Note-taking has always been a difficult task for me. I would rarely write them and, when I happen to write some, they would most certainly never be reviewed. Although there is still some value in writing throwaway notes just for the sake of writing, I wanted to look for a way to solve both of these issues, and I believe Zettelkasten might be the solution.
I was able to solve that for me by mid nineties when Netmanage Ecco Pro appeared. Since I developped software, my typing was pretty fast and accurate. But listening to some complex talking and writing (and even talking) at the same time so that there is some structure an decent wording and context just with some linear medium (including "Zettels") was too difficult. An outliner with decent shortcuts was the solution. Whenever there was a side note (and there were many), I just added a sub item (CTRL+R), wrote what I wanted, and the went back to the previous level (CTRL+L), all without taking the hands off the keyboard, and while looking at my conversational partners (not at the keyboard, not at the screen). Eventually I started to take verbatim transcripts of meetings (with up to thirty people all talking at cross purposes, and then everyone wanted my notes). The written stories made sense with the indentation, or some reorganization of the items helped to follow the story lines. With CrossLine I can even leave all items where they are and collect them in new contexts via trasnslucent links. I can still reconstruct meetings with decisions and rationales which happened twenty years ago.
Zettelkasten was a useful concept before there were computers and good applications for information management. The organizational concept based on "Zettels" was born out of the limitations of paper and folders. Since the late eighties we have electronic outliners and hypertext systems.