and not a shotgun.
Searching on a topic in your archive is like firing a shotgun into the woods and hoping that there will be food on the table somehow. I need a sniper rifle, night vision goggles, and infrared satellite pictures as if I have cheated the hell out of Counter-Strike. (I never did by the way.) There is some sneaky, precious game out there.
The tags for objects are much more precise and reveal real connections. They narrow down the search way more which is hugely important if your archive grows. They only give you what you want, and not the topic which also contains what you want.
(The Chihuahua image is from Pixabay, licensed CC0 Public Domain.)
Christian’s Comment: This distinction is one of the gems I first heard of in Sascha’s draft for the 2nd edition of the Zettelkasten Method book. Honestly, I never thought about a difference like this before and ended up with tags around topics surprisingly often. The problem is that once you start topic-tagging, you cannot get back to the notes that have an “object tag” relation. They all get lost in the same mess. That’s a bummer. So better start changing your tagging habits today and prevent more chaos from ensuing. I can tell you that cleaning things up along the way is not much fun.
Sascha’s Comment on Christian’s Comment: This topic will be covered in the upcoming English online course.
Christian’s Comment on Sascha’s Comment on Christian’s Comment: I’m looking forward to it in my most favorite language!
Diet and fasting are two of six categories in my work on lifestyle. These are not topics but principles and therefore abstract entities in my work. ↩