What is happening in your ZK journey? Nov/1/2025

Will

Current ZK Report

Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• I have to eat my own dog food. I've tried to get lurkers to participate in the forum discussions, and now I find myself a lurker. Hesitant to start a conversation, comment, or ask a question because I'm not sure of what to say or if I have the time to engage appropriately.
• Doing basic things well with fewer complications is the highest goal. "We avoid doing simple things that work because they don't make us look smart. Smart people feel stupid doing simple things, so we invent complicated alternatives that accomplish less but feel more intellectually satisfying. Meanwhile, the people who dominate their fields are doing embarrassingly basic things, but they do them better than everyone else." - Farnam Street Brain Food Newsletter
• I'm fed up with Bear's inability to sync via iCloud. It has gotten worse because I have over 3000 notes. For journaling, I'm exploring iA Writer. The simple interface is inviting, and I can focus on the writing without distractions. I recommend watching the YouTube video by the bullet journal guy, Ryder Carroll. This Tiny Writing Setup Changed Everything - YouTube
• The idea of a daily note as the hub of my knowledge work is central to my Zettelkasten system. I don't think it has to be in the same application, but it has to be able to be linked.
• Journaling my writing journey could serve as an example for others. An example of what to avoid in order not to be laughed at.
• The older I get, the busier my life is. Why is this? It seems unfair.

Books I'm reading or have read:

• Nisargadatta. I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Edited by Sudhakar S. Dikshit, translated by Maurice Frydman, 2nd American ed, Acorn Press, 2012.
• Haig, Matt. The Humans. First Simon&Schuster hardcover edition, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
• Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2009. [[202507301741]]
• Proulx, Annie. Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. With Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, Scribner, 2005.
• McDowell, Gary L., and F. Daniel Rzicznek, editors. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice. Rose Metal Press, 2010.
• Wilkins, Joe. Fall Back down When I Die. Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

Most recent note

• Everything is Becoming Television 202510310637
  • Subatomic: The gravitational pull of the infinite scroll of screen media threatens creativity, inwardness, and deep attention by reshaping culture into passive consumption and flattening the dimensions of my inner life.

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I'm sure you have even better ideas.

imstqtic

I've been called out, as a lurker! But I'll use the opportunity for a question. How have you used your daily note that it's become central to the Zettelkasten?

Will

@imstqtic said:
How have you used your daily note that it's become central to the Zettelkasten?

Good question.

My notes have many origins. They begin with ideas from books, articles, forum posts, conversations with friends, conversations with myself, and reflections on my own life experiences.

In my daily notes, I have conversations with myself and reflect on my life. These become seeds for some of the most meaningful and personally moving notes.

It is a writing environment that I'm comfortable in. I try out ideas, test them out, and see if they work. This is a sample. I drafted this response in my daily note. It's a way to know if I can write in a way that is clear, concise, and engaging without being too verbose.

I can bake my response over a couple of hours. This is what I love about asynchronous writing: the freedom to think and write at my own pace.

Does this help explain how I use my daily note in support of my ZK?

Sascha

Welcome back!

KChousos

Hello everyone!

The past month I've mainly used my ZK to process notes from lectures, breaking down the things the professor covered and trying to explain them in my own words. Before I "atomize" these notes, I also pass them to an LLM to create plaintext flashcards.

My current problem is the following: I'm wondering if my usage of ZK for this kind of thing is redundant. I find myself many times basically copying definitions from textbooks, where they are expressed in the most distilled way possible, with no room for interpretation. So I don't know if it's worth the time investment creating notes like this just so that they exist in my ZK. I mean, I can just find these things elsewhere, right?

Also, so far my flashcards are a subset of my ZK notes, but my hunch is that the most effective combination would be something like a Venn diagram, so that they are two parts of a whole when it comes to my studying workflow.

