Fleeting Notes Vs Literature Notes Vs Permanent Notes

Understand the difference to help you leverage the power of the Zettelkasten system

Prakash Joshi Pax
4 min readSep 7, 2021

When I first came across the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, I was confused. It took me a while to get a hold of it. I read every article on the web and watched every video on youtube. But even after so much research, one thing I couldn’t understand was the difference between literature notes and permanent notes.

Along with all the articles and videos I read and watched, Sonke Ahrens's book, how to take smart notes helped me get a better perspective on the difference between these different types of notes. In this article, I will try help you understand the difference between fleeting, literature and permanent notes. These in turn will make you a better note-taker.

Fleeting Notes:

Fleeting notes are the ideas or reminders that can pop into your head at any time. They are the everyday thoughts that you may think are important.

Ideas are like people and if you don’t capture them they will go away. To capture these fleeting notes, you can have a simple notebook or an inbox system on your device.

Fleeting notes don’t serve any purpose rather than helping you to develop permanent…

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Prakash Joshi Pax
Prakash Joshi Pax

Written by Prakash Joshi Pax

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