Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. July 16, 2024

Will · July 17

Swimming with Ideas

This is yet another opportunity to share with your friends what you are working on. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps me and, hopefully, you, too. It helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼

Here is a report on why I'm here and this week's ZK work themes/ideas:

Lately, I've been making notes on thinking skills, reading for knowledge, and organic idea development. Some of my notes have more developed ideas than others—the value of a note is directly related to the time and attention I give it. When I refactored my note on Samu Practice, I split it into three notes, and the note "Work is Play: The Zen Concept of Mindful Working" caught my attention and continues to develop.

I'm editing it to make it more engaging, balanced, structured, and concise while eliminating redundancy. While many of my notes consist of lists of bullet points, with this note, I'm rewriting and editing it using the first-person narrative. This approach requires deep thinking and forces me to find more examples and use cases.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

McPhee, John. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. One great chapter, and it is worth it.
Best, Laura. (2017). Cammie takes flight. Nimbus Publishing. #YAL_research
Prose, Francine, and Nanette Savard. Reading like a Writer [a Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them]. HarperCollins, 2007. Audiobook
Doczi, György. The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture. Shambhala, 1981. [[202404231538]]
Han, Byung-Chul, and Daniel Steuer. Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Polity Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-5095-5802-5 #philosophy BookShare

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

★★★★★

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 see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.

My ten-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I hope someone has even better ideas.

jbz · July 17

Hi,

Could you elaborate on the outline and siblings/childs of Samu practice @Will ?
I think I have a couple of drafts about Taoism, Zen and your notes sound like I can add a few things to mine.

Last week I focused on getting a workflow with my editor and how I craft my notes. I'm slowly getting there.

This week I will focus soil structure and vegetable needs and growth as climate is changing I need to understand how to modify and structure my gardening to keep having food .
And continue reading about zettemkasten here to increase.my understanding of it.

Will · July 17

Hi @jbz,

My workflow changes depending on the material and ideas. At the time this idea stream surfaced, I was studying ideas in the philosophy of the ambient. The samu stream of study emerges from my Zen practice. My work practice is centered on rakusu ring making.

I started with Johnathon Pendall's article Work is Play: The Zen Concept of Mindful Working. expanded it and included ideas from Samu: The Dynamic Expression of Zen Practice—Upaya Zen Center

This created a large note that had at least three different themes.
1. A practical definition
2. How I apply it in everyday life (this is the particular note I'm working)
3. Its philosophical and psychological underpinnings.

I still have yet to incorporate my musings into this well of ideas Opening to the Joy of Work | Lion’s Roar.

Samu as a path to joy (The title changed)

zettelsan · July 17

Have been lurking for several months but making the first post in the forum.

I just finished reading Zettelkasten Method: How To Take Smart Notes For Knowledge Management. It was a good reminder of the gist of the Zettelkasten method. I've read a few other books on Zettelkasten, the one by Sönke Ahrens rather thoroughly which initially piqued my interest in the method.

I have set up the environment with Emacs Org Roam and been building my note repository now primarily consisting of literature notes for the past year or so. It has grown to a decent size now; there are about 3,500 nodes in my graph at this point.

Yet, I have been a bit struggling with getting in the groove of creating meaningful Zettel notes (following atomicity, linking effectively and such). I think that the major impediment has been that I haven't seen enough good example Zettelkasten systems to emulate how others do this effectively. It's one thing to learn conceptually through reading; it's another to actually practice what you think you understand.

Hence my primary motivation these days is to look for such examples here in the forum and in other places. I've already done my own searching within the forum for older discussions of this kind, but I appreciate it if you have any new public materials that you could introduce to someone at my phase.

Anyways, I might still be primarily a lurker, but I appreciate all the discussions taking place here. Thanks for letting me join.

Will · July 17

@zettelsan, if you haven't already, you might look at this post Example Zettels? — Zettelkasten Forum.

zettelsan · July 18

@Will Indeed, I have checked the thread you linked. (In fact I found the article I just read and mentioned earlier in one of your older posts.)

