I have been stuck with the thought of; whether or not the people who utilize a zettelkasten still keep a journal to write about their everyday life, or whether they just use zettelkasten as a device for all of that.
@flin, I can only tell you what I do and try and explain the value I get from my process.
I am a journaler and a zettelnaut. They are two different domains or personas. My journal is about my perceptions of my world. My zettelkasten is my idea factory, where ideas are forged into knowledge.
There is a some bleed over between these domains. It is dealt with simple links.
I currently use Bear for journaling and The Archive for hosting my zettelkasten.
In The Archive, links to Bear look like this -
Investigate task serialization as opposed to incrementalism.
- bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id=BBBA98B8-EB3E-435C-80FB-D65B185B978C-16225-00006F516691134F
In Bear, links to The Archive look like this -
[Build and Maintain Friendships](thearchive://match/Build and Maintain Friendships 202209230722)
Will Simpson
The quality of our thinking is directly proportional to the quality of our reading. To think better, we must read better. - Rohan kestrelcreek.com
I am a journaler and a zettelnaut. They are two different domains or personas. My journal is about my perceptions of my world. My zettelkasten is my idea factory, where ideas are forged into knowledge.
Thank you for this. I’ve been wanting to have a journal but held back since I’m still currently trying to figure things out with my zettelkasten.
But reading this made me realise what the differences between the two are, and I am probably gonna use them both, based on how you categorized them.
@flin said:
I have been stuck with the thought of; whether or not the people who utilize a zettelkasten still keep a journal to write about their everyday life, or whether they just use zettelkasten as a device for all of that.
I personally don't journal anymore for myself other than for training or projects.
On journaling
The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)
I do not need to accumulate in a low-structured way because I have already built structures within my own Zettelkasten and have both the habits and the temperament that allows for longer periods of introspection and to happen to be at the desk with my Zettelkasten available so I can write down my thoughts directly as individual notes.
So, the act of journaling is a habit to give yourself garantueed access to reflection and the healing aspect of writing.
Journaling Within Your Zettelkasten
My recommendation is to journal within your Zettelkasten:
You create a Structure Note that just contains the links to the individual entries.
Each entry starts by creating the link first on the Structure Note to make sure that you'll have the timeline down and give your future self a canvas on which you can think about the meta of your journal (it gives you access to techniques like to creating episodes through section headlines and commentary for example)
You make sure to connect each entry to the rest of your ZK
a) After each entry you treat it as if it was a note. That means that you search for connections in your Zettelkasten and give your future self a plethora of link context (describing the nature of the connection within the note!).
b) You make time for regular sessions to make a) happen.
Henry David Thoreau kept both a commonplace book (essentially a traditional (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten in notebook form) and a separate writing journal where he did what most would consider typical 'journaling', but where he also tried out phrasing, writing, and other experimental work that would ultimately become part of his published written output. This may be a useful model for some. His journals ran to multiple volumes, but a good edited version with a nice introduction to some of his work and methods can be found in:
Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal: 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Original edition. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009.
Similarly Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary. Published posthumously on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.
One might have considered some of this part of his fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.
Samoyault, Tiphaine, and Jonathan Culler. Barthes: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown. 1st edition. Cambridge ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2017.
I keep a wholly separate section of one of my boxes as a journal/diary as well, but it's less significant and is ordered only by date with very sparse indexing and an almost non-existent amount of linking. I have a bit of @Sascha's practice going on there, though certainly not as deep as his excellent description. I would caution newcomers to the practice of ZK to be very conscious of what, how, and why they're integrating a journaling practice into their workflow so that they don't risk what I call "zettelkasten overreach". Guarding against this sort of overreach can very easily be seen in my separate/distinct "journal on index cards" versus Sascha's more explicitly thought out "journal within a zettelkasten".
One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. —Umberto Eco
One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.
I think it's important to differentiate between paper and electronic writing here. Looking back, I can see that my own personal history of electronic writing, as a person who was not enough of a programmer to write his own software, was very much shaped by what was possible with the mass-produced technology of the time. My first personal computer that I used for writing was an early Macintosh, circa 1990. (I had used earlier non-GUI computers for other purposes but not for writing.)
In my first years of electronic writing, I did my writing, including journaling, in long word-processor documents. I didn't know of any good alternative on the personal computers of the time, and it was pleasant enough. The user experience was NOT "a large blank sheet" nor "an index card". It was more like viewing a small part of a long scroll (early Mac screens were very small: 512 by 342 pixels or 0.175 megapixels). In that way, it was a very different writing experience from any paper form factor, not analogous to a letter-size paper sheet or an index card. It did not intimidate me at all, but letter-size paper never intimidated me either.
Although I was already creating web pages in 1994, I didn't start using more hypertextual software for my non-web-published writing until the 2000s, when many new apps became available for the new Mac OS X. Scrivener especially was the huge leap forward. That's the time period when the "data model" for my journaling and note-taking shifted out of the long scroll into a more granular personal knowledge base. So my writing practice changed according to what was possible with the "off-the-shelf" software of the time. For me, there was never any attempt to imitate an index card file, and I still don't find index cards to be a very close analogy for how my personal knowledge base works. (Yes, there is a vague analogy, but also very disanalogous aspects.)
