Share with us what is happening in your ZK journey this week. January 7, 2025
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 one-on-one 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’m learning sketch-noting using an iPad and SimpleMind as my software agent.
- I am getting a new perspective on my note-making. A substantial number of my notes are directly or indirectly about note-making and the zettelkasten method. I see that my ZK is overloaded with notes on notes. I want to rectify this by exploring ideas outside notetaking. NotebookLM is helping me develop skills to explore my ZK deeply and has already helped me identify surprising connections between unrelated notes and themes with gaps or underdeveloped areas. I’m encouraged and excited. Time will tell.
- I should look at an overflowing inbox as a wealth. The more I have, the wealthier my life. Why strive for a zero inbox? I’m not talking about email; I’m talking about immature ideas that gradually unfold, releasing their secrets.
- With a lot of fiddling, I've got a workflow that puts selected notes on my new static blog. It will want more fiddling as time goes on, but I'm of the opinion that releasing early and upgrading often is the way to develop. (A metaphor for coding and personal actions.) Here's the link if you're interested. Will Simpson's Notes
Books I’m reading or read this week:
- Calvino, Italo. The Complete Cosmicomics. Recorded Books, Inc., 2017. Everand
- Doto, Bob. A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly. First edition, New Old Traditions, 2024. Kindle [[202411190452]]
- Eliot, George, and Rosemary Ashton. Middlemarch. Repr, Penguin Books, 1871 (Original).
- Yagisawa, Satoshi. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. Translated by Eric Ozawa, Unabridged, HarperAudio, 2023.
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
Klangdelikt
Vetle Nærø
Lara Somogyi
★★★★★
The "My rolling fourteen-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 fourteen-day zettel production
I hope my contribution is helpful, and I’m sure you have even better ideas.
–––––
Will Simpson
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
One of my goals for 2025 is that I will dedicate myself to the foundations of my life. The plan is to focus on a different foundation each month.
I got the idea from Scott Young, who started this last summer. link
I don't have a yearly plan yet, but I have decided to dedicate January to my Zettelkasten. Other foundations over the next few months are finances, fitness, nutrition, productivity, spirituality and so on. I'll decide at the end of the month what to focus on in the coming month.
What is my plan for the foundation Zettelkasten?
Define goals for the card box
What do I want to achieve with my Zettelkasten? What is the underlying goal? How do I implement the goals? The first task is to visualize this in writing.
Review my process and my notes in the Zettelkasten
It is helpful to look at the notes and the structure of my Zettelkasten and see what is useful to me and where priorities may have shifted.
Read (new) specialist literature
I've put together a reading list that I'm going to use for inspiration for my future note box.
First, I read A System for Writing by Bob Doto. I already created those notes:
Implement initial changes in the card box process
This point is self-evident to me. Without implementation, the whole thing makes no sense
Interact with the community
I've read a lot in the communities over the past few years, but haven't posted much - I'm changing that in January
Write about the implementation and new findings and results
I will write about on my Blog from time to time and here in the forum.
In ths period my Zettelkasten is particularly focused on better nutrition, plant-based nutrition, running.
Yesterday, inspired by a recent topic on idea/note titles, I completely revised my section on noteworthy titles
My number of structure notes is growing. I use some of these notes for navigation. My goal is to create a simple and intuitive structure. As a blueprint for a step-by-step creation, I started this week with a sitemap:
The central structure is my ARCO model with four books:
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
@Edmund Very organized! This high level of structure could be just the right cup of tea for many people. As I age, I engage less with structure. I think that is simply due to less energy and less remaining time
Most notes in the past week have been about deceptive graphs/charts, because of a discussion in a private chat that I had no properly processed material for.
Screenshot from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.02035 -- PDF freely available
The rest have been about auto-completion, intercepting key presses and still allowing to type. -- I was waiting for some feedback on a build of The Archive that should fix an immediately app crashing bug for a user, so we can whip up a release, and worked on auto-completion for tags.
Example of suggestions after typing
#hash:It's almost ready. There are many caveats that make it unusable or break the app, still, but in a couple of weeks this should be ready, too!
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I finished reading Bob Doto's A System for Writing. My first real entry to Zettelkasten was Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes, which left me alone in the vast sea of validated ideas with no examples. It was a guessing game as to how to orient my effort building my Zettelkasten.
