Beginners guide to permanent notes

In this guide, I want to introduce you to the permanent note and explore how permanent notes power your Zettelkasten notes and how to get the best out of them.

What are permanent notes?

A permanent note should contain a single idea, thought or fact. You can then link it to other related ideas. Ideally, every permanent note you create would link to another related idea within a permanent note. However, this isn’t always possible, and that’s perfectly fine.

These unlinked permanent notes remain in your Zettelkasten, and at any point in the future, you might link a new permanent note to that previously orphaned note. This brings that original idea to the forefront, potentially sparking another idea or revealing a new connection.

The role of backlinks in Permanent notes

Backlinks connect related notes, creating a web of ideas and thoughts.

This web of ideas gives your Zettelkasten its structure, allowing you to navigate between related concepts. These thoughts and ideas might come from different fields and domains, but you’ve identified a relationship between them.

It might even change the way you think. I’ve found that when reading something, I often see a link to an idea already in my Zettelkasten. This experience seems to grow as my Zettelkasten expands.

How to create a permanent note

In this section, I’ll guide you through the process of creating a permanent note by showing you how I add permanent notes to my own vault.

Creating a permanent note from a literature note

In this example, I’ll walk you through a real-life example from my own vault. I’ll show you how I create permanent notes from a literature note I recently made based on notes I took while reading the book ‘Smarter Than Us’ by Stuart Armstrong.

As you’ll notice, the literature note consists of notes made using an outliner style. This helps me see the structure of the ideas and thoughts I’ve taken from the book. The literature notes are written in my own words.

Now, let’s create some permanent notes. Remember, it’s one permanent note for each distinct thought, idea or concept.

The literature note makes some key points about our strengths as a species, so I created a backlink to a note on humans. An existing note about humans already exists in my Zettelkasten, so I link to that note, as it makes sense to update it.

I look at the existing permanent note to see if I’ve already come across a similar idea from another source, or perhaps even from my own thoughts. In this case, I feel that the ideas from the book add new perspectives to our understanding of humans.

A Zettelkasten develops organically and reflects my interests over time. However, there’s one note I want to create now: a note on the human mind. I want to create a specific note to include the bullet points related to the development of the human mind.

So, I added the key points from ‘Smarter Than Us’ to the bottom of the note. As you can see from the screenshot below, I’m adding backlinks to any notes that I think are related. Some of these notes don’t exist yet and might not be created tonight.

Normally, the bullet points at the end of my ‘humans’ permanent note would be removed. However, I think they’re relevant to the ‘humans’ note, so for now, they’ll remain.

I added a link to the human mind from the literature note for the book, as the idea originates from the book.

I consider each permanent note as I create it. At times, like in this example, you begin to have a conversation with your Zettelkasten as you work out the best way forward. It’s a creative process, and that’s why I enjoy this part of working with a Zettelkasten the most.

Creating a permanent note based on my own thoughts or ideas

On 12th September 2025, I was reading an article on how to manage your second brain when a thought unrelated to what I was reading came to mind. I quickly jotted the following down in my journal:

“Your Second Brain will consist of at least 4 components. PKM, journaling, tasks, schedules.

PKMs are not a productivity tool. It’s a knowledge tool.”

Later that day, I took another look at the idea and decided that the idea portrayed in that thought needed to be added as a permanent note in my Zettelkasten

I added a backlink from the entry in my Obsidian journal to an existing note on a second brain. And added the following to the bottom of the permanent note.

“I realised on 2025-09-12 while reading a Medium that a second brain will consist of at at least 4 components

• Personal Knowledge Management System (PKM)
• Journaling
• Task list
• Calendar”

I’ll include a screenshot so you can see how backlinks were added to the date the idea came to me and was jotted down in my journal. This provides context if needed, as I’m demonstrating in this post when sharing my processes.

(Insert image)

Why permanent notes matter?

Why do permanent notes matter? It’s hard to know where to begin!

When you work on a permanent note, you externalise your thinking process, which can allow you to see your ideas from a different perspective. This can help you refine your thoughts or generate new, related ideas.

If the permanent note was originally someone else’s idea, the act of recall can help you absorb the idea into your own understanding.

Linking related ideas within permanent notes mirrors how our minds work when we try to learn something new: we look for ideas or concepts we already understand.

When I was learning object-oriented programming in Java, I realised it shared many concepts with how relational databases work. Once I realised that, it became easier to learn, as it became about spotting the differences.

The human mind isn’t designed for long-term storage of ideas, which is why we forget things.

I hope this beginner’s guide to permanent notes encourages you to start your PKM journey, if you haven’t already.

Further reading

• Introduction to the Zettelkasten system: Introduces you to the rest of the Zettelkasten method.
• Deciding Which Notes to Keep: A Zettelkasten Approach: Explains my process on how I feed ideas and knowledge into my PKM.
• From Information Overload to Knowledge Powerhouse: Building Your Personal Knowledge Management Stack: An article on the PKM stack which feeds fleeting notes into my system for further processing
• CTNET Guide to Managing Literature Notes: Our guide on literature notes
• The essential guide to managing fleeting notes for productivity and knowledge management: Our guide to fleeting notes the initial idea that could become a permanent note
• An Introduction to the Outliner note taking application: This guide explains how outlining your notes work.