Basically, since I'm pursuing my MSc and simultaneously working as a research assistant, and since my MSc program has a heavy workload with many assignments designed to drill this information into our brains anyhow, I'm debating the need for processing such concepts in my ZK as well. What are your thoughts? Anyone in/has faced a similar predicament?

imstqtic

Appreciate your responses! I could see how externalizing thoughts might help further progress them. Is the daily note exclusive for knowledge work? How does it differ from a regular, analog journal?

Will

@imstqtic said:
Is the daily note exclusive for knowledge work? How does it differ from a regular, analog journal?

You hit a triveta of phenomenal questions.

The process of journaling every day can be folded into knowledge work. Knowledge work isn't just formal, academic, or technical work; knowledge isn't entirely built on a schedule. Being primed to capture sudden sparks of insight is part of the daily notes role. The other part it plays is to provide a writing surface for the thoughts that come up in interstitial moments without having to face all the mental overhead of switching contexts, or deal with the distraction of a formalized atomic note. Th ere is an auditioning process going on with the daily note. Many ideas in this realm fail to make the cut and are abandoned to the scribbles of a madman. Some take a day or two to fester into something more substantial. Reviewing yesterday's and last week's daily notes can surface new and novel ideas. Sometimes I'll write something with the intention of finding it tomorrow or next week.

As for differing from a regular journal — well, the daily note is open to being treated in many ways. Action items, book lists, grocery lists, calendar items, and even a list of things I want to do in the next few days are all part of the daily note. Project tracking and task management can play a role. I use the daily note in a freeform way, and I've reaped the benefits of this flexibility. Analog, digital, typewriter, fountain pen, daily, weekly, whenever, sitting or standing — the daily note is a place testing the boundaries of my thinking.

KillerWhale

@Will I'm puzzled by your sync problems. I've mauled Bear with massive Obsidian imports and tag changes, I have 8146 notes in there at the moment and it has behaved flawlessly. Are you leaving your iOS devices awake for the time to accomplish important sync operations?

On my end: I'm delighted by my return to Bear. I'm no longer messing around with overhead (UIDs, mandatory linking, sources). I'm working the way I need to: I'm not an academic, I don't need precise citation data, I just need to put stuff in there that I can link against when needed or to find again when required. For the first time in ages, my inbox of fleeting notes decreases again.

On the themes, I've mostly been working through personal insights related to therapeutic work. It started as random thoughts taken over time, ended up as long paragraphs of separate ideas, and that note is now ripe for becoming a beautiful structure notes with atomic ideas. It's possibly the first time that I'm doing such canonical Zettelkasten (shoutout to @ctietze 's recent article on processing documentation and @Sascha 's video about atomicity: thank you) and the funny thing is, it's nothing like influencers or the famous writers in the field tell you. It's both so much simpler and so much powerful than that.

Will

@KillerWhale said:
@Will I'm puzzled by your sync problems. I've mauled Bear with massive Obsidian imports and tag changes, I have 8146 notes in there at the moment and it has behaved flawlessly. Are you leaving your iOS devices awake for the time to accomplish important sync operations?

Bear is pretty and minimalistic. These are the two points that hooked me back in 2020 when I first started using it. For years, it was great. I didn't have anything to sync it with. Then I started using a couple of iPads and an iPhone. I had a second Mac Mini in the shop. So I have 5 devices I want to sync with. With the Mac Mini, the syncing happens in the background as you'd expect. But with the iPad and the iPhone, you have to keep Bear awake for the sync to happen. It is not automatic. It takes a few minutes for the sync to happen. Sometimes up to 10 minutes. During that time, you can not do anything with the iPad or iPhone. The bear must be in the active window for the sync to occur.

I admit that your mileage may vary because of my slow internet. I'm glad to hear you are not having these issues. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Bear, and that was a disaster. Newest release, and it took me 4 days to get it resynced, when I was connected to a 1 gig internet connection. In the last month or so, I've created notes on the MacBook Pro, which have caused the application to crash when opening them, but not older ones.

All this is too much of a headache. I'm eyeing my fountain pen collection again. I even toyed with the idea of going back to Evernote. They are improving their app quite a bit.