In my view, the issue with the Zettelkasten examples that are often shared as examples is that they tend to be snapshots of very small snippets within their larger trees/graphs. That helps as an illustration of how you would create one particular Zettel but still leaves the process of "emergence" to our imagination. Just seeing substantial examples of this process of emergence could stimulate mirror neurons to get a better feel for how I could better develop my own intuition.

Maybe if I could read German I should dig into the Luhmann's original Zettelkasten being made public on the web. Unfortunately I cannot read German.

But at the same time I think that I kind of understand that seeking examples might be futile; trial-and-error may be the only way to go, as people have different ways of interacting with their second brain. And that's why the method is intriguing for those who want to discover ways for emergence.

@Will said:
@zettelsan, if you haven't already, you might look at this post Example Zettels? — Zettelkasten Forum.

andang76 · July 18

@zettelsan said:
@Will Indeed, I have checked the thread you linked. (In fact I found the article I just read and mentioned earlier in one of your older posts.)

In my view, the issue with the Zettelkasten examples that are often shared as examples is that they tend to be snapshots of very small snippets within their larger trees/graphs. That helps as an illustration of how you would create one particular Zettel but still leaves the process of "emergence" to our imagination. Just seeing substantial examples of this process of emergence could stimulate mirror neurons to get a better feel for how I could better develop my own intuition.

Maybe if I could read German I should dig into the Luhmann's original Zettelkasten being made public on the web. Unfortunately I cannot read German.

But at the same time I think that I kind of understand that seeking examples might be futile; trial-and-error may be the only way to go, as people have different ways of interacting with their second brain. And that's why the method is intriguing for those who want to discover ways for emergence.

@Will said:
@zettelsan, if you haven't already, you might look at this post Example Zettels? — Zettelkasten Forum.

I consider a good example of Zettelkasten, and an important source of inspirations, the Andy Matushak work, even if he consider himself his model different from zettelkasten :-)

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

It contains the relevant elements, it hasn't the use of folgezettel or a similar coding of notes.

zettelsan · July 19

@andang76 Matuschak's system is definitely interesting and there's a good amount of material to see how they fit together within his system.

The issue is that, as you mention, it doesn't appear to follow a "standard" (whatever that means) Zettelkasten. For example, each of his note tends to be fairly substantial and the granularity is low, i.e., Andy seems fine with not getting the benefit serendipitous emergence were his notes each more atomic. It's almost as if he's writing a bunch of short web articles with hyperlinks.

If that works for him, there is nothing wrong with it, of course. But that's exactly how I already tend to organize my writings, and I feel that I'm missing the benefit of Zettelkasten. I want to develop a system to help me write better articles from granular pieces of notes, not actually going right in with writing the articles themselves.

ZettelDistraction · July 19

I aim for concision. This may take several notes, each commenting on its predecessor. I created a Zettelkasten because I don't have a "personal narrative." Each day can seem disconnected from its predecessor. I needed a place to record practices that were supposed to be consistent, such as

Meditation (two unused meditation cushions, one medium, one large, both full of cat fur, bear witness to my inanition);
tDCS with the +F3 -F4 montage;
Reading with pen and paper;
A consistent plan of study;
A number of mathematics projects;
The habit of opening Zotero and Zettlr on my computer desktop before doing anything else;
The daily constitutional; and
A regulated sleep schedule.

There would be more, but without the Zettelkasten at hand, I am at a loss.

Will · July 19

@zettelsan

I've had a difficult time expressing the same sentiment about the scarcity of immersive explorations of an individual's workflow. As @andang pointed out, Andy Matushak is a hugely inspirational figure in the note-taking world. His method, while not a zettelkasten method, offers a wealth of insights and inspiration. His video showing his thinking process while taking notes is a style of learning example that can truly inspire us all. ¹

@ctieze did something similar in a video series, processing his ideas from the book by David Epstein titled "Range."²

I have a few video's showind my zettelkasten. ³ Some are a bit old, and they all suffer from poor production quality, but even with my speech impediment, together, they show the inner workings of my zettelkasten.

The offer I mentioned in an earlier thread still applies, and it's free. You get what you pay for; we're not in it for the money.

