What are you working on this week? (2020-06-15 to 2020-06-21)

henrikenggaard

The second edition of the weekly thread. Share your progress and work, big or small.

Also, remember that sometimes we all need weeks where we collect our thoughts and gain new perspectives on ourselves

---

I handed in my "final" draft of my paper, which felt great. When I did the first draft I had a lot confidence, but humbling as the editing process might be, it has definitely improved the quality of the work.

This week I'll turn to the exciting part: exploring loose ends and ideas which popped up the past month. I have a collection of "question"-zettels and "research direction"-zettels, which I will try to find some answers to.

Oh... and probably another revision of paper

ctietze

Also, remember that sometimes we all need weeks where we collect our thoughts and gain new perspectives on ourselves

I love that this starts with an inspirational quote for the week!

---

I was invited on a "Survival Workshop" over the weekend. It was way less stressful and more laid-back than I had imagined, but there's a lot of interesting topics that I want to process now. Like some basic herbology (I love the German term Kräuterkunde so much more ) for which my Zettelkasten has no department, yet.

A lot of the simple tricks we practiced are short one-liners when written down, like "when you lie in a hammock, lie diagonally", so I guess that'll go into a collection of tips or something. The problem with the hammock example is I didn't understand what that meant until we did a demonstration setup (a hammock is fixed between two trees in a straight line, so how is there a diagonal? Turns out I didn't know what real hammocks look like, and how to use them: see here for details)

That's what I plan to do in my free time this week, when I'm not programming. In the programming department, I'll work on notes about app localization processes.

henrikenggaard

@ctietze said:
I love that this starts with an inspirational quote for the week!

Well, I'm glad I can inspire I just wanted to remind everybody that it is okay to "not work" on something or to be "unproductive". Focusing too much on productivity ain't no good

avggeek

Well I commented in the older thread, but I'll mention it here anyway.

I just published a script that does the conversion to regular markdown links to GitHub : https://github.com/balaji-dutt/zettel-link-rewriter. It's still missing a README which I will add soon but I'm pretty sure it works

This week's WAYWOW is to work on the next script that converts wikilinks into Hugo links and can extract references from Pandoc as well. I actually want to start getting back to reading and making notes in my ZK and blogging about some of the tech stuff I've learnt, both of which have fallen by the wayside as I got to grips with actually programming in Python.

PS: @ctietze filed an issue asking for an enhancement to my script, but my limited python-fu is failing me. If there are any python-istas here, please let me know!

GBC

I am completing my exams this week. The act of pulling out information that I studied for earlier in the year is clarifying my thinking about the end goal for note taking and how to refine the process. Lots to think about.

Once my exam is out the way, I shall move onto studying for next years exams (metaphysics, and pre Socratic Greeks) so will be setting up a new ZK for that study. I'm currently trying to decide whether to have one big ZK for life notes and study, or whether to keep them separate. As I plan to come back from Obsidian to TA, keeping them together means I don't have worry about scripts needing to work on different folders.

Since I'm out of work and this is not a position I want to be in, I shall also be doing some work related studying and skill enhancement. I might want to do some blog posts on some of these areas, so using ZK might be appropriate.

Finally, if time allows, I'm keen to explore my other interests of social economy and how society works.

Will

Wednesday, I'm headed backpacking into the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness for 4 or 5 days. I'll be collecting observations and writing fragments, testing my metal, and communing with the trees.

GeoEng51

@GBC said:
I'm currently trying to decide whether to have one big ZK for life notes and study, or whether to keep them separate. As I plan to come back from Obsidian to TA, keeping them together means I don't have worry about scripts needing to work on different folders.

I've wondered about that, as well. I'm tempted to have server ZK, but every time I think about how that might work, I convince myself to keep everything in one ZK. Splitting them up removes the opportunity for cross-links, which at least potentially could enrich our thinking. Being a newbie, I don't have much experience on which to base that idea, but that's where I've got to for now.

Can you share how you've used Obsidan? I've downloaded but barely looked at it. I thought it might be helpful once in a while as a "skin" to examine at all the notes in my ZK and see if there are connections that I hadn't noticed. That's a poorly formulated idea, as I have almost no knowledge or experience with Obsidian.

GBC

@GeoEng51 said:
Splitting them up removes the opportunity for cross-links, which at least potentially could enrich our thinking.

I agree. At the same time, however, my studies at this stage are really quite separate from anything else I'm doing and mentally I just like them to be separate. I don't yet have a solid tagging or retrieval process so I want to make sure I have that in place before I put study notes in with other stuff. I'm also still playing with the art of study notes, which I find to be a different beast to thoughts arising from other reading. So, my aim is to have them together, but I don't think I'm ready for it yet.

Can you share how you've used Obsidan? I've downloaded but barely looked at it. I thought it might be helpful once in a while as a "skin" to examine at all the notes in my ZK and see if there are connections that I hadn't noticed. That's a poorly formulated idea, as I have almost no knowledge or experience with Obsidian.

