Within a week of using Roam Research’s implementation of a knowledge graph or Zettlekasen I decided to sign up because there was something special in this way of organising information. My initial excitement was actually around cooking, the ability to organise recipes around multiple dimensions (a list of ingredients, the recipe author, the cuisine) meant you could both search and browse by the ingredients that you had or the kind of food you wanted to eat.

Since then I’ve started to rely on it more for organising information for work purposes. Again the ability to have multiple dimensions to things is helpful. If you want to keep some notes about a library for handling fine grained authorisation you might want to come back to that via the topic of authorisation, the implementation language or the authorisation model used.

But is this massively different from a wiki? Well a private wiki with a search function would probably do all this too. For me personally though I never did actually set up something similar despite experiments with things like Tiddlywiki. So I think there are some additional things that make the Zettelkasten actually work.

The two distinctive elements missing from the wiki setup are the outliner UI and the concept of daily notes. Of the two the daily notes is the simplest, by default these systems direct you a diary page by default, giving you a simple context for all your notes to exist in. The emphasis is getting things out of your head and into the system. If you want to cross-link or re-organise you can do so at your leisure and the automatic back-referencing (showing you other pages that reference the content on the page you are viewing) makes it easy to remind you of daily notes that maybe you haven’t consciously remembered you want to re-organise. This takes a good practice and delivers a UI that makes it simple. Roam also creates an infinite page of daily notes that allows you to scroll back without navigating explicitly to another page. Again nothing complicated but a supportive UI feature to simplify doing the right thing.

The outliner element is more interesting and a bit more nuanced. I already (and continue to use) an outliner in the form of Workflowy. More specifically, I find it helpful for outlining talks and presentations, keeping meeting notes and documenting one to ones (where the action functionality is really helpful to differentiate items that need to be actioned from notes of the discussion). The kind of things where you want to keep a light record with a bit of hierarchical structure and some light audit trail on the entries. I do search Workflowy for references but I tend to access it in a pretty linear way and rarely access it without a task-based intention.

Roam and Logseq work in exactly the same way, indeed many of the things I describe above are also use-cases for those products. If I wanted to I could probably consolidate all my Workflowy usage into Roam except for Roam’s terrible mobile web experience. However there is a slight difference and that is due to the linking and wiki-like functionality. This means you can have a more open discovery journey within the knowledge graph. Creating it and reading, I have found, are two different experiences. I think I add content in much the same way as an outliner but I don’t consume it the same way. I am often less task-orientated when reviewing my knowledge graph notes and as they have grown in size I have had some serendipitous connection making between notes, concepts and ideas.

What the outliner format does within the context of the knowledge graph is provide a light way of structuring content so that it doesn’t end up a massive wall of text in the way that a wiki page sometimes can. In fact it doesn’t really suit a plain narrative set of information that well and I use my own tool to manage that need and then link to the content in the knowledge graph if relevant.

In the past I have often found myself vaguely remembering something that a colleague mentioned, a link from a news aggregator site or a newsletter or a Github repo that seemed interesting. Rediscovering it can be very hard in Google if it is neither recent nor well-established, often I have ended up reviewing and searching my browser history in an almost archaeological attempt to find the relevant content. Dumping interesting things into the knowledge graph has made them more discoverable as individual items but also adds value to them as you gain the big picture understanding of how things fit together.

It is possible to do achieve any outcome through any misuse of a given set of tools but personal wikis, knowledge graphs and outliners all have strengths that are best when combined as much as possible into a single source of data and which have dedicated UIs for specific, thoughtful task flows over the top. At the moment there’s not one tool that does it all but the knowledge graph is the strongest data structure even if the current tools lack the UI to bring out the best from it.