My life as a craftsperson

ctietze

I already have a blog post to introduce myself. But well.

I consider myself a craftsman in a very general sense. I like making things. That's part of why I enjoy programming. I also maintain a local group of people who want to improve their drawing skills. I always wanted to become a writer from an early age. Crafting things from wood makes me happy. You see, I don't really care about the medium if it's about happiness; but not everything in life is about personal happiness in the sense of feeling joy. I also want to be useful. So programming and writing it is for now.

Figuring out how life works brought me to philosophy. (Studying philosophy at university in turn forced me to get to know Sascha, by the way.) Before graduating from school, I was already into personal productivity techniques because I felt I didn't know how to do things properly. So I read books like Getting Things Done; and books about how to learn and how to read. I was once subscribed to a weekly newspaper because I found grown-ups read the newspaper and know about politics and stuff, so I began to emulate their behavior in order to be a grown-up myself one day. The notion of a "Zettelkasten" was introduced to me in the "culture" section of this newspaper (there were a couple of articles about Arno Schmidt, Niklas Luhmann, Jean Paul, and their respective Zettelkasten archives over the years). At university, I dived deeper into the practice of feeding my Zettelkasten with information.

And so here I am: after years of experimentation, reading productivity books, and working as a student advisor at university, I now write for one of the best websites for knowledge management on the whole web

I don't have a job since March anymore, so I'm a full indie programmer right now. Like the heroes from my late youth! Fortunately for the Zettelkasten project, Sascha's work is mostly knowledge work and less crafting, so he gains far more experience points for his Zettelkasten skill than I do in my meagre spare time. That's very valuable to push the project forward. In the meantime, I'm creating software to make everybody's lives better, hopefully. And in the course of creating this software, I'm taking notes on programming techniques and theories and publish a book about software development every now and then. Thanks, my dear Zettelkasten, for having my back!

tobias

Hey Christian,

that's a cool introduction I like your approach to consider yourself a craftsman. Have you read Cal Newports "So good the can't ignore you"? I read it recently and found it very interesting (although I'm very sceptical about his economic metaphors and concepts like "career capital" due to my "political education and socialisation" when I was young and suggestible)

ctietze

I didn't, but @Sascha did a couple months ago and kept me updated about the topic.

I guess you're asking because Cal suggests you become an expert in 1 thing instead of spreading yourself thin over many things, and because my craftsman thing is a unifying principle for the different activities I enjoy. A unifying principle does help make sense in life. The craftsman-metaphor helped me to not feel torn so much.

Similarly, the kind of programming projects I tackle is closely tied to me describing myself as a scholar of sorts. I create software to make scholarly work / knowledge work easier, and I enjoy writing and increasing project-based knowledge, so I'm also serving myself with the software. Bringing this more closely together further reduced the feeling of fragmentation and thus the sensation of stress.

ctietze

I wanted to update my intro with a rough timeline after I read @Taylor's intro here: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/982/no-longer-lurking

(split up because it's too long for 1 post)

~2008: My first Zettel: duplicate and change instead of update

The oldest note with an actual Zettel ID that I have is called 2008-09-07_0419_T1-2_Lauf 4x pro Woche (lit. 2008-09-07_0419_T1-2_Run 4x a week)-- it's a "self programming" note with instructions to myself with regard to running exercises.

It is part of a couple of notes of early September 2008 where I laid out my plans for living a conscious life. I came right out of a voluntary extension of mandatory military service and had just started studying at University.

The list of "goals and stuff" (2008-09-07_0440_INDEX_Ziele und Pläne) used to be very intimate, now I don't mind sharing it, especially since 98% of y'all can't read German anyway

It's a structured list of action foci (educate yourself, get fit), model/mission (become a round character, let your family be holy), and objectives like learning an instrument.

At the bottom, you see I updated this list at 2009-12-01_0531. Some things were added, some replaced/updated. Back then I tried to duplicate notes and work on the dupes instead of changing the originals. I wanted immutable notes. That resulted in a lot of redundancy, so I dropped the habit eventually. It's a pain. Don't do it at home if your software doesn't do it for you. Heck, use git or another version control system if you really think you want to keep a history. (I bet you don't, in the end )

ctietze

~2010: My abandoned notes, and Kant

When I read stuff by Immanuel Kant, which, for me back in the day, was the pinnacle of hard-to-understand writing in my mother's tongue, I took meticulous notes on paper. Most of them are still on index cards, tied together, meant as a reading companion for the book. It's fun to interact with them, but I have absolutely no desire to ever transcribe them.

