Sort Your Notes by Type First: Why Folgezettel in Obsidian Feels Broken

I got a series of questions recently, and I recognized myself in every one. How do you actually implement folgezettel in Obsidian? Why do atomic notes never feel atomic enough to stop fiddling with? And if you commit to a numbering scheme now, are you stuck with the wrong one in five years?

Underneath questions like those there's usually a fourth thing, and it rarely gets said out loud: the system feels fragile. Threads that don't follow, addresses that seem to argue with each other, the sense that it's one bad decision from falling over.

Here's the claim this post is built on, and it isn't the answer I'd have given a few years ago. When my own zettelkasten felt fragile, the numbering was almost never the cause. What was actually going on, as best I can tell, was that several kinds of note were sharing one box and wanting incompatible things from it. Sorting by type first is what made the folgezettel question shrink to almost nothing for me — that's my read on it, not a law I can hand you a source for.

First, I don't have a fool-proof system

Let me be straight about what this is: what works for me, arrived at slowly and with a fair amount of flailing. Not a fool-proof method — and I'd be suspicious of anyone offering one.

I spent a long time trying to think out the perfect system before I let myself use one. I was afraid of two things: that I wouldn't find my notes when I needed them, and that all this careful filing was an elaborate way of wasting my time. If that's where you are, you're not being neurotic — you're asking a reasonable question about whether the investment pays.

I finished my PhD on schedule and published 20 papers, and I'll say what I always say: I'm a fairly average researcher. My edge was never talent, it was systems — and they only started earning their keep once I stopped designing them in the abstract. What follows is what survived that.

Capture first, and make capture decision-free

Everything starts in an inbox area in Obsidian, where I dump every thought or idea that pops into my head and might be worth keeping — no folder, no address, no decision.

The purpose is narrow, and worth stating plainly because it's why the rest works: the inbox exists so that I never have to stop and assess whether something goes here or there. Capture is decision-free; sorting is a separate job, done later.

Much of the friction people report comes from fusing the two: every thought now costs a filing decision, so you quietly stop having thoughts. (Still choosing a tool? I compared the main note-taking apps here.)

📄 Free kit: If your notes exist but never turn into prose, that's the gap "From Notes to First Draft" is built for — the note-to-paragraph workflow I use myself. Grab it here (free, members only).

The four kinds of note I sort into

When I process the inbox, I'm really answering one question per item: which of four things is this?

Type 4 is the only one I'm certain belongs in the zettelkasten: the atomic material, a concrete idea or an observation someone made about the world. Type 3 I think fits there too — my experience of a method is a kind of observation, and recombines the same way — but I hold that one loosely.

The other two are where the trouble lives, and they cause it in two completely different ways.

Type 1 clutters the box

Quick one. Type 1 notes are the reading list for one paper, the reviewer's requests on one submission, the settings for an analysis you'll never run again. They feel like knowledge while the project is live; six months later they're dead weight that connects to nothing.

A zettelkasten full of expired project reference is one you stop trusting — and once you stop trusting it, you stop opening it. Keep those notes somewhere else entirely — a plain project folder does the job — and let them die there when the project ends.

Type 2 is the one that actually broke my folgezettel

This is the section I'd most like you to read twice, because it took me longest to see.

I had notes on things like how to write an article — good notes, genuinely useful ones. Every time I tried to place them in the zettelkasten I ended up with conflicting folgezettels, or threads I simply couldn't follow. For a long time I assumed I was numbering things wrong and went looking for a better scheme.

I wasn't. The real problem is that a how-to note and a zettelkasten note are ordered by two different clocks:

• Folgezettel records the order of discovery. An address like 4.1c1a says this branched off 4.1c1, which branched off 4.1c. The way I've come to read it, that makes the address a history of where your thinking forked.
• A how-to needs the order of execution. When you describe how to do something, you want the steps in the order they should be performed — not in the order you happened to find out about them.

Those two orders fight, and that fight is what makes the system feel broken. You learn what turns out to be step six years before you understand step one, so step six ends up addressed nowhere near it. Follow the chain and you don't get a procedure — you get an autobiography of your own confusion. The order of discovery and the order of execution are not the same order, and no numbering scheme can force them to agree.

So how-to content now lives in a separate, more wiki-style vault, and I rebuild those pages as necessary. That last part is the real distinction: zettelkasten notes accrete, wiki pages get rebuilt. When I learn a better way to structure a methods section, I don't branch a new note off an old one — I rewrite the page, and the old sequence is simply gone.