Would you like to explore the world of zettelkasten? I am offering short Zoom chats for anyone in the forums who wants to learn more about the art of zettelkasten from me, a non-expert. During the chat, we can explore my zettelkasten as an example. I use The Archive with a tool-agnostic approach, which means that the skills I'll show will transfer across platforms. Do you have any questions or need guidance? This is the perfect opportunity to get the answers you need. Please drop me a message, and let's schedule a session on the calendar. ⁴

GeoEng51 · July 19

@Will said:

Would you like to explore the world of zettelkasten? I am offering short Zoom chats for anyone in the forums who wants to learn more about the art of zettelkasten from me, a non-expert. During the chat, we can explore my zettelkasten as an example. I use The Archive with a tool-agnostic approach, which means that the skills I'll show will transfer across platforms. Do you have any questions or need guidance? This is the perfect opportunity to get the answers you need. Please drop me a message, and let's schedule a session on the calendar.

That's very generous of you, @Will !!

I'm in the middle of "trying out" logseq, which is quite different from The Archive. If anything, it has opened my eyes to how many different ways there may be to create a ZK. I may take you up on this offer down the road, to compare notes.

ZettelDistraction · July 19

This week, an update to the Zettel validator code in the Zettel GitHub. This was a few minutes of coding with ChatGPT 4o to modify the code.

{'good_zettels': 277, 
 'invalid_yaml_header': 191,
 'invalid_title_format': 76,
 'h1_mismatch': 204,
 'missing_see_also': 463,
 'missing_wikilinks': 20,
 'missing_hashtags': 47,
 'filename_id_mismatch': 274,
 'order_issue': 512}

Total number of words: 295171
Average number of words per Zettel: 339.6674338319908
Median number of words in a Zettel: 182
Minimum number of words in a Zettel: 4
Maximum number of words in a Zettel: 12374
Most common word count: (99, 8)
Least common word count: (255, 1)

Oh well. If you believe Logseq, which I don't use, I have 877 Zettels. The number is incorrect because some are LaTeX files and PDFs, though most are in the media subdirectory.

In other news, the Zettel Critique Assistant GPT first recommended splitting one Zettel into two.

I don't want to spend any time on the optimization and philosophy of note-taking systems since what I have seems reasonable enough, and I have no interest in making a name for myself in this subject. I'm more interested in the projects the system I intend the Zettelkasten to support.

However, I would like to take @Will up on his generous offer.

Of all the systems I've tried, my Zettelkasten has withstood the test of time (cf. The siren song of brain prosthetics).

A vague intention: go through Adorno's Minima Moralia.

jregan · July 19

I experimented with LogSeq for the past of couple of weeks, and I have reached the conclusion that it's a tool I prefer not to use. It is my understanding that the dev team is hard at work converting the application to use a graphical database, so most of what is there now is receiving little attention in the way of fixes.

Anyway, I have been using the Archive since 2019, and the overall simplicity of the Archive remains very important to me. The Archive supports my research and creative efforts in a way that makes very efficient use of my time, and it is flexible enough to support the unexpected, especially when I am in the middle of something else.

Will · July 20

@ZettelDistraction, yea! Let's meet up. DM underway.

ZettelDistraction · July 21

@Will Thank you for showing me how you use The Archive. It's much nicer than Zettlr.

I should have talked less. I wanted to know what you liked about your location out West. Our living circumstances couldn't be more different, at least in the United States.

KillerWhale · July 21

Having long considered…

how easily distractible I am
how I tend to overestimate my mental brainpower
what I really need out of my PKM
the app that I love and tend to gravitate towards

I realize that I need an extremely simple system with minimal overhead. At the moment, I'm doing my Zettelkasten with Folgezettel and that's it: no categorization, no tagging. Just a Zettel put somewhere in the system and done. Otherwise this requires too much on my part and I'm never getting around to doing it.

Having also seen that any work I put into tailoring Obsidian specifically to my needs tends to break down within a month because of some update in something, I have decided that I am giving up on the advanced features I really like (eg geotagging notes) to go a much simpler, but also agile route (eg tagging them manually).

So I am now firmly using Bear for everything.

GeoEng51 · July 22

@KillerWhale said:
I realize that I need an extremely simple system with minimal overhead. At the moment, I'm doing my Zettelkasten with Folgezettel and that's it: no categorization, no tagging. Just a Zettel put somewhere in the system and done. Otherwise this requires too much on my part and I'm never getting around to doing it.

