What is happening in your ZK journey this week? January 24, 2025
Swimming with Ideas
This is 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've shifted my reading to reading more academic journal articles than books. Journal articles are focused and concise. It is hard to find articles that are not hyper-specific. I'm learning this way to deepen my understanding of several factors: Creativity, Young Adult Literature, AI Prompting, Economics, Philosophy, and Health. This is cutting out the middle with positive results. Here is one I love. Digital Rubber Duck: Leveraging Large Language Models for Extreme Programming
- I learn to break down goals into projects with tasks. I'm using mind mapping for this and exploring sketchnoting too.
- I've started practicing semantic linefeeds while writing in Markdown. It turns out that this feature resolves my frustration with needing extra returns or two spaces for a linefeed when rendering Markdown. This method, known as semantic linefeed, was discussed by Brian W. Kernighan in 1974 and later incorporated into Markdown.
Books I'm reading or read this week:
- Gregory, Danny. Everyday Matters: A New York Diary. Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.
- Yagisawa, Satoshi. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. Translated by Eric Ozawa, Unabridged, HarperAudio, 2023.
- Reilly, Winifred M. It Takes One to Tango: How I Improved My Marriage - with Absolutely No Help from My Husband* - and How You Can, Too (*Maybe Just a Little). Gallery Books, 2017. Reread.
- Price, D. How to Make a Journal of Your Life. Ten Speed Press, 1999.
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
Vetle Nærø
The Mountain - Cantoma
Adele
MADiRFAN
Clem Leek
★★★★★
The "My rolling seveteen-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 seventeen-day zettel production
Zettelkasten Statistics
★★★★★
1438080 Total word count
21158 Total link count
4254 Total zettel count
★★★★★
17-day trend: 22/20 ⬆︎
100-day trend: 134/105 ⬆︎
1.88 notes/day since day zero (20181114).
24 zettels in my proofing oven.
79 incrementally improved over the past 17 days.
3 blog posts in the last 17 days.
–––––
Week 4 Deep Think Retreat Cycle 20250123
- This may be the only time this week that I stop to think deeply. I hope not, but some weeks are like that. An ideation and activation log for capturing ideas and concepts I want to make evergreen.
Why it took 35 years for the US to ban Red Dye No3 20250122
- The decision is rooted in outdated research and legal caution rather than contemporary science.
The Task-Project-Goal Growth Chain 20250122
- Life is a collection of projects that connect ambitious goals to actionable tasks.
Everything is a Gift of the Gods - the Stoic Stance 20250122
- Embracing gratitude for difficult people cultivates wisdom and aligns with the Stoic principle of finding opportunity in every situation.
C-JAMM403 1-23-25 20250122
- Seminar notes.
Where Has All the Silence Gone 20250122
- Within silence, creativity and inner peace emerge. ★Blog Post★
Never Argue with a Fool 20250121
- Choose composure over confrontation, recognizing that engaging in unproductive arguments undermines self-control and perpetuates chaos. ★Blog Post★
Ivan Illich on Radical Monopolies 20250120
- Lock-in to a singular technological system restricting imagination and autonomy,
Beyond Blame in Human Error 20250120
- Errors are more the result of systemic vulnerabilities than personal failings.
Noticing Dysregulation in my Relationships 20250120
- Recognizing emotional dysregulation is a challenge but offers opportunities for learning and growth. ★Blog Post★
Week 3 Deep Think Retreat Cycle 20250118
- This may be the only time this week that I stop to think deeply. I hope not, but some weeks are like that. An ideation and activation log for capturing ideas and concepts I want to make evergreen.
C-JAMM403 1-21-25 20250118
- Seminar notes.
Hybrid Intelligence 20250117
- This notion suggests a “chimera” of intelligence, blending human and external agents to enhance cognition and self-regulation.
Editing with Semantic Linefeeds 20250114
- Create atomic chunks of text, making structural editing more intuitive.
C-JAMM403 1-16-25 20250114
- Seminar notes.
Developing Empathy with your Future Self 20250114
- The transformative power of treating your future self with compassion.
Use a two-word spark to sensitize ideas 20250112
- Two-word combinations clarify and enliven complex ideas.
Landscape versus Portrait Mode 20250111
- Smartphones dominate our visual landscape. They change our perception of the world, highlighting individuality over context and erasing the collective landscape.
