Twitter thread on Folgezettel - The numbering system for #Zettelkasten

I have often wondered what is the utility of the numbering system used by Niklas Luhmann for his Zettelkasten in the digital age and discovered a bit late how relevant it still is. Here is why

Most modern note-taking apps offer wiki links to connect to other notes and back-links which reflect on the destination notes.

So I have avoided using the #Folgezettel numbering system so far. Until I discovered two problems which are not solved by modern note-taking apps.

They are the following

The modern note-taking apps don't help you organise notes sequentially (There are some exceptions which I name below)

How do you know which note was created on what date and which notes were created after which note? what if you want to insert them in between the earlier set of notes?

This is where the #folgezettel aka german for the numbering system in Zettelkasten note-taking method comes to the rescue.

Most apps like #Obsidian, The Archive and @notenilk will allow you to manually change the numbering of these notes.

If your note-taking app doesn't support sequential numbering I am curious to know how do you solve this problem?

How does the Folgezettel numbering system work?

The time and the date stamp in my note-taking app give me an automatic chronological sequence of notes. I can add “a”, “b”, and “c” after the time stamp if I want to insert a note in between two notes. (Screenshot The Archive)

If I further want to insert more sub-atomic notes in between these atomic notes I can further add “a1” “a2” “a3” and so on. This is in short the folgezettel numbering system for #zettelkasten. (Get The Archive app here - The Archive (macOS) • Zettelkasten Method ).

Watch this excellent video describing the system by @Martin_Adams here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF08siwudkI

And if you want a basic 30 mins crash course on Zettelkasten go here https://pkm.one/signup