Zettelkasten Forum


What are you working on this week (2021-01-18 - 2021-01-24)?

Feels like the new year has found its rhythm in my work and academics. Projects and workloads are through easing into the year, and are moving forward full steam ahead. Does it feel that way to you, too?

This week I'm working on:

  • Finding my sea legs in the most challenging course I've yet had in my PhD program
  • Transforming my Kindle book highlights into amuse bouches with which to delight and fatten my ZK. (Worried about this recent trend of highlighting and telling myself I'll go back and Zettel it. Time to nip that in the bud!)
  • Prepare dissertation critique for my research course
  • All the usual school activities, posts, and papers for the week
  • This one should be interesting - take a stab at drawing / mapping out the innovation culture in my organization, to help understand our current state for that initiative I'm heading at work
  • The usual work stuff
  • Staying sane and healthy through one more political milestone week for the United States - inauguration week
  • Seeing if I can't get that Archive ZK tag macro to show me my tag orphans for consolidation

What are you working on?

Comments

  • edited January 2021

    @jeannelking said:
    Feels like the new year has found its rhythm in my work and academics. Projects and workloads are through easing into the year, and are moving forward full steam ahead. Does it feel that way to you, too?

    This week I'm working on:

    • Seeing if I can't get that Archive ZK tag macro to show me my tag orphans for consolidation

    Here is a little command-line tool that creates a zettel with links to all the notes that are tag orphans. It prints a line at the bottom of the list stating how many notes are orphaned.
    293 202101181200 Zettel without tags.md

    Not very fancy. It will sort the zettel by date oldest at top newest at the bottom. But quick and after a while, you can rerun it and it will update the note with all the new orphans and remove those that have found homes.
    cd to-your-archive-directory
    egrep -L '^#\w| #\w' *.md | sed -E -e 's/.[^.]*$//' -e 's!^([0-9]+)[[:space:]-]+(.+)!\2 [[\1]]!'> "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md"; wc -l "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md" >> "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md"

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • Working on a paper -- but the data isn't really looking too promising :disappointed: Life on the cutting-edge!

    As a leisure activity I am making a little "digital garden" for my reading efforts (free time reading that is). I wanted to have something I could control and tailor to my interests, so I'm enjoying just playing around with the presentation and possibilities.

    I'm shooting for something nostalgic of the early personal homepages :smile:

  • edited January 2021
    • moving my task management system back to Omifocus after a nice (read: flexible) but in the end overwhelming (read: too many tasks and projects; always the question of one single file or multiple files/one per project) experience with TaskPaper
    • continuing papers
    • preparing the last classes in this semester (semester here ends in February)
    • continuing research on concepts of future
    • dissertation preparation
    • introducing literature notes as structure notes back into my Zettelkasten (and then integrating the resulting Zettels into other structure notes) → until now it works great!
    1. This week, I'll be swimming with the sharks. My literature of the Pacific Northwest seminar gets into full swing via zoom.
    2. Exploring different mail apps. I'm trying to free myself from Google's clutches.
    3. Continue testing The Archive b172.

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

    • I've this week to work on my projects, so I'm making progress towards shipping a real The Archive update, soon.
    • I managed to publish updates to 2 of my other apps to iron out some minor kinks. But not much time for something big.
    • Eeeeeeemails. My setup consists of Emacs as the mail reader + notmuch as the indexer. I set up parts of a workflow that sounded nice to filter through inbox items and eventually delete very old email, but I didn't commit to stick to it while I tested the setup. (I never used a command line email storage and didn't quite trust this thing.)
    • Setup of our new local server/NAS. Currently testing Time Machine backups with it. Up next will be a cloud storage replacement so we can move away from Dropbox. Then federation, with friends having similar boxes.

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

    • Weekly readings for uni classes for my degree
    • As a New Year/pandemic time resolution, I'm re-learning German (using Drops, Duolingo, and eventually Deutsche Welle).
    • Continuing the writing/research of my book manuscript
    • Starting my TA post at the university; ideally also working on internship applications

    I'm pleased that the first three of these are my "Big Goals" for the year, so steady, focused progress on each is important. The final one helps to maintain the Big Goals, since a degree, career change, new skills, and proof of scholarship (the book) all tie in with employment somehow.

  • @Will said:
    1. This week, I'll be swimming with the sharks. My literature of the Pacific Northwest seminar gets into full swing via zoom.

    Hope that goes well for you, Will.

    1. Exploring different mail apps. I'm trying to free myself from Google's clutches.

    I'm trying out "Hey" (from Basecamp), which I'm liking quite a bit.

    https://hey.com/

    I also use Proton mail when I want a really secure solution.

    https://protonmail.com/

    Either might work for you. Proton mail uses normal folders and tags for storing and categorizing e-mail. Hey uses a different approach, which I'm actually starting to really like.

    • Started listening to "Dune" Audiobook. I've been wanting to read that book for ages. The voice acting is really good.

    • I'd like to create zettels out of my writing streak. It something so obvious and so easy to think about but I am challenged by the lack of time and the constant diversity of topics.

    • I will try to use my ZK to generate at least one week's worth of post ideas.

    • I will write the first draft of a possible tutorial/course out of my daily publishing experience. I'm receiving more than one signal making me understand that there's a lot of people wanting to write and publish lost in the process of how to start and how to build a daily habit.

