Comments

• harr

  January 28 edited January 28

  @jameslongley said:
  When you’re facing a real, consequential decision, how (if at all) does your PKM system help you think it through (in practice)?

  I manage bigger decisions like projects. I consider projects somewhat separate from PKMS. They live usually in a project folder where I collect research material and keep track of the process. When all is done, most of the project notes get trashed. Only a few are saved in an archive.

  The archive helps to learn from earlier experiences. How did I decide back then? Why? Looking back, what part of the decision process worked and what was a mistake? What can I learn from this experience for similar situations in the future?

  The archive also helps with feelings of regret. People tend to regret the consequences of decisions less, if the decisions were made for a good reason. For example: "The decision to accept this horrible job was a mistake. But it was the right decision at the time, given the circumstances and available knowledge back then." If you don't have a documentation of the decision process, there's a risk of counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias. In my experience not much documentation is needed. Sometimes a few lines in a journal is enough.

  I do have notes in my PKMS, that contain reminders like these (plus some background on the psychology):

  • Define the problem. What do you want to achieve? What obstacles stand in the way of getting it?
  • Vividly imagine desired outcome and obstacles. (WOOP method)
  • Use intuition and cognition. (two systems, two hemispheres, dual process, embodied cognition)
  • Talk to someone. (socratic method, empathy, compassion, self-distancing, changing perspectives, embodied cognition, advice)
  • Relax. (default mode network)
  • Write.
  • When in doubt, don't. (too impulsive)
  • When in doubt, do! (too much fear, anxiety)
  • If you can't decide, you don't have enough information.
  • Beware analysis paralysis.
  • Would I regret it, if I didn't do it? (regret anticipation)
  • Not to decide is also a decision. (Sartre)
  • A wrong decision is better than no decision at all.
  • What is the cost of delaying this decision? (compound effect, opportunity costs)
  • You don't know the future. (black swan, grey swan, changing environment, risk assessment)
  • Which of my values matter for this decision? (value-based choice)
  • Use intelligent defaults for recurring decisions. (if-then rules, checklists, rulebooks)

  These reminders help with consequential decisions, because they remind me of successful decisions strategies, that I'm already familiar with. They help reduce stress in high-stakes situations.

  I find formalized and detailed note-taking useful to a degree, but I need to balance them with other methods that activate other parts of the brain.

  Post edited by harr on January 28
• Andy

  January 28

  I use my note system for writing/thinking about life decisions. As @harr said, documentation of the decision-making process is very important. I use IBIS-like decision rationale notation, as I've said ad nauseum in this forum. I also have notes on various problem-structuring & decision-making frameworks that I can consult.

  I can't think of any "moments where your system felt like it should help, but didn’t", which is either a sign that I'm doing something right or that I'm good at forgetting. I'm always trying to improve and don't consider myself a master at it.
• jameslongley

  January 29 edited January 29

  @Andy said:
  I use my note system for writing/thinking about life decisions. As @harr said, documentation of the decision-making process is very important. I use IBIS-like decision rationale notation, as I've said ad nauseum in this forum. I also have notes on various problem-structuring & decision-making frameworks that I can consult.

  I can't think of any "moments where your system felt like it should help, but didn’t", which is either a sign that I'm doing something right or that I'm good at forgetting. I'm always trying to improve and don't consider myself a master at it.

  I'm not familiar with IBIS (at least not the term - I may discover that the methodology is something I'm already aware of under a different name).

  Those links are all interesting and broadly map to how I've been using the zettelkasten. In short, the zettelkasten being where my version of the 'theory' lives and it serves as a kind of tailored/me-flavoured reference library. No doubt that's of value.

  The direction my thinking is going now - and this is something @Sascha advocates for in some ways - is essentially this: what could/would the zettelkasten look like/need to contain for it to actually become the environment in which thinking and decision making is done (as opposed to the place I go to refer to the frameworks that help me make decisions).

  The edges between those two things are somewhat blurry since writing in the zettelkasten is thinking and decision-making. I also think there's an additional level the system could perhaps elevate to if it was to truly be the environment in which decisions are made.
• jameslongley

  January 29 edited January 29

  @Andy perhaps a better way to phrase "moments where your system felt like it should help, but didn’t" would be: "I had a decision to make/a sticky problem to think through and I found that I needed to do something in addition to working in my zettelkasten".

  For me that tends to be things like opening up a Scapple board to dump all of the loose thoughts onto a free-form canvas so I have the raw materials of the decision in front of me in a way I can reference (and explore possible connections between). Sometimes it's capturing a stream of consciousness reflection in a voice notes app. Other times it's as structured as using a decision journal template - which is something I've tended to do separate from the zettelkasten.