Tips for Crafting Powerful Metaphors 20250110
- Using metaphors effectively reveals a unique perspective and resonates.
C-JAMM403 1-14-25 20250109
- Seminar notes.
Mindfulness and Inactivity Enhances Cooking 20250109
- Inactivity nudges flavors and textures into existence. ★Blog Post★
Cooking Thinking Canvas 20250108
- This thinking canvas aims to stimulate ideas for writing and studying food, meals, and cooking and relate them to a flourishing life.
I hope my contribution is helpful, and I'm sure you have even better ideas.
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
@Will I have never practiced the use of semantic linefeed in a real writing project. With the short-form writing and notes, I don't like the look of it. But I'm totally a fan of the idea, so that you can more easily rearrange sentences and edit paragraphs based on their smaller units. It's echoed in atomicity and units and means of composition. https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2646/more-programmer-nonsense-re-atomicity-writing-and-thinking
Please do keep us posted! You're known to let us peek into your workshop, and I'd love to see old and new notes in comparison, and what you think and feel about the approach
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I'm playing ... playing?! ... with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, NotebookLLM, and Claude to see what they make of my (thankfully digital) ZK. So far:
ChatGPT and DeepSeek are surprisingly interesting;
Gemini is the easiest to use as my ZK is in Google Docs, so I don't have to do any pre-processing;
NotebookLLM is the most entertaining, but I can't understand how to make it useful;
and Claude will barely look at my ZK.
This week I deeply read Luhman's Communicating with Slip Boxes.
Very important reading, it made me understand how Luhman's choices fit into his model to obtain the effects of his zettelkasten.
I suggest reading it, but I believe, too, that to understand it well it is also necessary to have a minimum of zettelkasten practice beforehand, otherwise you won't perfectly grasp everything that is worth grasping.
Hi @andang76,
I agree that Luhman's Communicating with Slip Boxes is an important text to study at any stage of a ZK practice. Your post sent me back looking at my notes on this paper.
This points to the key value of linking notes. The surprises and knowledge come from the search and decision process of which notes to link to which notes. There can be a mode of randomness at play here.
Thanks
Will
Communicating with Slip
Boxes ↩︎
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
Here’s an example of the key value of linking notes: the unexpected discoveries and insights gained from deciding which notes to connect.
This morning, I processed an idea about physics in a note. Particularly about leverage as a mental model. The source is Find The Contrast. In it, I noted the outsized effect small things can have an impact if thoughtfully used as a lever.
I keyed on the idea of outsized and did a simple text search and was surprised by the results.
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
I’m always inspired by @Will ’s posts he shares on a regular basis. On January 24, 2025 he shared three lists:
My insights:
My implementation:
1. A set of lists based on the same period of time:
- Best of - Permanent Notes
- Best of - Read Books
- Best of - Soundtracks
- Best of - …
2. Periods: week, month, year or all
3. Lists are short (1-10)
4. Lists are created automatically by a script
5. Lists are filtered by existing tags (e.g. '#theme/zettelkasten' )
6. Notes should be marked as „best of“ (a property in YAML) within my monthly reviews.
7. Cut and past to my mind mapping tool shows the progress along the year.
View on GitHub: https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates/blob/main/Assets/Timeline_flower_2025-01-15.pdf
Do you have a „best of“-list from 2024?
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
For media consumption, keeping a "best of" list has been fairly easy due to services like Letterboxd for movies, Goodreads for books, and Backloggd for video games. I choose 5 best media based on each type and include them in my annual review.
For zettelkasten, I'm still trying to figure out how I can produce a similar report based on notes in Bear rather than the Archive. But for now, I'm just producing a report on time spent using Toggl.
My example from last year:
was created by a script with Obsidian Dataview:
```dataviewjs let groups = dv.pages('"3_Permanent Notes" AND #theme/zettelkasten') .where(p => p.best_of == "year") .sort(p => p.file.name) .groupBy(p => p.created.substring(0,4).toUpperCase()) for (let group of groups) { dv.header(3, group.key); dv.list( group.rows .sort(k => k.file.name) .map(k => k.file.link + ": _" + k.lead + "_ " + k.template_type + ", " + k.created.substring(0,10).toUpperCase() + ".") ) }Without this script a manually created structure note was required. I am now happy with this kind of automation.
