stamp 202508171531
Folgezettel means follow-up note, and it describes the logic of how Niklas Luhmann numbered (UID’d) and sorted his notecards. (Hence the German term.) He suggested to number a new card in a way that it would be placed next to a card it’s most closely associated with.
The folgezettel numbering system is optional for digital, but it somewhat helps notes to cluster by connection. Without it, notes in a list would be sorted by date of creation or by title.
Related
- Bob Doto recommends using a folgezettel numbering system even when keeping notes digital.
- Without the folgezettel numbering as the sorting attributes, your notes would be in alphabetical order by title, or in a dated list by creation date, like in a commonplace book or a journal. 1b1b-id-ing-your-notes-by-timestamp-is-like-keeping-them-in-a-notebook
- The graph view in Obsidian takes a lot of heat for “not being useful”, being “only a shiny toy”. It’s hard to navigate indeed, but it’s the only built-in tool in Obsidian that helps to pinpoint where is a cluster of associated topics growing in one’s notes collection.
- I mostly use the global graph view of Obsidian as a motivation tool.
- The folgezettel numbering serves as a tool to show such clusters by the length and volume of similarly numbered notes.
- It took me a while to understand the difference between Bob Doto’s and Niklas Luhmann’s way of using the folgezettel. I instinctively went with Bob’s. The difference shows when we look at how it makes sense to us to write a list.