What is happening in your ZK journey this week? February 26, 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 in a short lecture class called Media Careers, taught by Don Shelton, a retired executive editor of the Seattle Times. It has only one session left and the final assignment. I'll be able to focus more on my writing after this class.
- The discussions here have encouraged me to rethink why and how I take notes. Taking notes has been a process of trial and retrial. I'm embracing reflective note-taking. My success has varied in getting my notes to hold meaning for me. Summarization is not a key to meaningfulness. Having an impact is what I'm looking for. I'm prompting for personal reflections and leaving paraphrased summations in the dustbin.
- I'm making a cleaner division between ideas for my ZK and those that must stay in my journal.
- I've had success avoiding watching soccer YouTube videos before bed. Instead, I make sure something much more enjoyable is queued up and ready to go after dinner. I get lost in the task and forget about everything else. One night, it is editing an essay, and the next, it is editing a drawing, and the next, it might be processing an idea in my zettelkasten. So far, five nights in a row. Now, I must not break the chain. Weirdly, I have to treat myself like a kid in order to break poor habits.
Books I'm reading or read this week:
- Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Classic Literature
- Schumacher, Julie. Dear Committee Members. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. — Experimental Humor Literature.
- Bergstrom, Carl T., and Jevin D. West. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. Books on Tape/Random House, 2020. — Nonfiction, Libby Audio
- Russell-Smith, Jen. The Joy of Sketch: A Beginner’s Guide to Sketching the Everyday. David & Charles Publishers, 2020.Everand — Sketching Project
★★★★★
The "My rolling fifteen-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 fifteen-day zettel production
Zettelkasten Statistics
★★★★★
1450483 Total word count
21282 Total link count
4288 Total zettel count
★★★★★
15-day trend: 10/10 ⎯
100-day trend: 130/102 ⬆︎
1.87 notes/day since day zero (20181114).
22 zettels in my proofing oven.
48 incrementally improved over the past 10 days.
–––––
Umwelt Shaping 20250224
- Success stems from consciously structuring one’s milieu, allowing it to shape personal growth and creative expression.
Writing to Find My Tribe 20250224
- Each blog post acts as a search query, signaling your interests to the world and connecting you with my tribe.
Usualing Without Awareness 20250221
- Habits create efficiency but can also obscure growth opportunities.
Embracing Reflective Note-Taking 20250221
- Engaging with how a text shifts your mindset creates lasting understanding.
Default Trust To the Experts 20250220
- If you want to have more true beliefs, you should simply trust the experts.
C-JAMM403 2-25-25 20250220
- Seminar notes.
Condensing The Iceberg 20250219
- Writing is the art of condensing abundant information into an accessible, concise narrative that respects the reader’s limited attention.
C-JAMM403 2-18-25 20250217
- Seminar notes.
Productivity Rain Dances 20250217
- Real success lies in consistent, deliberate work that improves inputs and drives concrete outcomes.
Anxiety is the Most Expensive Habit 20250216
- Mindful presence is the antidote to anxiety’s costly grip.
- Mindful presence is the antidote to anxiety’s costly grip.
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
What about your own Zettelkasten, experiences and arguments?
Zoom in: PDF at GitHub
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
What is a Wendesatz? Peter Brönnimann's [1] "Wendesätze" are the core of a legendary campaign he created more than ten years ago for an insurance company [2]. In 2013, it was even the most awarded poster campaign in the world. Here's one of his famous examples:
„Wendesätze“ involve a turnaround in thinking, a leap of thought as it were, when a certain term or phrase is used, so that they always contain more than just a message. „Wendesätze“ do not care about grammar rules, and that is what makes them so humorous.
Let us start our own game. What would a "Wendesatz" look like for working with a Zettelkasten?
[1] Peter Brönnimann. “Wendesätze I Swiss Life.” Accessed January 27, 2025. https://peterbroennimann.ch/wendesaetze.
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
I'm settled on my new but old but new Obsidian system. Sings alongs, works beautifully. Minimal overhead as I've automated or ditched most of the "best practices" usually recommended (UIDs are YAML and mostly invisible to me for instance).
It all clicked (big thanks to @Sascha in this long term journey) when I realised that working with my PKM and personal insights was no different from the way I work with my books: degrees of certainty, emergence, incompletion and constant refinement all over. I've translated this to my general notes, a lot of it is in a various degrees of incompletion or reflexion, but that's not a bug, that's the whole idea and process. I'm freer than I've ever been with my notes and thanks to the myriad ways Obsidian allows you to find stuff, I'm confident I won't lose it as it will grow (and even more when I finally have the time to carve out regular chunks of time to work on it).
It finally all clicked for me and my needs, it's awesome and, as Sascha keeps saying, it's actually so much simpler than people tend to make it to be.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
@KillerWhale Care to show a before/after in a discussion for people who want to emulate your approach?
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@KillerWhale That warrants a comprehensive guest post for our section "ZK for fiction writers"...
As the next cohort of the ZK101 course will start this weekend, I will prepare another concentrated phase of working on ZK material.
I am not sure how to attack it this time, since I am trying to figure out how to both create new material and prepare the education process of my children (e.g. critical thinking, defence mechanisms against coercion) The "soft skills" are not relevant. However, since the elements of critical thinking are thinking tools in the purest form, they are highly relevant on how to access and add value to ideas. (e.g. identifying if clear binary with uncertain boundaries should be applied and what the possible implications are, being sensitive to opportunity costs, boundaries as subsystems - stuff like that)
Just don't know.
