I know that Supernotes follows the “minimal information principle”, but I wanted to ask if there is a chance that the body of the card can act as a block so that you can link directly to it.
Maybe someone has a (better) suggestion for the workflow, but I don’t just need the individual pieces of information for learning, I also need an overview - a bird’s eye view of the individual cards, so to speak. At the moment, I actually create topic or daily cards and regularly exceed the soft limit because I either want to have the information in direct context or don’t want to create so many individual cards.
Today I was looking for an outliner as an addition to Supernotes and briefly looked at Obsidian and Remnote, but my conclusion is that I would actually only want to use Supernotes. Maybe it would also be possible to work with inline tags, so that you can click on them and all set tags are displayed.
I don’t quite get what you are after. Do you wish to embed cards in other cards as a block? Can you elaborate, maybe give an example?
Thanks for asking @freisatz.
I only know it from Notion, for example, where every element is a block and therefore linkable.
I am trying to give an example:
Card A
- Topic 1
- Topic 2
Card B
- Topic 3
- Topic 1 (linked from Card A)
Now it‘s also possible but I would need 5 Cards and set the parent on Topic 1 to Card A & B. My current workflow with Supernotes is not quite the minimal information principle - maybe more like a topic card to have some context.
I’m studying law and you have to link a lot of topics together.
@isaiur what’s stopping you from using the 5 card solution you suggested? That would mean you’re sticking to the “atomic” note principle, where each unique idea lives in its own notecard. All of Supernotes features are built around the simplicity, power, and flexibility of that idea.
Thanks, that helps. You already mentioned the obvious approach, to implement something like this by splitting cards and building a structure by adding the respective parents. Also, I understand that you are reluctant to do so as your workflow feels like Card A should not be split in two.
I would encourage you to reflect on why exactly that is. Do you have an objective, valid reason, or is it just that you are used to more comprehensive cards, as those are so much more common elsewhere. Atomic cards sure do feel different, and it takes some practise to get it right. It may also be that the approach doesn’t work for you and your use case. Still, it is what supernotes actively promotes, and it’s definitly worth a shot.
That’s a good question. I think it’s more like what @freisatz is saying. I’m used to take notes that way and I think I can only learn in context or sometimes I really need context but therefore Supernotes gives me the parent / child structure …
Here is a card from today … it’s in german but maybe you’ll get the idea:
Every day I start my learning routine with my Spaced Repetition unit. I repeat the questions that are due and write down the points that I found difficult (these are the bullet points under the first bold text on the card). This automatically gives me kind of a learning diary and I can see at a glance what I have done. This automatically gives me a kind of learning diary and I can see at a glance what I have done and what I need to work on again. On the other hand, I have to note down the results of an interpretation of a concept - this is easier for me if I create it on one card than on many.
The advantage of having information on a card, however, would be that I would have the current date as the parent, for example, and then set the date as the parent for each card where I had difficulties, so that I can automatically see how often I have repeated or edited things, for example.
Thank you both for the ideas and help - I’ll give it a try.
Are there maybe some blog-posts or guidance you can recommend for the atomic notes approach?
This blog post is a useful explanation of why atomic notes are so powerful, and a basic “how to” on the approach: Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive | by David B. Clear | The Writing Cooperative
Another resource that is very insightful, and demonstrates the approach in itself by example is the Zettelkasten by Andy Matuschak.
I totally get that when drafting a protocol like that, you probably don’t want to fiddle around with the creation of new cards. For my (compariot) understanding, what would you like to link to in your example? An individual bullet point?
I kind of have to link to an individual bullet point. For example in criminal law I have a definition of risk and I can find the wording for that in civil law - so I would link that bullet point to another bullet point. But in the last hour I did a little research and reflection how I could use atomic notes and I like the approach of that. In the past I hadn’t the confidence or courage, because I always used the hierarchial notetaking in Notion and earlier on google docs and so on - but with the atomic notes approach I could use the graph of Supernotes and it’s more the bottom up method to built knowledge around the starting point.
For your workflow, which in itself is absolutely fine, of course, in my opinion you’d need an outliner - Reflect, Roam, Obsidian. Supernotes is not that and will likely never be.
Great you found the courage to try sth completely new! Let us know here if you encounter any issues on that journey.
Now, going beyond that level of abstraction, here’s how I personally would probably do it.
- create an evergreen note for risk.
- create a card for every foxy session of yours, as you already do. Give it a tag
#sessionor whatever. Add any topic that is addressed in that session, such as risk as a parent.
Think of it this way: Parents provide context. The context for that session of yours is the concept of risk. This is also pretty convenient from a user journey perspective:
- Want to review all sessions concerned with risk? Open risk in noteboard and filter by
#session. - Want to write a note that makes explicit use of the notion of risk? Link the respective card inline.
The value of creating concept-based Evergreen Notes alone cannot be understated, because of something called the generation effect. It makes the output of a learning session not being represented in the network of your brain, but permanent, real-worldish. And it makes the outcome measurable in terms of how many cards have I created or improved today?.
Thank you for your suggestion on how to proceed. As you are a compariot, you probably also understand the concept of my example map from above. I would rather have set the current date as the parent and then created each bullet point as a new atom and linked it to the date as the parent and then also have the option of linking this atom to others - which I don’t have with the current card.
With law, it’s all about understanding the system, which I only get by linking and comparing the individual knowledge elements - that’s why it actually makes more sense to use a system like Supernotes and not an outliner or even something like Notion, where you just write long documents that you can’t use at all in its structure.
Thanks for the offer, I will give it a try and will certainly come back here and report any problems.
I think block based features would be immensely valuable.