I am doing personal research on how to get more from books I read. And that lead me to note taking schemes and zettlekasten from there.

From what I learned so far it seems zettlekasten method has many important benefits.

Here are some examples.

First.

To better understand and remember what we are learning we need to connect it to what we already know.

In zettlekasten to add a note you need to find where to connect it to things you recorded before. System makes you do it. And you get contextual organisation as a bonus. Which works better and is closer to how knowledge actually is. Things make sense in context of things they are connected to, categories, hierarchies and tags fail to capture this completely, but still can be used along with zettlekasten.

Spaced repetition.

We forget half of what we read in 24 hours, and almost everything in two weeks. Key to not forgetting is reviewing at increasing intervals and working with that information.

In zettlekasten you are forced to review when you are searching where to connect new note. What's more, some ways to work with it require you to convert information, you may be start with copy paste, then rewrite it in your own words, then create notes that link together multiple notes. You work with same information multiple times at multiple levels.

This helps you to understand and remember this better.

Engaging with information in ways that engage more of your brain facilities like drawing, coloring, organising with mind maps helps too. This is where obsidian helps only minimally as it creates those graphs and maps for you, as far as I can say it does not allow to organize them as well.

But may be in future. I think many interesting things can still be added and improved upon to make similar note taking system truly a tool to be reckoned with. External artifact of your knowledge which is easy to use and expand.

By the way I heard from multiple authors that from certain point your zettlekasten becomes a partner in dialogues when searching for answers. You just follow where connections and questions lead you. I suspect that zettlecasten can be organized as question/decision trees for finding information and solutions in non linear way.