What are you working on this week (2021-01-25 - 2021-01-31)?

jeannelking

I'm noticing that the busier I get, the less time I'm spending with my ZK. Not good, not okay, as the reading I'm doing belongs in my ZK brain. So.

• Carving out time (aka taking time off work) to revisit my reading notes and transfer them into my ZK. Perhaps Friday, depending on schedule.
• Preparing two conference abstracts for submission to two different conferences (International Conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management, and the SOU Creativity Conference)
• Lots of work stuff (organizing events, facilitating sessions, mentoring teammates, etc.)
• Lots of school stuff (because PhD)
• Developing a CV for myself (because it's time)
• Mapping out the system for one of our business region's innovation process. Should be fun.
• Making lots of fires in the fireplace because it's cold, wet, and windy in San Diego right now

How about you? What are you working on this week?

henrikenggaard

Just submitted a conference paper. A bit of a scramble, but that is how it turns out sometimes.

The busyness from that work has also meant that I haven't really had time to work with/on my Zettelkasten. However, I don't feel bad about it: priorities change and shift

Tomorrow I am taking the day off. Probably finish a book; go for a walk.

I've been reviewing and collecting "reviews" of books I have read for my little "digital garden". It is quite nice and enjoyable.

After that it is back to work. Hopefully the coming time will allow for more interaction with the Zettelkasten

ctietze

• Fixing problems with recent changes to The Archive until it's ready to face a broader audience.
• Migrating newsletters. My own page and the Zettelkasten form have exceeded the free tier of MailChimp and I'm not willing to pay 2-digit monthly fees to send an email 2--4 times per year.
• Setting up our home server for file sharing. Kinda works, but everything is new, so I'm cautious. Lots of Zettel about that are being written.

@jeannelking What format do you chose for your CV? I'm always curious because for programmers, online CV's seem to work okay enough. But a motion artist friend has a show reel movie instead, dropping most formal education info completely. There seems to be different practices for different audiences.

prometheanhindsight

I'm back after some time away! After finishing my dissertation last October, I spent several months experimenting with note-taking and -organization formats. I tried migrating to Obsidian using note titles instead of UIDs for linking, then I moved to Roam Research, then back to Obsidian...

Now I'm returning to the Archive. The trouble is that every transition depreciated the quality of my notes and links by requiring me to go through and edit old notes to match the newer approach while simultaneously making new notes.

The best way I can see to fix this is to start fresh with an entirely empty archive and incorporate what I've learned about note-taking moving forward. I have a few notes that I'm sure will migrate over from the old now-fragmented archive--namely, notes I've made in the last week or two that aren't worth remaking from whole-cloth when I can just spend a little time reformatting. That amounts to maybe a dozen notes or so that need to be reformatted rather than several hundred.

One of the mistakes I made during my experimentation was incorporating personal notes in with my ZK notes. My personal (non-ZK) notes need some reorganizing since I can't just delete them and start fresh. Hopefully it won't take me long to sort them into their requisite folders.

Other than some of the filing, reformatting, and reorganizing that I need to do to give myself a clean slate, I'm working on reading about an analytical technique that I'm potentially going to be learning soon. Recently I realized that the instrument that I was going to use for this new technique isn't outfitted to measure the specific thing that I want to measure. I need to read through the literature and determine if there is anything interesting that I can do with this instrument, or if an expensive ($400k) upgrade is the only way that this instrument will be useful to my research.

Will

@henrikenggaard said:
priorities change and shift

Yes, they do!

Tomorrow, I am taking the day off. Probably finish a book; go for a walk.

We all should be so lucky.

This week I'll finish reading Owning it All by William Kittredge for my seminar, Literature of the Pacific Northwest. This book is a moving admission of a colonial mindset and the dire consequences of a twentieth-century university education that went along with agribusiness. Kittredge writes, "...felt cheated and was betrayed by my education on agri-science. I proceeded in good faith but "it turned out we had wrecked all we had not left untouched... a dreamland gone wrong."

I'll continue to explore alternatives to the software I currently use for personal journaling.

I, too, hope to get some walking in. solvitur ambulando

Sascha

• Zettelkasten: Working on the section on beauty and knowledge.
• Knowledge: The Old Testament. (Mainly on the aspects of metaphorical truth, connection to wisdom and story archetypes)

Nick

@prometheanhindsight why so many switcheroos regarding what system you use?

prometheanhindsight

@Nick said:
@prometheanhindsight why so many switcheroos regarding what system you use?

