The Field That Keeps My Zettelkasten From Going Stale

Our problem with personal Obsidian vaults is often that we write down our conclusions, but later can't remember whether they came from real evidence or just from circumstances we can no longer recall. Those vaults eventually get abandoned; they stop carrying any value for us. So I'm building the habit of making "Reason:" a mandatory field for every note that goes into my Zettelkasten: I have to explain to my future self why I'm entering it. Months or years later, when the note surfaces in whatever research I'm doing, I'll see why it's relevant (or at least why it was relevant to me on the day I captured it), and each note carries a set of fields to hold that:

• Title — what the note is about, at a glance
• Date — when it entered the vault
• Reason — why I'm entering it, written for my future self
• Quote — the exact words from the source

There's also a bit of wiring inside the SlipBox. Once it finds the page number, it inserts the reference ID from my source database, and it looks for logical links or tags to connect the note to other notes.

Filed under: sent,
Zhenia