Paper is great. I miss working with paper. It just isn't useful for the stuff I really do, sorry. Still I like to play with the book and the index cards every couple of years or so.

A more recent variant of the reading notes are part of a Structure Zettel that tries to 1:1 replicate the book, Critique of Pure Reason. This "book overview note" got updated some time in the past decade; the ID originally contained dashes and underscores like the one I showed above, and it originally was still an immutable Zettel, so I had 2 or 3 versions lying around that I combined some 5 years ago or so.

It's called 201008261307 Überblick Kant -- Kritik der reinen Vernunft and looks like this:

More doesn't fit, sorry

With regard to the recent revival of Folgezettel vs Structure Zettel, I today notice that I prepended a list of things outside the book's table of contents: it's a list of central concept notes, which are themselves prototypical Structure Zettel (I didn't know about these in 2010). They are also kind of "programming" me for reading Kant. "Sprachgebrauch" is roughly "linguistic usage", and I try to explain to myself how Kant (mis)used words in this text, and others.

Why is this so interesting to me now? Because I annotated a topical structure with stuff that's uniquely useful for me to understand whatever follows. That's a pragmatic decision. It breaks with the rest of the structure. that's why I prepend it below a level-1 heading at the top of the note.

Sprachgebrauch: <!-- (~"linguistic usage" of phrases and words) -->

*   [Bedingung der Möglichkeit][§2010-09-06_1019]
*   [Vorstellen][§2010-08-30_0926]
*   [Ding an sich (physisch)][§2010-09-01_1118]
*   [Gegenstand geben/denken][§2010-09-02_1017]

Übersichten:  <!-- (these are structure notes) -->

*   [Anschauung][§201009301714]
*   [Erkenntnis][§201009301747]
*   [Kategorien][§201009301617]

2010 was also the year I learned to program on the Mac, so I could change the source of Notational Velocity and add MultiMarkdown highlighting to it, which eventually, in a combination with David Halter's fork that added a sidebar to NV, led to nvALT by Brett Terpstra and David Halter. I jumped on the nvALT bandwagon quickly afterwards. And I vowed to never use NV's native tags and rely on plain text instead, it seems

ctietze

~2013: Naive structural renaissance

I didn't record the exact event, but around 2013 or 2014, I adopted Sascha's suggestion (with reluctance, as always) to create different kinds of notes through intentional naming. I showed the INDEX stuff above already. And Kant's overview was an INDEX, too. This is still ancient, v2 note-taking with a twist. So I renamed notes like Idea and Reason to Concept of Idea and Concept of Reason to telegraph that they are supposed to be overviews of the concept, without much detail. The details should be collected on other atomic notes. Like Concept of Idea according to Kant an overview like this would merely link to.

Still very stiff and mechanical. Lots ot notes on particular texts without much cross-connection. Many "Concept of X" notes that spawned from this thinking as Dictionary-like short explanations of all kinds of things. An explosion of ontologies. The concept craze eventually began to ebb in 2015.

Around this time I dropped the note kind categorizations. _INDEX_ for overviews, _R2_ for "reference material - my interpretation" and _R1_ for "reference material - original quote", etc.

ctietze

~2015: Focus on programming

I launched my first app in 2012 and then followed in 2013 with another. Programming became a thing. Not just a hobby anymore, but part of my journey to financial freedom and, eventually, finding a sense in life. My departure from philosophy and a University career began back then, unbeknownst to me.

This also meant a more serious approach to learning programming stuff for the Mac and iPhone. A couple of years in, and I have produced quite a few "tutorials to myself" in my Zettelkasten. It took a surprisingly long time for programming to become a real topic in my Zettelkasten. I didn't want that stuff in there. I wanted to keep my Zettelkasten clean; it was supposed to focus on truly important topics, like morality, living the good life, psychology, and stuff like that.

But programming became important to me, so I took the tool that I knew and tinkered with for so long to apply it to a domain I already understood, and began to understand more and more.

