Ideas I'm Grappling With March 9, 2023

Will

It's Thursday, and here we go again. I'm telling you what I'm working on to inspire you to tell me what you worked on.

This week I practiced my onboarding of an idea spark into my ZK. For 6 of the ten new notes this week, I used the following workflow to get ideas for the stages they are at. Practice exposed a few gaps in my workflow, and I was able to correct them and practice more. The formatting and some of the housekeeping became automated and easy to complete making time for the fun of considering the idea's connection.

This is not the only workflow I use, but the one I used several times this week. Books, PDFs, lectures, and YouTube videos are treated differently. Web articles sparked all six of these notes I'm describing.

1. Captured the article in Bear
2. I Used Bear's highlighting feature to highlight anything that sparkled as I read.
3. Added quick notes and highlighted them.
4. Used a Keyboard Maestro script to extract highlights, creating from a template a note
   • Contained all the highlights formatted as quotes
   • Correct YAML front matter with prompts and with the #inbox tag
   • Titled the same as the original article/source
   • Contains a link to the original article/source
5. Note is incrementally upgraded with prompts being fulfilled and quotes/highlights all being processes into my thoughts and interrelations
6. I reevaluate the title once all the quotes have been processed.
7. I'll create a one-sentence summary.
8. I hang the note on a structure note.
9. Now for the fun part. Deep links are searched for and discovered.

This sounds like a lot of work, but it is really a lot of fun. After reading and marking up the article, I'll devote 5 minutes to getting the note into shape and then let it sit. This resting process is essential. I'll attack the digestion of the quotes a little at a time, switching from note to note as the mood strikes.

Once all this is done, I'll let the note rest in the #inbox for a day or two to think and consider before removing the #inbox tag.

Three of the six notes where I used this workflow are still in the #inbox.

My seven day zettel production

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Edit @ctietze: Fixed list Markdown formatting

GeoEng51

@Will I think the digestion period you described is so important for creating meaningful connections and for a sober, second look at the content of the zettel. Thanks for the detail.

I'm afraid my zettel production this week has suffered, as I have just finished writing a 9000 word, two part blog on "communications at work". The first part is about normal conversations and all kinds of meetings; the second part is about written communication in different media (including presentations, which is a hybrid of written and verbal). I estimate about 50% of the material came out of my ZK, but it still took 20 hours or so to get it to a final draft stage.

I use Scrivener a lot for technical notes and writing, but I find more and more for personal writing, I just do it within The Archive.

prometheanhindsight

My simulation computer was tied up this week running timing tests for a paper revision (getting resubmitted today, and hopefully published soon). Since I can't run new calculations, I'm working on analyzing some previous simulation results. I finally took the plunge and have been carrying out my analysis using Python rather than Matlab, which I have used for the last 8 years.

I haven't quite figured out how to take useful notes on programming. Most of my notes would just be code snippets or a reminder of how a particular command works. Useful notes to have, but not likely to have many connections with any of my other notes. For now, I'm just referring back to my previous scripts if I need a reminder of which command to use.

Speaking of workflow, this week I started to put my data analysis into my ZK. This is a work in progress. I haven't quite worked out what level of detail or polish I want in these working notes. Usually, I would take the figures I make as part of data analysis and put them in a powerpoint, adding textual notes to remind me what's plotted. I can then just pull figures or slides from my various analysis powerpoints when I need to put together a talk or prepare for a meeting. It struck me that I could just do essentially this same thing in my ZK.

So far, my notes for this are a lot bigger than the previous notes that I've taken. They're pretty well structured, though, with a section describing the specifics of the simulation, a section with the results figures, and then a section that describes the results with whatever analysis feels appropriate. We'll see how this evolves, but I could see this being a really good boon for building my ZK up. Already, my notes on these most recent simulations have me hunting through old figures and references to provide clarification for my newest data. The key, and maybe the tricky bit, is to make sure that this works into my usual flow rather than slowing me down and becoming burdensome.

Will

@prometheanhindsight said:
Speaking of workflow, this week I started to put my data analysis into my ZK. This is a work in progress. I haven't quite worked out what level of detail or polish I want in these working notes. Usually, I would take the figures I make as part of data analysis and put them in a powerpoint, adding textual notes to remind me what's plotted. I can then just pull figures or slides from my various analysis powerpoints when I need to put together a talk or prepare for a meeting. It struck me that I could just do essentially this same thing in my ZK.

Your train of thought reminds me of an article I read Aug. 2021 titled How to get your creative work back on track. In it, Coleen Bak writes about embodying a slide deck with innovative attributes. This got me thinking about using slides a zettels, and into the rabbit hole I dived.

Your idea for blending PowerPoint with text notes in your ZK got me searching my ZK, and I found a small reference to pandoc's ability to convert markdown to pptx. (Unfortunately, not the other way round.) I have had success working with pandoc. The closer I looked at the simple formatting style needed, the more I realized this could be a format for some of my ideas. I'm experimenting. Here is a link to the clearest explanation, including a template. What? Slides? From Markdown?

ZettelDistraction

Are you sure you want to know? While working my way toward a theorem, I decided to add an answer to Constructing a simplicial map from a diagram from math stackexchange.

AWomanThinking

Here's my workflow and products at the moment:
1. Read books in Kindle. Highlight and make notes as I go. I've recently added a good quality stylus for note-taking so that I can make use of the handwriting function in my tablet's keyboard. The ecosystem for this makes me wish I'd been able to afford IOS when I started collecting apps and books.
2. Save articles for reading later - currently using Readwise Reader. I'm inconsistent with this, would like to process at least 1 article/day, but I struggle to make myself slow down and not read 5 things of which I remember nothing.
3. Sync both Kindle and Readwise highlights into Logseq, using Readwise to collate the two. Expensive, but it's working and with little manual effort on my part.
4. Sit down, ideally weekly, and pick ONE thing that I've recently read and synced in to process. Because of the way my sync is structured, each book/article creates its own page with each highlight making a quick note on that page.(1) When I process and summarize what I've read, I'll usually pop open the book or article and use the original text and my highlights as references. The summary goes on the page for the book, above the imported highlights (which are their own section, and can be collapsed or expanded as a whole).
5. As I'm summarizing, if I think of something that I know I want to link to this literature note, I'll make a note to myself for later "(Link this to that thing from the other week about AI and automation)" If it's fast to make the link - if I know exactly where that other piece of information is - I might link it right away, but I'd rather get the summary down then get pulled into searching.

I'm missing a convention for notating my own responses to the text that I'm summarizing, but am trying to do that as well, usually in a sub-note attached to the point I'm responding to. This is where I add things like "I am skeptical about this" or "This feels true, but where's the evidence?"

This week's work has been to read and summarize the first several chapters of the book "What's Our Problem"

(1) Titles are automatically generated from the title of the work, and it's working well enough for me so far.