I’ve recently started working on my master’s thesis, and as such I’ve been looking for a good way to take notes. I need to be able to capture notes on my reading, as well as any ideas or thoughts that I have. I’ve previously experimented with:

• Notion - I did like how feature rich it was, but I disliked the rigid organisation structure. I felt forced to organise everything into a heirarchical pages and sub-pages. Also, it felt like once I committed to Notion, it wouldn’t be possible to switch platforms if I wanted to.

• Obsidian - Based on my issues with Notion, it would seem like this is the answer. I liked the zettlekasten approach to note taking - it felt more unstructured and aligned better with how ideas and thoughts naturally arise. I also really liked the idea of all my notes being stored locally as text files. It seemed like the perfect solution… until I saw the power of Emacs and Org.

Why Org?

I was drawn to how extensible it is - the ability to completely customise a workflow to match your exact purposes is unmatched. I was also drawn to the rich set of features it supports, whilst still being based entirely on text. I don’t think I’ll do the best job of selling just how amazing this seemingly simplistic piece of software is, but there is a lot of discourse regarding this topic on the internet already.

Setting up A Zettlekasten with Org Roam

Org roam is an extension of org mode, which facilitates “networked thought”, similar to tools like Roam Research or Obsidian. The key feature of this extension is the ability to seamlessly link together org files. It also indexes this network of files, allowing to quickly search and jump between these files. Lastly, it surfaces backlinks, which are references to the current file inside other files. The idea is that these backlinks give contextual information and help you easily traverse your network of thoughts.

Out of the box, it is already a very useful tool. I’ve been using it to build up a sort of second brain - I use it to capture most of the thoughts I have, about any topic. It pairs brilliantly with org mode’s organisational and task tracking features (which I may cover in a future blog post).

Capturing Thoughts

Org roam ships with an excellent feature, called dailies. These are daily notes which you can easily capture to with a convenient keybinding:

I use this to capture incomplete thoughts and ideas as they come up, and hopefully flesh them out into fully fledged entries in the zettlekasten. I can flag these ideas that I want to revisit with the IDEA keyword I also use dailies to maintain journal - it is quite interesting to look back on past entries!

Processing Captured Thoughts

I then search for anything flagged with the IDEA keyword through org mode’s in-built agenda feature. This has been a very useful feature - it means that I actually action ideas I have, rather than forgetting about them, or making a note which I never revisit.

Bibliography Management

As an example of how extensible org mode is, let’s explore how I’ve integrated bibliography / citation management into my note taking workflow. This article gives much more detail on how to set this up. You can also have a look at my dotfiles for more details.

Zotero

Zotero is a bibliography management tool. Using a browser extension, I can save research papers to my library with a single click. Using the better bibtex extension for zotero, I have set up an automatic export of this library to bibtex.

Citations in Org Mode

Using this bibtex file, I can easily insert a citation for any paper in my library:

I can also quickly open up a paper from my library which I’ve referenced in a note:

And More…

This is just a glimpse into what’s possible. In future posts I may cover how I track tasks with org mode.