Journal and zettelkasten.

flin

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.

Will

@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)

flin

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.

Sascha

@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:

1. You create a Structure Note that just contains the links to the individual entries.
2. 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)
3. 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.

chrisaldrich

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.

• Barthes, Roland. Mourning Diary. Macmillan, 2010. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533113/mourningdiary.
• Budelis, Kristina. “Barthes’s Hand.” The New Yorker, September 8, 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/barthess-hand.
• 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.

Andy

@chrisaldrich said:

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

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:

Will

@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.

Edmund

Thank you @Will . I’m honored to get a fresh burger just from your kitchen in Idaho. It is fun to learn how to make succulent knowledge burgers with small variations of ingredients. Sharing receipts for the classic burger is my all time BBQ favourite!

And I still have some questions:

• Is your burger now included in a permanent note of your Zettelkasten?
• What about your key method “Reading”? What may be the best book to start with?

ZettelDistraction

Here's mine.

Sascha

Your passionate pessimism is perhaps the most reliable thing in my online life @ZettelDistraction

ZettelDistraction

@Sascha said:
Your passionate pessimism is perhaps the most reliable thing in my online life @ZettelDistraction

Thank you, though I think the enshittification of Internet platforms is even more reliable.

Edmund

@ZettelDistraction said:
Here's mine.

Very delicious. Thank you for sharing. And it reminds me what was missing in my burger recipe: the cheese and the sausage. The most important stuff for thinking ;-)

Tell me more about your incredience “Rule of Three”. Normally, the rule of threes contains the following:

• You can survive three minutes without breathable air unconsciousness, or in icy water.
• You can survive three hours in a harsh environment (extreme heat or cold).
• You can survive three days without drinkable water.
• You can survive three weeks without food.
• You can survive three month without …
• Three years without …

How many without Zettelkasten?

ZettelDistraction

@Edmund said:

@ZettelDistraction said:
Here's mine.

Very delicious. Thank you for sharing. And it reminds me what was missing in my burger recipe: the cheese and the sausage. The most important stuff for thinking ;-)

Thank you. Cheese is indispensable. Sausage is unavoidable (I have Crohn's and cannot ingest sausage without feeling somewhat ill after eating it).

Tell me more about your incredience “Rule of Three”. Normally, the rule of threes contains the following:

• You can survive three minutes without breathable air unconsciousness, or in icy water.
• You can survive three hours in a harsh environment (extreme heat or cold).

...

How many without Zettelkasten?

As for the rule of threes in survival, I couldn't last three seconds without my Zettelkasten. The rule of threes, in my understanding, refers to triads, groups of three related but distinguishable items. There is the rule of threes in writing and the rule of thirds in aesthetics.

Mihir Kumar Chakraborty and Soma Dutta in "Theory of Graded Consequence (Logic in Asia: Studia Logica Library)" defend the claim that three levels of language are inherent in logic: the object-language (level 0), the meta-language (level 1), and the meta-meta-language (level 2). By analogy with this, there are three levels of cognition needed:

1. while the Zettelkasten is on the rails;
2. to keep it from going off the rails;
3. when it touches the third rail;

namely,

1. cognition;
2. metacognition; and,
3. meta-metacognition.

And in my remarks to @Will elsewhere about my nothing burger of a ZK, I mentioned my lack of @Will power concerning:

1. reading with pen and paper;
2. learning as much as I can; and,
3. improving by starting over, starting over, starting over.

Following the Rule of Threes, I wrote three triads above. I try to complete projects three days, three hours, and three seconds in advance. I work on three projects in parallel at a time, for example:

1. LoRa 902-928 MHz software-defined radio project under Gnu Radio on the RTL-SDR;
2. A mathematics super-project, which consists of three subprojects; and,
3. a drawing project.

My Zettel IDs decompose into 1- the keyword, 2- the optional Folgezettel and a non-optional separator, and 3- the timestamp. I alternate between three editors:

1. Zettlr;
2. Obsidian; and
3. VSCode.

My Zettelkasten seems to be concentrated around three areas:

1. Computing;
2. Amateur Radio; and,
3. Mathematics.

Now there are three more triads in this numerological scheme. Perhaps there is no scientific basis for the numerology of the Rule of Three. But science doesn't answer all the questions one could ask. Whatever the attraction of the Rule of Three, I invariably forget at least one out of the three if I remember the other two. This is where the Zettelkasten comes in. At some point, I will read The Questions of King Milinda, which is a Duty to Self. And that leads to three other areas that grow more slowly in my Zettelkasten than the others, perhaps because they are the most important for becoming human--an aspiration:

1. Humanities;
2. Philosophy and Religion;
3. Foreign Language.

In desperation, we aspire
to be human. Yea, to Humanity!
-- The Benediction of the Mutations

AWomanThinking

My my my, all of these burgers. I am not in front of a device with adequate sketching capabilities, so I will have to rely on text.

Personally, I do journal. A lot. On good paper. With fountain pens.*

My journal-writing serves as a rough draft of my thoughts. I treat it the same way I do things I've read - I'll pull highlights and feedback into my ZK, but dumping the whole thing in en masse, my grumblings about colleagues along with my actual thoughts about how to lead a group, it would not be useful. And I have always found that the way I write with a pen in my hand is different from the way I write digitally - the wording and tone are different. So it's worth it to me that my first draft of everything be handwritten.

I've been journaling at least as long as I've been carting what wants to be a ZK from one tool to another. Journaling serves a second purpose, in giving me space to work through challenges that don't expect to ever need to produce product from.

• And yes, I do currently have ink all over my fingers from a pen that's not sealing properly, how did you know?

Edmund

@ZettelDistraction said:
My Zettelkasten seems to be concentrated around three areas:

1. Computing;
2. Amateur Radio; and,
3. Mathematics.

And that leads to three other areas that grow more slowly in my Zettelkasten than the others,
perhaps because they are the most important for becoming human--an aspiration:

1. Humanities;
2. Philosophy and Religion;
3. Foreign Language.

Thank you for inspiring. And it takes me more than 3 minutes to summarize some of my „Rules of Three“ for my Zettelkasten:

3x3 Rules of Three

• 3 connections per note
• 3 tags per note

• 3 sentences to summarize idea

• 3 main types of notes - note, sketchnote, structure

• 3 main templates - note, sketchnote, structure

• 3 main themes - sketchnotes, Zettelkasten, datastory

• 3 main targets for output - book, LinkedIn posts, forum posts

• 3 main chart-types - bar-chart, venn-chart, doughnut-chart
• 3 step process - collect, connect, combine

And you are right, it‘s also a great way for summarizing all these crazy thoughts in my head and my Zettelkasten. Thinking made easy. - Let us take three more month. Will there be a visible change in our rules? I‘ll put a reminder to my bullet journal.