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
Thanks for sharing your Obsidian dataview! It seems like you have a property called "best_of" that you populate for it to roll up into the dataview right? Will need to consider the addition of that property
Still tweaking my fresh system but I think it's the good one.
Some lessons learned along the way: with backlinking, Obsidian really muddies a lot the difference between tags and links, to the point where I'm finding that it's not really worth differentiating between both (even though I started to do so). Is a topic a tag or a page? But what about projects?
With Evernote, I only had tags so that's all I used, and it worked. I'm finding that with Obsidian, differentiating between tags and links is mostly irrelevant, and it's better to simplify things, use one and be done with it.
Links it's going to be all the way, and I will reserve tags (if needed) for note status.
I have imported my notes for the current book from Bear, and it (mostly) worked, incompatibilities being due to the different way both apps manage attachments. It wasn't hard to correct things for a dozen notes, and I had some weird note links that didn't make the trip but consistently showed as GUIDs, which were very easy to fix with a terminal command. One hour of work for 500+ notes (and I uselessly fiddled with some layout on old notes).
My georeferenced journal is up and running and works perfectly.
I feel like I'm totally leveraging the Zettelkasten philosophy and at the same time I'm not doing much of the best practices, which is kind of weird. Anyway, I'm happier and happier with how it turns out.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
Reading
Finished Burkeman's "Meditation for Mortals". It's 4 weeks worth of daily chapters, took me 12+
After a disastrous discussion about statistics in a private chat, I ordered 3 used copies of the book "Calling Bullshit" (1 for me, 2 for the other guys). It's not a dense book, but the first one I start reading since becoming a father. It's superficial enough to be read lying on the carpet next to a toddler so far.
Am also revisiting Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. Each pattern is a self-contained (atomic!) idea of sorts, embedded in a hypertext of ~1200 pages worth of such ideas, with a focus on solving real problems of people inhabiting real spaces. -- It's a classic in the programming world, because programmers adapted the procedural style of real-world architectural tips easily and with great benefit to their craft. The book is just nice to peek into, browse for a bit, and think about things. Also with regard to creating a pattern language.
Zettelkasten
Up to Jan 24th -- mostly about drop down menus (for this website!) and a bit of networking:
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
After finishing A System for Writing by Bob Doto, I wanted to try Folgezettel for managing trains and clusters of thoughts. So I spent a few days writing an Org Roam plugin to use Folgezettel in place of UUID and displaying as overlays (instead of visible texts in the documents). I've never used the feature of Emacs so it took more time than I wished, but it seems to work for my satisfaction. At least good enough for trying out Folgezettel in style of Doto. I'd like to do enough experimentation to see if it suits my taste. I'd like to catch up on reading the related articles and forum discussion about the pros and cons as well.
On the reading for my Zettelkasten side, I finished a couple of books by John Gray: Feline Philosophy and Seven Types of Atheism. I find Gray's pessimism and critique of Western Liberalism quite fitting to the current climate of the world, where we no longer seem to know what progress is and what it means to humanity.
I also finished The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal on the peril of pop psychology, replication crisis, etc., and how the cultures in the U.S. and academia play a role in promoting non-solutions to complex social issues.
@zettelsan What did you implement using overlays exactly? (Can you share a screenshot?)
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I'm actually not sure if overlays are the appropriate feature to use for this, but I used it in order not to actually modify the buffer content... anyway, it looks like this without Folgezettel overlays:
With Folgezettel overlays, the same Org document looks like this:
The overlays are turned on and off as the minor mode.
Ah, now I get it! You can do so many things with overlays, I wasn't sure what you were overlaying on what
I can also imagine an overlay the other way around, inserting an ID somewhere, and getting an overlay with the full title or something.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
In Org, linking is done via hyperlinks (i.e., [[link][description]]) and the link is often hidden like HTML hyperlinks, so putting IDs as overlays make sense. This probably is a substantial difference from the style of links many others seem to use, where both ID and title are explicit.
I thought it would be better to hide IDs, especially if they are random (like UUID), but some people seem to get some contextual info from IDs along side titles. I'll see if I find that useful for myself.
In any case, being able to code in Emacs to add features like this can be fun.
Sounds like you’re diving deep into some fascinating topics! I love the shift toward journal articles as these are concise and straight to the point. Mind mapping and sketchnoting sound like great ways to visualize ideas too. I’m currently refining my own ZK workflow, experimenting with better linking strategies. Always cool to see how others approach their process!