  As I think about what this looks like for me, it tends to involve changing the format of the content (from linear notes to a mind map for example).
• jameslongley

  January 29 edited January 29

  I manage bigger decisions like projects. I consider projects somewhat separate from PKMS. They live usually in a project folder where I collect research material and keep track of the process. When all is done, most of the project notes get trashed. Only a few are saved in an archive.

  Yeah, this maps to how I've tended to approach decisions as well. My GTD-informed mind tends to want to maintain very explicit hard edges between the different spaces. I don't typically go as far as to create a project for the decision (unless I do, in cases such as "Move [parent] to new care home]" in which the decisions being made include "should we move?" "where should we move?" etc).

  When you say you manage bigger decisions like projects do you mean that you think of it as something that needs to be managed in a different space (e.g. your project management tool or a different notes/documents location)?

  The archive helps to learn from earlier experiences. How did I decide back then? Why? Looking back, what part of the decision process worked and what was a mistake? What can I learn from this experience for similar situations in the future?

  This is an interesting piece of it and is something I've started managing with a running log of time/date stamped interstitial journal style notes in the inspector/sidebar of zettel (my zettelkasten is in Scrivener). I find a lot of value in being able to refer back to what I was thinking X long ago. Are you referring to a similar practice of capturing date stamped reflections in the note body in some way?

  The archive also helps with feelings of regret. People tend to regret the consequences of decisions less, if the decisions were made for a good reason. For example: "The decision to accept this horrible job was a mistake. But it was the right decision at the time, given the circumstances and available knowledge back then." If you don't have a documentation of the decision process, there's a risk of counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias. In my experience not much documentation is needed. Sometimes a few lines in a journal is enough.

  Agreed - though I've used a more formal decision journal template on occasion (e.g. for major business direction decisions), I haven't generally found that creating formal documentation was a sticky practice.

  I do have notes in my PKMS, that contain reminders like these (plus some background on the psychology):

  • Define the problem. What do you want to achieve? What obstacles stand in the way of getting it?
  • Vividly imagine desired outcome and obstacles. (WOOP method)
  • Use intuition and cognition. (two systems, two hemispheres, dual process, embodied cognition)
  • Talk to someone. (socratic method, empathy, compassion, self-distancing, changing perspectives, embodied cognition, advice)
  • Relax. (default mode network)
  • Write.
  • When in doubt, don't. (too impulsive)
  • When in doubt, do! (too much fear, anxiety)
  • If you can't decide, you don't have enough information.
  • Beware analysis paralysis.
  • Would I regret it, if I didn't do it? (regret anticipation)
  • Not to decide is also a decision. (Sartre)
  • A wrong decision is better than no decision at all.
  • What is the cost of delaying this decision? (compound effect, opportunity costs)
  • You don't know the future. (black swan, grey swan, changing environment, risk assessment)
  • Which of my values matter for this decision? (value-based choice)
  • Use intelligent defaults for recurring decisions. (if-then rules, checklists, rulebooks)

  These reminders help with consequential decisions, because they remind me of successful decisions strategies, that I'm already familiar with. They help reduce stress in high-stakes situations.

  This is pretty similar to what I've got. The question I'm asking myself is whether the value in these is in having created them more than it's generally in referring to them in the moment of making a specific decision. In some sense they're the artefacts of having thought about something in the past more than they're a just-in-time tool. I'm wondering to what extent there's value in figuring out how to make notes like these just-in-time tools in some way. The shorthand for this would be to think of applying "checklist manifesto" thinking to designing these notes/versions of them.

  I find formalized and detailed note-taking useful to a degree, but I need to balance them with other methods that activate other parts of the brain.

  Appreciate you taking the time to share such detailed thoughts. Very insightful.
• jameslongley

  January 29 edited January 29

  @Andy said:
  I use IBIS-like decision rationale notation, as I've said ad nauseum in this forum.

  IBIS is fascinating - thanks for pointing that out.

  Do you have an example of IBIS applied in your zettelkasten you could share or point me to in another of your comments here in the forum? I'd be keen to see how you implement it.

  Post edited by jameslongley on January 29
• harr

  January 29 edited January 29

  @jameslongley said:
  My GTD-informed mind (…) .

  Same here.

  When you say you manage bigger decisions like projects do you mean that you think of it as something that needs to be managed in a different space (e.g. your project management tool or a different notes/documents location)?

  Yes.

