Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. December 19, 2023
This is about you! 🫵🏼
Swimming with Ideas
This is another installment of the What Are You Working On? thread. Please be courageous and add to this thread by telling us what is happening in and around your ZK journey. Join the community and enlighten us about your knowledge path trajectory. I do this for selfish reasons. It helps me clarify my goals and visualize my thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks an idea worth exploring. This is an invitation to you to up your participation in the discussion.
Ideas I'm exploring with my ZK:
- WikiLinks - how to format them, how to convert them from one format to another, why they are formatted the way they are.
- Working with the garage door open.
- How to get more than 3.8% of the zettelnauts who view this thread to post a quick response sharing their battles with note-taking. How's the ZK journey going for you?
- How the transience of thought relates to international deep, geo, and aerospace industries.
- The goals and structure of a revolving 'Continuous Review/Refactoring of Structure Notes"
Things I'm reading:
- Calvino, Italo. The path to the spiders' nests. 1947.
- Garmus, Bonnie. Lessons in chemistry. 2022.
- Parrish, Shane. Clear thinking: turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. 2023.
- Sencea and Gioia, Dana. Sentences from Seneca. 2023.
Music I'm listening to:
★★★★★
The "My rolling ten-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.
Let me know if you would like to discuss any of these notes.
My ten day zettel production
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
We’ll because I had to decide between keeping my Mac or change to windows and get the benefit of gaming with another suite of productivity tools, I had to stop using the archive and look for another solution.
I dug deep and wide but couldn’t find a good alternative for the archive and I also couldn’t justify saving money for 2 types of computers, one a Mac and the other one a Microsoft just because some apps I use are inside the Mac ecosystem while gaming is only possible in Windows computers.
I had to make a compromise and went with Widows. It’s not that I’m a hardcore gamer but I do like to play the occasional game one or two days a week for a couple of hours. I specially enjoy strategy games or other titles with rich history. While I avoid multiplayer games at all costs.
In this compromise I wasn’t able to find an alternative for the archive that satisfied me so I’m going to go full analog. I just ordered the antinet book, while reading content from Ryan Holiday and his commonplace book filled with index cards categorized by topic or project.
At the moment while the setup of my analog commonplace book/zettelkasten finishes I’m reading “Letters from a Stoic” which wasn’t a well researched purchase because the translator decided to omit a vast majority of letters, but well this one will have to do for now while I order another complete edition next month. I’m reading the book, just making some marks inside the pages of relevant paragraphs or sentences.
Once I finish the book I’ll grab another Leuchtturm notebook which I will title as “stoicism” and use it as my commonplace and star to take notes from the things I previously marked on the book, while adding my ideas and thoughts on the matter. By that time I hope my mini commonplace box of index cards is ready to go and then I’ll start to write again on the index cards what I previously annotated on my notebook.
It looks like a chore but repetition is the mother of learning and I still haven’t tested the process which I hope to refine in 2024. Who knows? Maybe I’ll launch a blog about what I learn in hopes to change the life of my countrymen and teach them something, where I live we desperately need more people with deeper values.
@Jvet Did you look at Zettlr? It is available on Windows. So is Obsidian.
@GeoEng51 I did but wasn’t happy with how it works. I can’t quite put my finger on the thing that bothers me. Still, even if I fail with the analog implementation of it, it will be fun.
I stay away from obsidian because I don’t like the complexity of it. I feel like I have to watch a dozen of YouTube videos before I actually understand the app.
Another big reason pulling me to windows is Excel. The app on Mac is kind of weak when you try to do more complex things
At the end of the year, I am preparing my personal annual review and conclusion on the basis of the digital paper collection.
My "Zettelwirtschaft" allows me to look at my records from different perspectives.
Corresponding reports are generated on the basis of metadata (date of creation, keywords, links...).
So that this annual project is not disturbed by technical questions, I will check my notes for formal completeness this week.
Between Christmas and New Year, the actual review follows
1) along the timeline: Monthly what was important and significant in retrospect, positive and negative
2) along my Feynmann topics:
Progress or regression?
does the topic, the question, currently still have significance? Also in 2024?
is something added or what can be deleted? (Less is more)
3) no good resolutions for the new year!!
The annual, written review is always humble towards big plans :-)
immer am Rand der Sammlerfalle
Interesting approach to an annual review. I'd love to hear more details. Review is paramount to the project of knowledge growth.
What kinds of reports do you generate? Which do you find the most motivating? I'd love to hear about any surprises uncovered by your reports.
Do you do other reviews other than monthly and years?
These are great questions.
I'm usually surprised by my accomplishments.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
@Will
These reports are only quantitative (number of links, text length, last edit). In other words, simple lists as a kind of note box controlling.
The biggest surprise this year was the sheer number of poorly linked notes on the topic of history from the year 2023.
Obviously, I kept making notes on one topic throughout the year - and then lost the thread due to more current everyday problems.
As a result, I am now (in January 2024) prioritising my work with the note box a little differently.
immer am Rand der Sammlerfalle
I'm interested in this. How did you narrow the report so you could tell the culprit was the "topic of history form the year 2023?" How did your report define "poorly linked?" I can tell what notes have one or no links. I hadn't considered that there might be a way to sort those scoundrels to see a tread. I can't define the quality of those links in a report, I have to investigate each link to determine its quality. When I do, I find the quality on a spectrum.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
@Will
Not systematically. In practice, when I use my card index as a reader, I find the entry point via the search and then via the links. (I can also filter specific MOCs on the topic in the search)
If I have enough time, I use this opportunity to complete formal and content-related deficits in the linked notes.
If the topic seems too confusing, a graphical overview of the topic generated with the help of Excalibrain often helps.
One consequence of the experience gained from the 2023 annual overview will be that I will get into the habit of checking the notes for formal errors every month.
immer am Rand der Sammlerfalle
@Will
Much simpler than it might sound.
With a query (Dataview) I leave a list with the fields: title, created, modified, text length, number inlinks, number outlinks
This list can be sorted by the individual fields in the reading view.
I focus on the extreme outliers. As a rule, the title already reminds me of the content of the note.
immer am Rand der Sammlerfalle
The accumulation of poorly linked notes on the subject of history in 2023 became conspicuous by a combination of creation data and titles. So not a clever algorithm but only the view of the title list from an unusual perspective. As a result, I have to revise my "Feynmann question" on the subject of history.
immer am Rand der Sammlerfalle
Here is a further bit of information regarding my weekly writing for Storyworth. Last week, the question was, "What have you learned in your life that you would like to pass on to future generations in your family?" That took much more than the average amount of effort expended each week. It would have taken even longer if not for my Zettelkasten, which had many entries that qualified as partial answers to this question and which could be incorporated into the overall post.
About 30 to 40% of my Zettelkasten is devoted to this general theme, either directly or indirectly. One might say that its usefulness was by design and not simply fortuitous, although there was a bit of the latter in the equation as well.