Doto's book fills the niche that I was in very nicely. Doto's style is very minimal but very practical. It suits a wide range of practitioners looking to extend or find their own sweet spot. He always presents the relevant part of his example notes fully. This is very helpful as working examples out in public are often difficult to find.
One thing that made me rethink my approach is the use of folgezettel. My system is in Org Roam in Emacs, in which each note is automatically assigned a UUID upon creation. The connection is made via hyperlinking, so we don't typically keep an ID explicit to the note title. That's handy and tidy. But, the way Doto suggests to use folgezettel to identify clusters of thought trains is interesting. Indeed, we do have other ways to visualize connections between notes, but I see the merit in listing notes by folgezettel and titles for the overview of all the trains of thoughts. That's not something I can get for free by using UUIDs.
January 7th was the week that I was forced to evacuate a portion of my physical zettelkasten out of the house due to the Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA which started two blocks above our home.
Fortunately I can rejoice in retrospect as our house is miraculously still standing. It's still going to be several weeks of clean up and smoke abatement as well as the necessary restoration of power before we can reunite the drawer of cards with its siblings.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich Good to hear both you and your house survived! Is there anything you are going to do differently with your ZK now, given this recent experience?
When I travel with drawers full of cards in the back seat, I'll be sure to seat belt them in!!! 🤣🚗🗃️
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
I'm having a great time.
With the lessons of starting a vault from scratch, and the benefits of it, I am now building yet another system which is now designed for sustained use.
The principles are:
So I have
I'm very happy so far, and finally have gotten rid of a lot of the paralysis. I just write, and topical tags + degrees of certainty + the graph allow me to fish and connect stuff as needed. And it's beautiful to my eyes.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
Good for you! I love the simplicity of your workflow. It will allow you to focus on the meat of your ideas. The workflow will slip into the background and foster a deep focus on what matters.
A mix of subject and action tags is the way to go. I, too, use tags like I did in the Evernote era.
I use tags for this. I find emojis in titles too distracting.
Great idea! I wish I'd started out this way.
I love the idea of a great, big pile of notes.
I'm finding project linkage to of value too.
Congratulations.
Will Simpson
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
I am writing a self help book about how to get out of debt. A dreadful subject, but one I got a black belt in from the dojo of life.
My Zettelkasten skills are far more humble.
I started this writing project with an outline. That proved easy to drift away from.
Right now I have 30,000 words. Rewriting was always going to be a need. I can see benefit from rewriting what I've got so far.
I think I'm using a Zettel-like approach to help get this thing back on track. First, I went through my MS making short notes about each point or example I used.
Now, I'm creating a note per chapter. These notes provide an overview of what I want to say and in what order I'll present ideas. Appropriately interspersed in each chapter note will be my short notes, transcluded.
Streaming to Marked 2 gives me context and a view of the chapter note as I work on it or any of the transcluded components.
If I decide to drop an idea from a chapter, I'm just deleting its transclusion link. The idea will survive and I can use it in other places.
When I'm finished with the chapter notes I believe I'll have a good map for fixing what I've got and for finishing the book.
The book, by the way, is a way for me to get certain things off my chest and to leave a record for my kids of how their dear ol' Pappy got hamstrung and then bootstrapped his way out of it. Today, I'm debt free with a bespoke credit score. Best of all, I did it without getting victimized by trickery or get-rich-quick schemes.
Thank you @Will !
One of the great things with Obsidian is that, as long as files are moved from within the app and you have set your backlink options correctly, you can do whatever you like. And I'm finding that I can start with a few random notes on a project, which can then graduate to its own folder when I decide to really work on it. That makes for quicker access – but… maybe I won't even need that in the long run with the bookmarks feature.
At the moment, though, it makes me feel a bit safer 😅
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
@chrisaldrich Man, I'm so relieved your house is in fine condition. I live in Australia and I understand very well how scary fires are. Sending you all best wishes.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
Thanks @KillerWhale! We just got electricity back today after almost three weeks. With luck we might be back living in it in another two to three weeks.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
Read you post (on Mastodon) about driving through the devastated parts of town. Wishing you and your community a swift recovery!
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
Thanks @ctietze. It's going to take us a couple of months of work to recover from the smoke damage before we can move back into our home which is still standing. It's going to take decades for the portions of town that burned to the ground to bounce back, if, in fact, they do.
I've discovered today that the remediation companies do their best with paper goods, but portions of my paper zettelkasten that stayed behind may smell of smoke for the rest of their lives.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️