I think you are saying that you just create a zettel, assign it a Luhmann-esq number, and then that's it? If you are not tagging or linking your zettels, you don't really have a Zettelkasten, do you? You just have the equivalent of a drawer full of cards. Maybe I'm not understanding what you are actually doing.

ZettelDistraction · July 22

Folgezettel will link the notes by address, or relate them at least. I had the same trouble with Absurdian. Updates caused plugins to stop working. The interface encourages accidents and gets in the way.

If I had a functioning Mac, I'd use The Archive instead of Zettlr.

ctietze · July 22

If I had a functioning Mac, I'd use The Archive instead of Zettlr.

I sincerely hope to one day being able to end this plight on non-Mac platforms

Sascha · July 22

@KillerWhale said:
Having long considered…

how easily distractible I am

how I tend to overestimate my mental brainpower

The invoked probing questions for me as a coach for me were:

Did you ever employ a holistic program to increase both your focus and mental power?

Both power and work capacity can be increased to a substantial degree, if you provide the proper input (or: refrain from the improper input) -- especially, the proper lifestyle to support the mind.

andang76 · July 22

I think today I've obtained the first relevant result from my idea of having a Zettelkasten section about music that I have the opportunity to hear or think about when I'm in front of PC.
It seemed, before today, that my experiment of developing "Music Zettels" was a waste of time. I was wrong.

I've watched some videos about analysis of Taylor Swift phenomenon. Why she has the success she has, and if it is well posed.
There is a good way of evaluate the success of this artist (make an analysis, precisely), and a bad way for that (twenty minutes of hating or fanboysm).
Writing about the good way of evaluating the phenomenon, I noticed that I'm able to make a correlation with some principles, attributed to Mortimer Adler, met some weeks ago in a totally different context (a topic opened on Reddit by @Edmund. So, Zettelkasten enables me to retrieve when, where and with which I've my thoughts).
I haven't read yet Adler works, but three principles resonated in me in that topic, so I developed three zettels at that time:

You must be able to say, with reasonable certainty, "I understand," before you can say anyone of the following things: "I agree," or, "I disagree," or "I suspend judgement"
When you disagree, do so reasonably, and not disputatious or contentiously
Respect the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by giving reasons for any critical judgment you make

In the video I've watched tonight, I've found these principles incarnated. And it is a good video, indeed, about a controversial topic. (The video is in italian language, so I don't think it is relevant to post here)

I still need do develop and consolidate my thoughts about this case into a bunch of notes, I've only written this post and taken some sentences about into my daily journal note, but the serendipity of the episode has surprised me. I never thought I'd correlate Taylor Swift to Mortimer Adler (maybe this last sentence will be the title of a Zettel )

KillerWhale · July 23

@GeoEng51 As @ZettelDistraction points out, using Folgezettel is exactly the reason to force me to have at least ONE (soft) link. (Does not prevent me from having more of course.) I have to ask myself "where does this go?" and the Folgezettel index system forces me to put the note somewhere, which both means there is at least one link in a branch / chain and allows me to review my notes constantly looking for that (making other connections on the fly).

What this allows is also to see branches and chains grow organically, making tagging superfluous at this time. I am not using my Zettelkasten to do academic work (I mostly don't care about sources), but self-improvement, self-discovery as well as artistic creation. Feeling plays a bigger part in this.

When I used timestamps I just never could find the time to properly link stuff. I used to have, indeed, a deck of barely related cards.

@Sascha I have yet to follow Kourosh Dini's Waves of Focus curriculum in its entirety, but what I got from it already has been hugely useful. I've just been tested positive for ADHD and possibly ASD on top of my already existing OCD: and I'll never be using this as an excuse for scattered focus, but it appears to me I need specific and possibly atypical ways to channel myself constructively. And that includes, actually, satisfying myself with a dash of improper input, as it occupies the monkey part of my brain to allow to grown up part to do its thing.

Designing my system is part of that. 🙂

Zettelkasten Forum

Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. July 16, 2024

Swimming with Ideas

Here is a report on why I'm here and this week's ZK work themes/ideas:

Books I'm reading or read this week:

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

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