  I find Sönke Ahrens' terminology useful. He distinguishes in How to take smart notes (2nd ed, 2022) three types of notes (Chapter 6):

  (…) it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes:
  1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two.
  2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either as literature notes in the reference system or written as if for print, in the slip-box.
  3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished.
  (…) One of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in the confusion of these categories.

  This distinction is a reason, why I wouldn't take project notes in a ZK.

  Instead of expanding a ZK to include project notes, I prefer to complement the ZK with project folders.

  In my Obsidian setup Zettels and projects live in the same space (vault). But this space is divided into distinct sub-spaces (folders).

  They also have a clear conceptual boundary.

  For example: In my project notes I love to add links to permanent notes. For me that's an important motivation to write permanent notes. They make knowledge accessible. But I do not add links to projects in my permanent notes, because they would break, when I delete the project notes.

  (…) I've started managing with a running log of time/date stamped interstitial journal style notes in the inspector/sidebar of zettel (my zettelkasten is in Scrivener). I find a lot of value in being able to refer back to what I was thinking X long ago. Are you referring to a similar practice of capturing date stamped reflections in the note body in some way?

  Yes and no. I do occasionally add timestamped comments to my notes, when I want to keep track of how a thought developed. I do write a journal for personal stuff.

  But I don't do interstitial journaling. It's the opposite of what my brain needs during a break. My brain needs mindless breaks, not mindful breaks. (Keywords: default mode network, niksen, daydreaming; the original Pomodoro technique gets it right.) And I don't like mixing everything in one log.

  This is pretty similar to what I've got. The question I'm asking myself is whether the value in these is in having created them more than it's generally in referring to them in the moment of making a specific decision.

  I don't think that one is more valuable than the other:

  1. Writing notes while learning can improve understanding and retention.
  2. Having those notes available in the permanent external memory makes it possible to easily refresh the internal memory 🧠, when I have forgotten relevant details.
  3. In the moment of acute stress a shortlist helps me remember that I knew something in the first place.
• jameslongley

  10:19AM

  Yes.

  I find Sönke Ahrens' terminology useful. He distinguishes in How to take smart notes (2nd ed, 2022) three types of notes (Chapter 6):

  (…) it is crucial to distinguish clearly between three types of notes:
  1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two.
  2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either as literature notes in the reference system or written as if for print, in the slip-box.
  3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished.
  (…) One of the major reasons for not getting much writing or publishing done lies in the confusion of these categories.

  This distinction is a reason, why I wouldn't take project notes in a ZK.

  Instead of expanding a ZK to include project notes, I prefer to complement the ZK with project folders.

  I'm 100% with you on this - I just tend to take the hard edges distinction even further by having dedicated Scrivener projects external to the zettelkasten project.

  That's likely partially a manifestation of the tools in question (my limited experience with Obsidian indicated that you could have more distinct sub-spaces there than you can in a tool like Scrivener. That said, I feel like having search end up pulling from the combined pool of data is a form of 'contamination' (strong word I know) that my mind doesn't allow space for.

  In my Obsidian setup Zettels and projects live in the same space (vault). But this space is divided into distinct sub-spaces (folders).

  They also have a clear conceptual boundary.

  For example: In my project notes I love to add links to permanent notes. For me that's an important motivation to write permanent notes. They make knowledge accessible. But I do not add links to projects in my permanent notes, because they would break, when I delete the project notes.

  As a matter of interest - what's the heuristic for deciding that a given project note is a 'delete' rather than 'file'? For me it's a case of keeping what I think of as Reference/Project support in a totally different location (a PARA-structured Evernote account) and project folders find their way to the Archive stack once the project is finished or put on ice. I've been surprised on a number of occasions by the need to go back to and extract value from an archived project folder that I was tempted to consider done and no longer worth keeping.

  (…) I've started managing with a running log of time/date stamped interstitial journal style notes in the inspector/sidebar of zettel (my zettelkasten is in Scrivener). I find a lot of value in being able to refer back to what I was thinking X long ago. Are you referring to a similar practice of capturing date stamped reflections in the note body in some way?

  Yes and no. I do occasionally add timestamped comments to my notes, when I want to keep track of how a thought developed. I do write a journal for personal stuff.

  But I don't do interstitial journaling. It's the opposite of what my brain needs during a break. My brain needs mindless breaks, not mindful breaks. (Keywords: default mode network, niksen, daydreaming; the original Pomodoro technique gets it right.) And I don't like mixing everything in one log.

  Yeah, I should probably just refer to these notes as more the kind of time-stamped observations that fall under "doing the work" rather than "notes I jot down during a break" - I'm totally with you re: mindless breaks.

  This is pretty similar to what I've got. The question I'm asking myself is whether the value in these is in having created them more than it's generally in referring to them in the moment of making a specific decision.