Here's the diagnosis — my own reading, not something I can hand you a source for. If your system feels fragile and your threads don't follow, my first guess isn't your numbering. It's that you have procedures sitting in a box built for concepts. Pull the how-tos out into their own space for a month and see how much of the fragility survives. In my case, most of it didn't.

Now the numbering — which turns out to be the small question

With the wrong note types out, the question people agonise over gets easy. So: is a folgezettel address a topic category at all?

It isn't. A folgezettel address is a record of where a thought branched, not a claim about what the note is about. 4.1c1a doesn't say this belongs to category 4.1; it says this grew out of that, placing the note beside the one it came from — something a topic folder can never do (Ahrens, 2017).

And that, I think, is exactly why it's future-proof — my own conclusion, not a guarantee I can source for you. Between any two addresses there is always room: between 4.1c and 4.1d you can put 4.1c1; between 4.1c1 and 4.1c2, 4.1c1a. There's always a number or letter available, and in years of using it I've never had to restructure anything to make space.

It's the topic hierarchy that isn't future-proof, not the numbering. A folder tree makes you decide where a note belongs before you know how you'll use it, and assumes your associative paths in three days will match today's — which they won't (Ahrens, 2017). An address records only where a note was born; its links let it join any thread where it's relevant. It never has to pick one home.

You don't read a zettelkasten from A to Z

This is the reframe that took the most anxiety out of it for me. The point of a zettelkasten is not to read it front to back to understand something — not A to Z, and not from 1.1a down through 1.1a1a1a1 either.

What you actually do is wander around in it and gather material while you are writing. You're not consulting an oracle. It's more like a writing partner — a conversation with your previous self rather than with some all-knowing being. A previous self isn't comprehensive; it's just someone who did the reading and left decent notes.

In practice that's one habit, and it's the one that makes the whole thing work: I keep my zettelkasten open alongside whatever I'm writing. Draft on one side, notes on the other. That's the mechanic that means you never start from a blank screen (Ahrens, 2017).

Build a system that could be read cover to cover and you're building for a use case that never arrives.

So when is a note atomic enough?

I found this hard too, and stressed for ages about whether a note was atomic enough — an unanswerable question, and a very efficient way to lose an evening. What I landed on isn't quite what most people say, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

I define an atomic note as one that is (a) reusable across more than one context, and (b) full enough to serve as a paragraph in an academic article. So instead of asking do I have the right level of atomicity, I ask two questions that have answers:

1. Can this be used in more than one context? If it only makes sense inside the project it came from, it's carrying too much. A note holding one idea attaches anywhere that idea is relevant; one holding several is stuck where it was born (Ahrens, 2017).
2. Could I copy this straight in as a paragraph in an academic article? If it needs splitting, it's two ideas pretending to be one. If it needs expanding, the evidence is missing.

Neither asks whether the note is good. Both ask whether it will work later — a question you can answer while tired. (More in how to create atomic notes that actually stick.)

Notes are allowed to change

This follows from that second test, and it contradicts advice you'll have read elsewhere: I allow myself room to edit notes when new knowledge becomes available.

The reason is purely functional. I want to copy a zettel directly into a draft as a paragraph, and a note three years out of date can't do that — so I update it rather than preserve it as an artifact. When something is completely superseded, I'll sometimes make a dedicated note for the historic practice; the old view is often worth citing as history, just not as fact.

The archive isn't the point; being able to write from it is. It's also what makes it compound — each usable note makes the next piece of writing cheaper (Ahrens, 2017).

If you want to test this in a week

1. Stop sorting at capture. Everything into one inbox, no decisions.
2. At week's end, run each item through the four types.
3. Move every how-to into a separate space you're allowed to rewrite.
4. Open what's left beside your draft and write one paragraph from it.

None of it is permanent. (More in the resources hub and in how to use the zettelkasten method for your PhD.)

The takeaway

The three worries that opened this post are real: implementing folgezettel in Obsidian, atomic notes never feeling good enough, a numbering scheme that might not survive. They were just aimed at the wrong thing.

The numbering was never carrying the weight. It's an address; there's always room between two of them; and it can't go out of date, because it only records something that already happened. The sorting carries the weight — which notes you let in the door. Get that wrong and no scheme saves you.

Your zettelkasten probably isn't badly numbered. It's probably just holding the wrong things.

📄 Free kit: Notes only pay off when they become writing. "From Notes to First Draft" is my free kit for that step — the note-to-paragraph checklist and outline worksheet I use. Get it here, free for members.

One question before you go. Hit reply and tell me: what kind of note is clogging your system — project reference, how-tos, or something else? I read every reply, and the answers shape what I write next.