The Process of Smart Note-Taking | ssp.sh
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The Process of Smart Note-Taking<br>Connecting your Zettelkasten, owning them in plain text, and publishing what you learn in public
Productivity
2026-06-28
1863 words
9 minutes
Contents
I’ve taken notes over my whole life. As a Swiss, I’m very particular about organization and structured in filing my knowledge. I’ve tried and taken notes in many different ways, from forgetting everything, to noting down every detail, to only taking listings of the most important things. Today, I can say, there’s no right way, but I can see it’s working for me, as my most interesting ideas grow inside my note taking system, and they power what I share online, and earning a living from it.
So what is important when taking notes? And how you might take notes too? First, the book Smart Note Taking by Sönke Ahrens helped me tremendously to understand the basics, that was after I was taking notes already for 10 years, but the principles of it being fine to delete notes, to go from literature notes to evergreen (though I changed that a bit for my liking), were two things that helped me a lot. To see the notes as a system of thoughts, more than just notes. From dumping all my thoughts into a blank file in my text editor of choice to sorting them, and getting clarity from it. And that writing is not the outcome of thinking, it is the medium in which thought occurs . This has grown since then, even more.
But if we think about it, we can also make it a hugely scientific and philosophical, but on the other hand, it’s just ideas we have in our heads to:
Write down in a way we don’t forget, and more importantly
find them again in a year or two.
Also, do not write only a couple of words, as later you might not know exactly what you meant, but also don’t write too many details, or worse, copy a full article.
The key is to pause for a second , and think about it, and then write it down in a sentence or two. I usually use listings, so I know it’s kind of a brainstorming, if I want to go deeper, I can just indefinitely indent and go up again. So I can, if I want, write a full outline, add new thoughts from the idea I just heard, link it to other ideas and notes in my vault.
But number two is harder than it looks to write it in a way to find it again easily. That took me a long time to optimize, and only changing of system from OneNote to Obsidian, and more so from file organization to connected notes, or also called Zettelkasten. This means, during the writing, I didn’t need so much thought where to put the note, is it in business, or personal, should I create a new folder, or do I need to search all my notes if there’s already a similar folder, to just open a new note, doesn’t matter where it is, directly type, link it to at least one or two other notes (so I find it later if I forget the file name based on backlinks) and give it a name that I might search for in a year. That is crucial, as I almost exclusively search all my notes via file name, the name is key.
Luckily Obsidian helps us with duplicated names, because if you open double brackets anywhere with `Plaintext Files file Markdown. These files are just text files locally on my machine, meaning I can open them with my Text Editor or IDE, or do a search and replace on all my files. Back them up easily, and also notice they almost use no space, as just text files. And the best part, I completely own them, so all my ideas and work I put into them, I will own forever as long as there will be computers. They will not die with the tool such as OneNote, Apple Notes or Notion, once they are gone, your notes are gone too, or if they deactivate your account, byebye all your notes.
Blogging
But the not foreseen effect, was that when I migrated my blog from WordPress (Rich Text interface) to a Static Site Generators (SSG) with GoHugo, that is just Markdown. Now instead of needing to reformat, to upload somewhere in an online form, and constantly need to sync them between each other, say I updated my notes or fixed some grammar. No, now it’s essentially the same note. Obviously, the blog post needs a title, a hero image, maybe a description and some more attributes, the plain note doesn’t need.
But once I noticed this, I upgraded the workflow quite a bit. And I added my Quartz based second brain to my website (see ssp.sh/brain), and there I had the goal to do zero edits, and just hit a button and publish. And to be honest, that’s what I do for more than 6 years or so.
I add #publish to my note, and run a script (it ended up not being a button :), and it’s on my website under new recent note. Including all the backlinks I added via Obsidian and formatting, links title and everything. I even added an automatic hero image generator based on each note, and updated a bunch of more advanced things with the frontmatter that...