That's also the time where my output increased. If you take a look at my programming blog index around late 2014, the topics change from
"How I Edited my Last Zettelkasten Post and Came up With Something Even Shorter Than the Post Itself" (the Zettelkasten blog posts were originally all hosted there) to "Model-View-View Model in Swift" and "Getting XPC to a Helper App Working with Sandboxing Enabled". It's a personal blog, so there were multiple topics, but I eventually would divide Zettelkasten and the rest more cleanly.

Since then, business-related stuff and programming topics began their rise to dominance. These things had actual practical implications. (Sorry, morality!)

Of course I have stats for this.

date	total notes	notes w/o diary	word count
2012-01-29	1463	1215
2012-05-22	2076	1702
2012-07-24	2235	1857
2012-08-10	2295	1909
2012-08-27	2323	1937
2012-11-02	2354	1973	456729
2012-12-09	2437	2055	465061
2013-01-01	2471	2107	464570
2013-02-01	2554	2190	468824
2013-03-01	2604	2240	474843
2013-04-02	2638	2274	477707
2013-05-01	2703	2339	483805
2013-06-01	2772	2410	489478
2013-07-01	2815	2454	494056
2013-08-01	2863	2502	500587
2013-09-02	2888	2527	502532
2013-10-02	2944	2583	507841
2013-11-01	2994	2633	514591
2013-12-01	3026	2665	518439
2014-01-02	3061	2710	520121
2014-02-02	3138	2787	520726
2014-03-01	3172	2821	525371
2014-04-03	3193	2842	527360
2014-05-01	3208	2857	528296
2014-06-01	3219	2868	529816
2014-07-02	3247	2896	532636
2015-02-02	3457	3113
2015-03-01	3482	3138
2015-03-16	3489	3145	555043
2015-05-01	3532	3188	559831
2015-06-01	3548	3203	561764
2015-07-01	3576	3231	564634
2016-02-16	3724	3380	575852
2016-04-01	3733	3389	576070
2016-06-01	3744	3403	578794
2016-07-01	3762	3421	581896
2016-08-01	3804	3463	588382
2016-09-01	3825	3484	589701
2016-10-14	3893	3552	597452
2016-10-19	3918	3577	601818
2016-10-24	3925	3585	602692
2016-11-01	3940	3600	604063
2016-11-11	3953	3613	610825
2016-12-01	4027	3688	618999
2017-01-24	4048	3709	624037
2017-02-01	4059	3720	625271
2017-02-25	4079	3740	628422
2017-03-01	4088	3749	629314
2017-04-01	4107	3768	631049
2017-05-01	4140	3801	635135
2017-06-01	4192	3853	638960
2017-07-01	4229	3890	642846
2017-07-11	4281	3942	648774
2017-08-01	4325	3986	654693
2017-10-01	4477	4138	671084
2017-10-24	4517	4178	677476
2017-11-01	4540	4201	680251
2017-12-01	4616	4277	690813
2017-12-04	4631	4292	693113
2017-12-12	4651	4312	695687
2018-01-01	4692	4353	701736
2018-02-01	4754	4415	710105
2018-03-01	4803	4464	716337
2018-04-01	4858	4519	721455
2018-05-01	4907	4568	726501
2018-06-01	4935	4596	730246
2018-07-01	4960	4621	732994
2018-08-01	4977	4638	735375
2018-09-01	4997	4658	738128
2018-10-19	5052	4713	748279
2018-11-01	5056	4717	748836
2018-12-01	5084	4745	752839
2019-01-01	5101	4762	754273
2019-02-01	5127	4788	757480
2019-03-01	5145	4806	760578
2019-04-01	5173	4834	763355
2019-05-01	5191	4852	765363
2019-06-01	5217	4878	767345
2019-07-01	5231	4891	769722
2019-08-01	5261	4921	776038
2019-09-01	5278	4938	777646
2019-10-01	5312	4971	782245
2019-11-01	5348	5009	788197
2019-12-01	5473	5134	800388
2020-01-01	5513	5174	804568
2020-02-01	1	1	0
2020-03-01	1	1	0
2020-04-01	1	1	0

Wat! I just noticed the script is broken since February!!11

| 2020-04-01 | 5621 | 5283 | 818904 |

Phew, okay. Fixed now.

Looks like this as a graph:

2015 was also the year of the Folgezettel wars here.

The notion of Structure Notes was introduced through Sascha into my Zettelkasten in early 2016.

Took me until 2018 to take more personal notes on the topic and interpret their uses more.