I've simply been using it an alternative to TA. I find the UI easier on the eye and it has some stuff built in that TA needs scripts for (backlinks, autocompletion of links, tag list), and as long as I have notes in different folders then scripts that point to specify folders are a bit problematic, mainly because I am not at all skilled with scripts. The interface / interaction is less of a learning curve., and if you rename a note, all the links update.

Also, TA benefits from being driven by the keyboard and I've not quite got that cracked as yet - I constantly find myself creating new notes when searching, for example. Since I had exams coming up, it was just easier to work in a more comfortable environment.

But whilst I feel obsidian has got me through a learning curve in taking notes, I think TA is better in the long term - the search is much better, for a start. I think if I'm going to stick with ZK, TA is the way I want to go - I just need to get more comfortable with the interface.

I think in terms of identifying patterns, a better route is through TA search. I've been drawn to how Will sets up his notes, particular the phrases at the bottom - I can see that working for me and I'm going to adopt that.

matti

I actually managed to do some processing of Soziale Systeme in the exhaustive style I mentioned last week. I didn't progress a lot in terms of pages, but I spent some quality time with Luhmann's term "Welt". I also learned something about Luhmann's term "Reality", by reading and processing an article by Kaldeway about this.

At work I continue to write down stuff that comes up, but I try to write it down immediately, instead of saving open tabs to be processed later.

Also my consolidation project hopefully will progress further. The weekend and the three days after will be spent in Lapland hiking and visiting national parks.

@ctietze Fun fact: Karl Ludwig Willdenow's (Teacher of Alexander von Humboldt) Grundriß der Kräuterkunde was one of the first plant geographical books.

@GBC, @GeoEng51 IMHO having one ZK is better for the reasons you already stated, mainly the serendipitous effect this tends to have. If you need an empty plane to work, I would suggest to try to at least incorporate the Zettel into the main ZK at some point. In Evernote you could simply create a new Notebook to keep them separate for as long as this would be needed but still be able to link to them, etc. Moving them around within Evernote (from one notebook to the next) would also not break any links created. But you seem to use other apps. Nonetheless: Maybe something like this is available to you?

Phil

Like @Will, heading into nature, in my case Yellow Springs, Ohio. It's not backcountry but will be a needed break from screens.

Nick

Continuing my reading of Too Much to Know and thinking about the core functions of note taking and how they play out across time.

Then I'm also working on my CSS themes that I maintain for Obsidian app. Which is a curse because I don't really want to spend time maintaining them but I'm a stickler for visual design so I like to have things a certain way.

GeoEng51

Reading "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sonke Ahrens.

Massimo_Curatella

Reading for the second time "How To Take Smart Notes". I am listening to it while taking long walks. I still find new things.

Nick

@VDL1516 yes by Ann Blair. I'm enjoying it a lot because it is interesting. Although it isn't structured in the way I wish it was, so it makes fitting it together a bit difficult for my notes. Also I'm struggling a bit with what is worth taking notes on vs. not, getting the sense that I'm taking too many useless notes from it.

VDL1516

@Nick thank you. Unfortunately that is a problem I encounter often, especially when learning something new. A good method that I need to implement more is while reading when I make a mark I feel personally for me that is important to identify why it was marked, in the moment. Using identifiers with a quick letter suck as Q for quote or FR for further research can help later when going back through. I don’t do this enough and when I do it is quick and brief as I do not want to interrupt reading flow.

Sascha

Working a lot on client stuff. In the process, quite some Zettel and other texts get written for my project on health and fitness. Merely yesterday, I marked 8 Zettel (7 from yesterday 1 older) with ##publish which means that they are getting some polish and will be shortish blog posts. But also quite some words (yesterday 5600) got written for one of my book on movement and mobility.

Will

A lot off-topic. But I worked on my creative non-fiction writing skills during this trip and am currently this week looking to process what I can from my trail notes into my Zettelkasten.

@ctietze said:
I was invited on a "Survival Workshop" over the weekend. It was way less stressful and more laid-back than I had imagined, but there's a lot of interesting topics that I want to process now. Like some basic herbology (I love the German term Kräuterkunde so much more ) for which my Zettelkasten has no department, yet.

A lot of the simple tricks we practiced are short one-liners when written down, like "when you lie in a hammock, lie diagonally", so I guess that'll go into a collection of tips or something. The problem with the hammock example is I didn't understand what that meant until we did a demonstration setup (a hammock is fixed between two trees in a straight line, so how is there a diagonal? Turns out I didn't know what real hammocks look like, and how to use them: see here for details)

---

I'm just back from my own private "Survival Workshop" this last weekend 2020/06/20 and thought of your adventures with a hammock. I've been a hammock camper for five years now and I understand the importance of the diagonal lay and am intimate with whoopie slings. Here are a couple of pictures of my latest adventure in the Selway/Bitterroot Wilderness in Northern Idaho.