Problem

You notice that what you’re writing is going to be orphaned, disconnected from the rest. Maybe you just started your Zettelkasten and don’t see how taking note of anything could one day produce a network. Or you’re diving into a new topic and feel that every note you create is disconnected from everything else in your Zettelkasten.

Context

New notes have no incoming links and thus are unconnected. It’s not clear how you would ever get to them from other notes.

Or they have no outgoing links, so it’s not clear where to go from there.

Or they don’t even share tags with other notes, so there’s no loosely coupled connection, no clustering, that’d help with discovery.

Solution

Create an orphanage where you put assorted notes. Gathered in one place, you can truly see whether and how they may share similarities, and bond.

• Look for implicit themes in your notes that could be extracted and become Explicit Themes: new hierarchical parents to adopt the orphans as hierarchical children; or trunks that these branches can be grafted onto.
• Especially in the early days, there’ll be things that just are (see Facts), and that don’t yet have a lived-in home with many related pieces.

The orphanage could be a new, dedicated note, and index of sorts. Whenever you create a new note and you notice that it is orphaned, you put a link to it in the orphanage. One link turns into many. But as the list grows, so does the opportunity to discover patterns. Play with the list: change the order of notes, try to group some.

Once an interesting angle manifests, take note of it: create a new note to express the idea and move the links there, out of the orphanage. That’s going to be the structure note, the new home for these formerly unconnected ideas.

As the orphanage grows, the rest of your Zettelkasten grows as well. A note you took two years ago may today find a new home in a department of your Zettelkasten that didn’t even exist back then.

Overdose

Your orphanage becomes overcrowded and messy and it’ll no longer be feasible to tend to it. Since your Zettelkaste as a Septic Tank can handle some amount of rubbish, you may get by evicting forever-orphans eventually.

Related

• Where capturing the coin and its two sides as three notes is top-down, this approach is bottom-up: you start with the details (in the orphanage) and create the overarching group later as an Emergent Structure
• Tending to the orphanage is a Housekeeping task
• Both to move notes into the orphanage and routinely check it for notes that could move into a new home are Algorithmic Solutions.