  I don't think that one is more valuable than the other:

  1. Writing notes while learning can improve understanding and retention.
  2. Having those notes available in the permanent external memory makes it possible to easily refresh the internal memory 🧠, when I have forgotten relevant details.
  3. In the moment of acute stress a shortlist helps me remember that I knew something in the first place.

  Agreed - perhaps it's more a case of having sufficient meta-awareness to be aware of which form of value you're making use of in any given situation.
• Sascha

  11:56AM

  Have you ever created notes that function less like reference material and more like thinking tools (prompts, checklists, decision records, assumption maps, pre/post-mortems, etc.)?

  I think this question is the key to the overall topic:

  The Zettelkasten speaks the language of knowledge, project-/taskmanagement the language of action. That doesn't mean that there should be no task in the Zettelkasten or no information in project-/taskmanagement.

  Why would you create a checklist in your Zettelkasten? Let' me answer the question by a practical example:

  Each time, I create and publish a podcast episode, I learn something new. Each episode informs the next one. The tool are checklists, workflows, and templates.

  The learnings during each podcast episode creation generating during each episode feeds into the checklists, workflows, and templates which then will be the foundation of the next episode.

  So, it is project -> Zettelkasten -> project -> Zettelkasten etc.

  The question is best answered by intention. You might even create individual projects as use cases that you can draw on. A lot works if you are intentional.

  I am a Zettler
• Andy

  6:17PM

  There are many great observations above that I can identify with.

  @jameslongley said:

  @Andy perhaps a better way to phrase "moments where your system felt like it should help, but didn't" would be: "I had a decision to make/a sticky problem to think through and I found that I needed to do something in addition to working in my zettelkasten".

  For me that tends to be things like opening up a Scapple board to dump all of the loose thoughts onto a free-form canvas so I have the raw materials of the decision in front of me in a way I can reference (and explore possible connections between). Sometimes it's capturing a stream of consciousness reflection in a voice notes app. Other times it's as structured as using a decision journal template - which is something I've tended to do separate from the zettelkasten.

  As I think about what this looks like for me, it tends to involve changing the format of the content (from linear notes to a mind map for example).

  What comes to mind for me here, and may be helpful, is the analytical framework for aspects of personal knowledge bases (PKBs) from Davies et al. (2005) in this discussion (full citation in the footnote here): 1 Data model (1.1 Structural framework; 1.2 Knowledge elements; 1.3 Schema, or formal semantics), 2 User interface/views, 3 Software architecture. When you find some aspect of your PKB/ZK too limiting, you can ask yourself whether you need a different view (2) of the same data, or need some aspect of the data model (1) to change, etc. This is a more specific way of talking about "changing the format of the content".

  A Scapple board, for example, need not be something outside your ZK if you approach it with a particular structural framework or schema in mind. It could be a kind of structure note without clickable links. Clickable links are just a user-interface feature; people with analog Zettelkästen don't have clickable links!

  @jameslongley asked:

  Do you have an example of IBIS applied in your zettelkasten you could share or point me to in another of your comments here in the forum? I'd be keen to see how you implement it.

  I haven't shared examples because it's too personal, but a paragraph describing in general how I use it for life goals is in this comment from five years ago. In terms of David Allen's model of six levels of altitude for reviewing your life and work, that earlier comment is about the higher altitudes. IBIS or something similar can also be used at the lower altitudes, namely in specific projects like you and @harr were talking about above.

  @Sascha said:

  The Zettelkasten speaks the language of knowledge, project-/taskmanagement the language of action. That doesn't mean that there should be no task in the Zettelkasten or no information in project-/taskmanagement.

  I like this, and I think it works well if we substitute "inquiry" for "knowledge" too: "The Zettelkasten speaks the language of inquiry, project-/taskmanagement the language of action. That doesn't mean that there should be no task in the Zettelkasten or no inquiry in project-/taskmanagement."

  I'm reminded of something I said in the infamous discussion of Chris Rock about combining GTD with "deep inquiry":

  I consider GTD, for example, to be a brilliant workflow system, but it is completely lacking in "depth" in the sense just described because it neither emphasizes nor provides methods for questioning implicit, taken-for-granted systems of meanings/beliefs (or even unnoticed patterns in the environment). The part of GTD that is closest to "depth" is where it emphasizes reflection on higher-level goals and visions, but that is not the same as discovering and questioning implicit meanings/beliefs and building better ones. And there is usually no reason why GTD should emphasize depth, because deep inquiry usually does not "get things done" in business. But there are some problems that can't be solved (or even understood) without a method for deep inquiry and knowledge restructuring.