Some of the behaviors that help future-proof my ZK felt like they were creating enough friction that it was limiting my use of the ZK. I wanted to be able to more freely incorporate writing and thoughts into my notes without having to necessarily adhere to a certain notation.

I swapped to Obsidian because of its ability to do aliasing of links. Obsidian then introduced the ability to link to specific blocks of text, which I thought was pretty cool. That inspired me to try out Roam Research. Honestly, I absolutely adore Roam. It's so easy to put information into Roam and link it to other information and then have bits of notes naturally resurface in new contexts.

A week ago I ran into a bit of a snag with Roam, though. I was trying to do some creative writing and it just wasn't working within Roam's structure. As much as Roam was working for nonfiction thoughts and notes, brainstorming fiction wasn't working well. When I tried to extract my creative writing notes, though, I found that the process of getting information out of Roam was not easy at all. There was a lot of information built into just the outline and linking structure inside of Roam, and that structure and linking was not easily reproducible in other programs. That set off alarm bells in my head because Roam is an expensive subscription based web program made by a very new startup company. I realized that if I ever had to leave Roam in the future, there wasn't really a way to get my notes out of Roam.

I briefly went back to Obsidian, but my experience with Roam made me nervous to even use Obsidian's markdown features. Sure, I can make an aliased link in Obsidian, but if no other program can read that syntax, then my notes are locked into Obsidian. That pushed me to try The Archive again.

TL;DR: I wanted to use the modern comforts of proprietary formatting, but realized that my notes were locked into those proprietary formats. I decided to move back into a more future-proof format without those modern comforts to ensure that my notes are useful forever.

ProfMac

I will jump in this week:

• I started Korean lessons—again. Although, I live in South Korea it is easy to get away with not speaking the language (or not speaking it well), my attempts to learn it through osmosis was not working as I had hoped. I actually have to do the hard work and study. 😅
• I started reading/listening to Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis — hoping to inspire—as coined somewhere here on the fourms—some Zettelkasten feeding
• My process for notes and “Capture” are becoming more streamlined and feel “safe” so that I can actually do the hard focused work— revisiting notes makes more sense now than it did when I began.
• Our semester starts March 2nd so have been cleaning up my class plans to have a stronger start to the semester no matter which delivery method we use.

I have been a lurker for a while, with only a few peppered posts here and there. But I really enjoy learning from those that are engaged on the forum— it is a valuable resource.

Thank you for having this thread!

ctietze

I remember Turkle’s Alone Together to be really upsetting but also good

GeoEng51

We're getting some upgrades to the electrical power in our house. We woke up yesterday morning with snow on the ground and temperatures hovering around 0 C. That's of course the day when the power would be off for 8 hours. I had a battery and power inverter hooked up to my router and battery backup for my laptop. All that was needed for a productive day was a fuzzy housecoat over top of a flannel shirt, to stay warm.

ProfMac

@ctietze said:
I remember Turkle’s Alone Together to be really upsetting but also good

It is definitely both so far. I think her psychology and therapist training background contribute to the focus on the human brokenness which make it feel a bit darker at times than other books of similar purpose—like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

It’s another reminder to not let the technology replace relationships and more often than not to try to interact genuinely with others.

ctietze

Secret project of the past weeks is now online: a Chinese translation of @Sascha's introduction to the method. Took us a while to get right, but we're really happy with the result and are thankful for someone to put in so much work for the global ZK community 👍

jeannelking

@ctietze said:
@jeannelking What format do you chose for your CV? I'm always curious because for programmers, online CV's seem to work okay enough. But a motion artist friend has a show reel movie instead, dropping most formal education info completely. There seems to be different practices for different audiences.

Ooh, good question! Right now it's a Word document because I'm still capturing all the things I'm still realizing I've done. Moving forward as a creative/professional/academic/thought leader, however, a more creative interpretation is in my future. I am a huge collage fan for personal expression, although an interactive mind map would make total sense as well.

grayen

@ProfMac said:

• My process for notes and “Capture” are becoming more streamlined and feel “safe” so that I can actually do the hard focused work— revisiting notes makes more sense now than it did when I began.

Do you have any of this written down? I am always curious about how other people approach this.

ProfMac

@grayen said:
Do you have any of this written down? I am always curious about how other people approach this.

Not yet, but once I do I will share it in this form 😀