Share with us what is happening in your ZK journey this week. November 9, 2024

Will

Swimming with Ideas

This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you’re learning. Sharing 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. 🫵🏼

Do you want to do a live video chat with me about our adventures in Zettelkasting? Ping me at @Will, and we can schedule a time.

Here is my report on why I’m here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• I spent time working on the transclusion plugin for The Archive. It pulls together notes from a working dynamic outline into a finished document. This is all done in Markdown using The Archive’s editor and your notes. The finished Markdown can be exported with Marked 2 to the most popular formats. This is v.0.3.0 and will only get more functional as The Archive’s plugin architecture gets more developed.
• How have I come to write more in my journal (Bear) than in my notes? Should I switch to a daily note in The Archive? Should I consider each academic writing assignment a project and set it up in The Archive? I’ll give it a try with the Artist Profile writing project.
• I’m listening to Podcast #1029: Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time | The Art of Manliness. In it, Oliver Bukerman talks about "productivity debit." This resonated with me and is making me rethink my journaling.
• I used to have daily notes in The Archive. I stopped because I thought that much of the stuff recorded was not fodder for a ZK. It is still true that much of what I record in my Bear journal is not appropriate for my knowledge base. I use my daily journaling for free writing, time management, and partly to establish habits. I don’t have to restrict myself to one or the other. I can do both.

Books I’m reading or read this week:

• Adler, Mortimer Jerome and Van Doren, Charles Lincoln. How to read a book. 2014. [[202407311603]]
• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988. [[202408212021]] #JAMM425 Bookshare
• Tatel, David S. Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice. First edition, Little, Brown and Company, 2024. Kindle [[202411030530]]
• Dicks, Matthew. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018. Bookshare

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

• Evans on Evans
• Eydís Evensen
• It Comes in Waves
• Light of Sun
• EIRLYS

★★★★★

The "My rolling 15-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 15-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I’m sure you have even better ideas.

ctietze

I'm reading Burkeman's book (ePub) after listening to the AoM Podcast, and it's a book that you can read a bit of every day (which works quite well with our toddler).

Also, Burkeman suggests to not take notes in the book. -- He hinted at how this may be hard for a Zettelkasten user in an email when I reached out prior to purchasing the book That got me interested even more I admit.

John_P

Thank you for the space you have opened up here.

This also brings me to my current topic.

Spaces and spiritual maps

How they influence us and how we can use them. Creating atmospheres to get into vers. States of mind. From workplace design to the optimal space (including mental spaces) for various projects.

Living in a Box

A project I am working on more intensively.
From analog to digital and back. An organizational and living tool with the requirement that everything has to relate to a defined space (box, Din formatting...).
One thought I am pursuing is that the power of creativity lies not in “infinite freedom” but in “limitation”. Modules and docking systems, compatibility and integration as well as flow systems are the topics of this project.

Walking and thinking

I live in close contact with nature and take the opportunity to go for long walks every day. I am currently on a journey of discovery here, observing “my self” and the interaction of observing nature and drawing conclusions about a deeper understanding of the self.
---> Realtion to spaces and mental maps

And daily greets the marmot

I go about my daily business and work in our small but excellent agency. https://www.bardach.studio/about-us

Thank you very much and I look forward to an exchange

KillerWhale

Still circling my app of choice. Apple Notes is decidedly unusable when using handwriting notes (the app grinds to a halt on extended sessions), which is its main selling point.

Played with Noteplan but its slant towards daily notes is not for me.

Still not finding better than Bear and Obsidian for my needs (power and features on a Mac as well as on iOS as I write and think a lot on my phone). My ideal app would offer Obsidian's feature set with Bear's speed and UX; I especially would want: notes geotagging for journaling (offered through the MapView plugin), block-level linking and a graph. It boils down to: do these features matter enough for me to suffer Obsidian's clunkiness?

ctietze

@KillerWhale Have you considered using a dedicated "capture" app, like Drafts at least used to be? That should make journalling and auto-tagging notes with weather, geolocation, ... possible.

