Some time ago I read this post in the Zettelkasten.de website taking about the differences between a Zettelkasten and a Personal Knowledge Management system (PKM), and even talked about it in My Experience with a Zettelkasten, but it wasn’t until now that I realized its real meaning.
I have been using Logseq for some weeks, maybe one or two months, mainly because of the Journal pages features, where I just wrote everything I found interesting. However, I have been feeling how the older notes, although the information is there, lack meaning to me, I struggle to remember why I captured it, because there is no feeling attached to it. At this point (yesterday) something clicked inside of my brain, and I realized that, of course, what I have being introducing into Logseq Journals is simple information, which is useful when I want to find something back, but has no value or purpose as knowledge by itself. It is just a note thrown there, in an specific day, but nothing more.
For example, I have stored many quotes, and in many cases I still remember why I saved them for, but I am not longer feeling the same when reading them, and therefore cannot reach the same conclusions I made back then.
There lays the difference between a Zettel and a simple note of information. A good and atomic note would have captured a feeling and/or a piece of knowledge, not a cold piece of information.
Even further, writing lots of stuff in the Journal pages just seems to be a little noisy, and maybe we should be more selective with the notes we make. It is perfectly fine, however, if we are able to process all that information, and Journals even gives additional context because of the back link to the date it was taken, but I think it should be avoided to use this feature like an inbox which is never processed.
It is true that all this is product of my own misunderstanding, because a Journal is, clearly, not a Zettelkasten. So we should treat by what they are, and we shouldn’t switch roles. A journal is something we can look back at, and have old an new feelings. Whereas a Zettelkasten is something when we look at, we quickly know specifically what we thought at that moment, the feeling were purposely processed by our old self for our future self.