Baker and Me -- Joe Pairman Uncovers Universal Principles

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Baker and Me -- Joe Pairman Uncovers Universal Principles

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Its emphasis is on connection and not mere collection of ideas.

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Will

Thanks for this pointer!
I'm encouraged to go slower and enrich my notes with thoughtful connections and descriptive titles. This will be a learning process for me.

Thanks, coach.
Will

joepairman

Hi Sascha, thank you for your reflections on my post, as well as all your other posts that helped me approach Zettelkasten.

Mark Baker's principles are for what I'd call "enablement" content; content that helps you do something. And, on the web, that means that each chunk of content must carry its own context with it (though it should be richly linked to other useful chunks). That struck me as very similar to your post https://zettelkasten.de/posts/how-to-write-notes-you-can-understand/ , which as you saw I compared to some of Baker's principles for writing useful pages.

But as you mention "universal principles", I do wonder to what extent the principles of creative writing might also be useful for knowledge creation, whether "PKM" or published enablement content. Joe Moran's book "First You Write a Sentence" certainly made me focus more on verbs than nouns in my writing. And his thoughts on the static, dull nature of noun-heavy prose also helped me rethink the way I link notes together. Now, I try to link more explicitly, not just saying "See…" but adding more specific verbs such as "contrasts with", "supports", or "exemplifies". This seems to help me traverse my notes more fluidly, even after time has passed.

Will

@joepairman, assume blog post. Thanks for the book recommendations. Both First You Write a Sentence and Every page is page one are on my to-read list.

@joepairman said in the blog post
(This sparked another mini-research project for me and I did come up with a useful way to “infotype” links – but more of that in a future blog post.)

What a tease! "Infotype Links" Not sure what you are referring to but am dying to find out.

@joepairman said in the blog post
Perhaps part of the problem was that newer #note-taking tools made it very easy to create new notes and even treat fragments of notes as linkable objects in themselves. Easy is good in general, but not if it helps you create too much content without pausing to lay tracks for your future self.

This tickles my mind, I feel a quiver in the 'force', the Jedi hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. I want to connect this with the learning notion that material should be simple but not too simple as one benefits from the struggle to understand the material as long as the struggle is surmountable. Some struggle is a positive thing and can solidify knowledge. Some apps make us sloppy because they prioritize ease of use over creative knowledge building. And there is all the designed-in attention-stealing of these apps too. Easy can and usually does make us lazy. [Source needed.]