Nowadays, I can imagine you could do this with the Shortcuts app as well, and put the shortcut on your home screen to start a new journal entry with all info pre-filled:
https://jeremybassetti.com/fieldnotes/gps-apple-shortcut/#1-gps-to-clipboard

(I'm thinking of approaches like this because I despise phones for editing, but they are fine to capture stuff like tear-off notepads -- and this would do the trick)

The author of the link above uses Notes with a "scratchpad" file to append to. You want to get out of Notes as a storage, but you could still use it to draft and write -- and then use another Shortcut to take the scratchpad contents, cut the text, then move it to a date-time-stamped file in a folder using the Files app.

GeoEng51

@KillerWhale @ctietze This all sounds a bit clunky to me. I keep coming back to Logseq, in which I do both my daily journalling and the rest of my Zettelkasten, both well-integrated and living alongside each other happily. I capture a lot of my thoughts or draft notes while out and about on my iPhone and then take whatever follow-up actions I feel are important when I am back on my computer.

KillerWhale

@ctietze Thanks very much for your interest in my case, much appreciated! I love Drafts for all these reasons, but there's a major dealbreaker: it does not capture media (photos and files) easily, and I do that constantly.

I did design whole custom buttons to that end, which do work (save the content to the Drafts Library folders, which get synced with iCloud, and have a custom delete button to trash attachments along with a draft) but processing is a hassle (you need to preview stuff to even see your media).

For Bear or Obsidian, I've designed a Shortcut / share sheet array which work well enough (especially when paired with the action button on the iPhone), it's not as quick and elegant, but it reasonably works.

What I love with Obsidian's MapView is having a visual map of my entries. So far, I'm using Bear tags as with Where/Country/Town, this works, but is not nearly as… fun. And I do find the map useful for browsing.

For people interested in playing with all that, the SupaSend app on the App Store is currently on sale – it's a paired down, media enhanced Drafts replacement. Especially useful for Obsidian and sending stuff without loading the app, which still takes ages despite the recent enhancements.

@GeoEng51 I keep an eye on Logseq, waiting for the DB release though.

ZettelDistraction

More plugins

Since I have "upgraded" from Zettlr to Obsidian, I have hardly written any "main notes" because I have fallen into the Daily Notes Obsidian plugin maelstrom. Yesterday, I learned about the Periodic Notes Obsidian plugin, which supports Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Notes. I am trying Weekly notes since I have a better chance of escaping from this week's note than today's. This upgrade means I must rename my Daily Notes folder to Periodic Notes. I would not have mentioned any of this if I had the slighted doubt that the entire Zettelkasten forum finds periodic journaling endlessly fascinating.

An overwhelming list of Obsidian plugins is available at The Must-Have Obsidian plugins for 2025. I have installed the Periodic Notes and Calendar plugins.

A timestamp template

Since I like to track my activities (I lied: I dislike it), I came up with a timestamp template for use with the Obsidian Templater plugin. Here is an example.

[2024-11-14 19:26:15] Added a timestamp template and assigned this to alt-T.

Such scintillating entries go into my weekly notes.

The trivial code

<%*
let timestamp = "\[" + tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss") + "\] ";
-%>
<%* tR += timestamp %>

Because I am too ashamed to admit that I am dependent on Grammarly (far from perfect) and Pro Writing Aid (which fights with Grammarly), I am secretly reading through Pullum, Geoffrey K. The Truth About English Grammar. Polity Press. 2024. ISBN 978-1-5095-6054-7.

As for the rest, mum's the word.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:
Because I am too ashamed to admit that I am dependent on Grammarly (far from perfect) and Pro Writing Aid (which fights with Grammarly), I am secretly reading through Pullum, Geoffrey K. The Truth About English Grammar. Polity Press. 2024. ISBN 978-1-5095-6054-7.

I used to think my grammar was pretty good, as I liked the subject (admittedly, in elementary and junior high school) and absorbed and practiced what I learned. In addition, I have written reams of engineering reports and papers - enough paper to fill a room! However, I started using Grammarly (and sometimes Pro Writing Aid) when writing my personal history over the past year. It tells me that I am wordy and not consistently accurate (although I love to use dictionaries and thesauri when writing, my favourite being https://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml?s=grammar ). I can see where Grammarly's suggestions do improve my text. So, your book reference sounds intriguing; I will pursue it with vigour.