@Edmund, you've done it again. You've inspired me to devote a couple of hours to sketching. I tried to emulate the freedom and looseness I love so much in your sketches.
My drawing is outside your league, but I might get there someday. I used Autodesk's Sketchbook on an iPad mini with an Apple Pencil.
Will Simpson
The quality of our thinking is directly proportional to the quality of our reading. To think better, we must read better. - Rohan kestrelcreek.com
Comments
@flin, I can only tell you what I do and try and explain the value I get from my process.
I am a journaler and a zettelnaut. They are two different domains or personas. My journal is about my perceptions of my world. My zettelkasten is my idea factory, where ideas are forged into knowledge.
There is a some bleed over between these domains. It is dealt with simple links.
I currently use Bear for journaling and The Archive for hosting my zettelkasten.
In The Archive, links to Bear look like this -
- bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id=BBBA98B8-EB3E-435C-80FB-D65B185B978C-16225-00006F516691134F
In Bear, links to The Archive look like this -
Will Simpson
The quality of our thinking is directly proportional to the quality of our reading. To think better, we must read better. - Rohan
kestrelcreek.com
Thank you for this. I’ve been wanting to have a journal but held back since I’m still currently trying to figure things out with my zettelkasten.
But reading this made me realise what the differences between the two are, and I am probably gonna use them both, based on how you categorized them.
I personally don't journal anymore for myself other than for training or projects.
On journaling
The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)
I do not need to accumulate in a low-structured way because I have already built structures within my own Zettelkasten and have both the habits and the temperament that allows for longer periods of introspection and to happen to be at the desk with my Zettelkasten available so I can write down my thoughts directly as individual notes.
So, the act of journaling is a habit to give yourself garantueed access to reflection and the healing aspect of writing.
Journaling Within Your Zettelkasten
My recommendation is to journal within your Zettelkasten:
I am a Zettler
Henry David Thoreau kept both a commonplace book (essentially a traditional (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten in notebook form) and a separate writing journal where he did what most would consider typical 'journaling', but where he also tried out phrasing, writing, and other experimental work that would ultimately become part of his published written output. This may be a useful model for some. His journals ran to multiple volumes, but a good edited version with a nice introduction to some of his work and methods can be found in:
Similarly Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary. Published posthumously on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.
One might have considered some of this part of his fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.
I keep a wholly separate section of one of my boxes as a journal/diary as well, but it's less significant and is ordered only by date with very sparse indexing and an almost non-existent amount of linking. I have a bit of @Sascha's practice going on there, though certainly not as deep as his excellent description. I would caution newcomers to the practice of ZK to be very conscious of what, how, and why they're integrating a journaling practice into their workflow so that they don't risk what I call "zettelkasten overreach". Guarding against this sort of overreach can very easily be seen in my separate/distinct "journal on index cards" versus Sascha's more explicitly thought out "journal within a zettelkasten".
One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich said:
I think it's important to differentiate between paper and electronic writing here. Looking back, I can see that my own personal history of electronic writing, as a person who was not enough of a programmer to write his own software, was very much shaped by what was possible with the mass-produced technology of the time. My first personal computer that I used for writing was an early Macintosh, circa 1990. (I had used earlier non-GUI computers for other purposes but not for writing.)
In my first years of electronic writing, I did my writing, including journaling, in long word-processor documents. I didn't know of any good alternative on the personal computers of the time, and it was pleasant enough. The user experience was NOT "a large blank sheet" nor "an index card". It was more like viewing a small part of a long scroll (early Mac screens were very small: 512 by 342 pixels or 0.175 megapixels). In that way, it was a very different writing experience from any paper form factor, not analogous to a letter-size paper sheet or an index card. It did not intimidate me at all, but letter-size paper never intimidated me either.
Although I was already creating web pages in 1994, I didn't start using more hypertextual software for my non-web-published writing until the 2000s, when many new apps became available for the new Mac OS X. Scrivener especially was the huge leap forward. That's the time period when the "data model" for my journaling and note-taking shifted out of the long scroll into a more granular personal knowledge base. So my writing practice changed according to what was possible with the "off-the-shelf" software of the time. For me, there was never any attempt to imitate an index card file, and I still don't find index cards to be a very close analogy for how my personal knowledge base works. (Yes, there is a vague analogy, but also very disanalogous aspects.)
My Zettelkasten is a Bullet Journal and my Bullet Journal is a Zettelkasten. More about: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2333/migration-from-bullet-journal-to-zettelkasten
To show it from an other perspective:
@Edmund, you've done it again. You've inspired me to devote a couple of hours to sketching. I tried to emulate the freedom and looseness I love so much in your sketches.
My drawing is outside your league, but I might get there someday. I used Autodesk's Sketchbook on an iPad mini with an Apple Pencil.
Will Simpson
The quality of our thinking is directly proportional to the quality of our reading. To think better, we must read better. - Rohan
kestrelcreek.com