    • I need to walk at least 40Km by January to keep the pace of 100KM per month. It has been a slow beginning of the year.

  • edited January 2021

    @Will said:
    2. Exploring different mail apps. I'm trying to free myself from Google's clutches.

    Can totally recommend hosting your own email on your domain. You have a blog and domain already, so getting started should be simple!

    I didn't want to bug my web admin about spam protection too much -- not that I got that much spam on my personal email account for some reason. But I use https://fastmail.com for my @christiantietze.de addresses to handle that stuff for me, and a less tech-savvy friend of mine transitioned to his own personal email account via fastmail.com, too, and is super happy about this.

    Using FastMail as an app: the interface is like classic gmail, so it is really fast, unlike modern gmail. IMAP works great, so having email on multiple devices is no problem.

    I use the feature to create email addresses on-the-fly when signing up with web services, useful for finding out who leaked your email and to create filter rules, e.g. fishywebsite.com@me.christiantietze.de, but that's a fringe feature I guess

    -- In case anybody wants to sign up with fastmail.com and reduce my monthly bill by a cent or two, I have a referral link :)

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • edited January 2021

    Hi everyone, I am new and this is my first post :blush:

    • Reading Designing your life and did the Lifeview Reflection exercise. This, along with Workview Reflection exercise aims to provide a compass to career navigation.
    • Reading The body keep the score to learn about how trauma affect people's brains. The book tells interesting stories, which I had some troubles taking notes on since some arguments are intertwined in the narratives. I realized many books on decision making, neuroscience, strategic insights converge on the 2-system, split-brain model, intelligent memory model of the brain.
    • Working on an email campaign to recruit participants for user research for a product in my company. Conversion is pretty low, but a small number of interviews are valuable enough.
    • Reading Job to be done playbook and synthesize a JTBD Map of Content. I have read up a lot of JTBD, but only until this week did I begin to put many pieces into proper perspective.

    I use Obsidian, and don't follow Zettelkasten strictly but do embrace writing evergreen notes.

  • @Massimo_Curatella said:

    • I need to walk at least 40Km by January to keep the pace of 100KM per month. It has been a slow beginning of the year.

    Good goal! I have a similar one. How are you tracking? I’ve use a couple of different apps on my iPhone - Walkmeter and Track-kit. Track-kit has access to some really nice maps of hiking trails. They both record all the stats about your walk (including heart rate, if you have something that monitors it). That can all be exported as a gpx or kml file (or other formats). I find it satisfying to review various routes and stats at the end of each week.

  • @GeoEng51 said:

    @Massimo_Curatella said:

    • I need to walk at least 40Km by January to keep the pace of 100KM per month. It has been a slow beginning of the year.

    Good goal! I have a similar one. How are you tracking? I’ve use a couple of different apps on my iPhone - Walkmeter and Track-kit. Track-kit has access to some really nice maps of hiking trails. They both record all the stats about your walk (including heart rate, if you have something that monitors it). That can all be exported as a gpx or kml file (or other formats). I find it satisfying to review various routes and stats at the end of each week.

    Google Fit does everything. I don't track anything. I just let it work.

  • @Massimo_Curatella Yes, that is an option. I tend to be less trustful of the Google universe; my life would be simpler if I was less paranoid.

  • @GeoEng51 said:
    @Massimo_Curatella Yes, that is an option. I tend to be less trustful of the Google universe; my life would be simpler if I was less paranoid.

    I can see what you mean but I don't think we can escape the system. At this point, better to have some benefits!

  • @Massimo_Curatella said:
    I can see what you mean but I don't think we can escape the system. At this point, better to have some benefits!

    I couldn't disagree more, but not in this discussion, given all the options that are available :)

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • @ctietze said:

    @Massimo_Curatella said:
    I can see what you mean but I don't think we can escape the system. At this point, better to have some benefits!

    I couldn't disagree more, but not in this discussion, given all the options that are available :)

    I like it when you disagree. Let's disagree properly, please, I'd like to learn.

  • @Will said:
    Here is a little command-line tool that creates a zettel with links to all the notes that are tag orphans. It prints a line at the bottom of the list stating how many notes are orphaned.
    293 202101181200 Zettel without tags.md


    Not very fancy. It will sort the zettel by date oldest at top newest at the bottom. But quick and after a while, you can rerun it and it will update the note with all the new orphans and remove those that have found homes.
    cd to-your-archive-directory
    egrep -L '^#\w| #\w' *.md | sed -E -e 's/.[^.]*$//' -e 's!^([0-9]+)[[:space:]-]+(.+)!\2 [[\1]]!'> "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md"; wc -l "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md" >> "202101181200 Zettel without tags.md"

    Thanks, @Will! That's amazing!

  • Last minute addition: I'm now also preparing a submission for speaking at a conference!

  • I am working on my lightweight markup language alternative to Markdown, as Markdown is great for simple notes, but a poor fit when you want embed more complex information in your notes. I want my Personal Information Management and Zettelkasten in one system, yet still being easy enough to write and view in just plain text. At the moment I am making sure the language will have good support in editors (highlighting, automatic formatting, autocomplete, etc.).

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