I am a Zettler
@ctietze I would love to, but I struggle to articulate precisely. It's really more of a conceptual shift, very simple actually. Before, I was obsessing with the permanent notes, the literature notes, the UIDs, the sorting of it all. Your own posts here about dealing with ideas rather than notes and Sascha's perspectives (embrace the mess) have helped me figure that my writing notes were messy and nowhere following the trappings of the Zettelkasten, but were probably actually the truest Zettelkasten I had. And they do work. So, instead of having a specific messy creative space and an ordered, tedious Zettelkasten space, I have imported the creative mess in the Zettelkasten space.
Before, I had a lot of overhead – linking, thoughtful tagging, UIDs, writing notes as complete as possible.
Now, I write notes, I tag them by subject if revelant, I link them from structure notes or things that I really want to keep looking at, otherwise I just let them fall and search for them or trust they will resurface if needed when working in the system. I explicitly attach an emergence level to each (inspired by what I'm doing with fiction and Bryan Jenks) : 🌱 (the title and barely a sentence quickly captured) or 🌿 (it's been developed but it needs refinement). 🗺 for structure notes and 🔖 for notes taken on media ("literature notes"). Almost no folders (unless working on a specific project, needing its separate space so as to allow simpler file browsing).
What helps is Obsidian takes care of a lot of things for me:
I'm clearly leveraging the tool in ways that suit my way of thinking and reduce the overhead to almost zero. But one of the most important thing was accepting that things could (and actually should) be unfinished to revisit later if relevant (thanks again, Sascha). And if not, there's no value on the time spent on those up front.
@Sascha It would be my honor. Actually, I'm soon giving a course on idea emergence for fiction writers (using the system I've been using for years now, adding Zettelkasten methodology which I've studied for years but only think I now truly "get"), so let me try to teach that in the wild – I've given workshops already, but it's a full-fledged week thing in this case, which should give me invaluable feedback as to the best teaching approach. Then let's talk!
Man, the education of children is hard. All I can say is I honestly cannot grasp how to go at this, as I've voluntarily chosen not to pursue this area of life and only work with adults. But teaching those skills is a wonderful thing and sorely needed in this world. Utmost sincere, 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.
Been a while since I commented. I'm still operating a basic setup for my ZK off my computer using Zettlr. But now that I have been amassing more material the paranoia of losing it is starting to kick in and have been looking at ways of backing it up to the cloud. Also I haven't figured out how to have a constructive way of synching my ZK with my phone (Android). I'd love to be able to review my notes in those off times when I am out and want something stimulating to pass the time. I have done it for my Anki cards, but the ZK notes are more cohesive to full ideas. I'm sure with enough tinkering and reading different folks' systems I'll put something together.
@dc3 I believe we don't have a lot of info about backing up one's data in the forums, so if you want to discuss options, create a new thread anytime!
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@KillerWhale Let's record a "podcast" (YT-video) for which I prepare some question and put on my Socrates hat. It'll be very interesting for both Zettlers that use it for fiction and non-fiction to get a glimpse into your development.
I am a Zettler
It would be my absolute pleasure. Let me try my methods live on my unsuspecting students first to see where I can improve my discourse 😁 And then, let's do it!
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
After I've coded up a folgezettel plugin for Emacs, I migrated some zettels from an existing Zettelkasten of mine, to see how the ID scheme could help me connect ideas better.
I also spent some time writing a function to pull recently updated notes from Org Roam (which surprisingly doesn't support timestamping of notes). This is to do somewhat similar summarization that I sometimes see people do in this "what's happening" thread. I decided to start my newest Zettelkasten in Japanese (my mother tongue) so I wasn't going to actually share anything here, but I'm enjoying coding in Emacs Lisp so much (haha) now that I wrote a function to add translation instead.
Here is the list of zettels created during the migration process during the past couple weeks:
The literature notes created/updated during the past couple weeks:
I obviously didn't read this many books. Most of those are note/transcription exports from podcasts that I've listened for over a span of a few weeks. I dumped quite a few of them on Feb. 25. Those are from my John Gray obsession era that I mentioned in older threads.
For a math project to produce concrete examples of $(\infty)$-categories (specifically, $(n)$-hypergroupoids for any $(n)$), I have a new GitHub repository to run SageMath containers with Podman under Ubuntu 24.04 in WSL2 on a Windows 11 system. The repository is called SagePod. While I have specific math projects in mind, SagePod is useful for anyone who wants to run containerized SageMath under Linux.
I have to write more on paper these days, though the computations require coding--they are beyond my ability to explore without a computer. My Zettel output has diminished the more I document code and work with AI to write, though it's a struggle to rid the text of marketing fluff and to get the AI to stick with the facts, instead of telling the reader what to think and feel.
The latest ChatGPT model 4.5 will claim to have written more than it has. A few days ago I asked ChatGPT 4.5 to write a technical report. ChatGPT 4.5 insisted that its three or four-page output was complete. Claude 3.7 Sonnet produced a far better nineteen-page report, after revision, which I showed to ChatGPT 4.5 for comparison. "How many pages is your report, ChatGPT?" "Three or four pages." "How could your three or four pages possibly cover as much as the nineteen page report?" ChatGPT admitted it fell short. "Now that you have a complete report, please augment your report to include it." ChatGPT returned a lightly updated four-page report and insisted it had included everything. ChatGPT 4.5 has been a dud, but ChatGPT o3 mini-high has been good for coding.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
LLMs have advanced very much, but I find them still far from "there" in terms of (creative) thinking. But I cannot deny that they are already great as a writing aide. Especially in language translation. They are language models, after all.
I wonder how people see AI and its potential threat to our creative activities. Is it possible that they nullify our efforts to employ a method like Zettelkasten, as they can do better themselves or at least offer an alternative method that is more effective than our manual effort? Not easy to tell.
No, for several reasons. They write edgeless, non-committal mush, add unnecessary conditionals when given the antecedent (ChatGPT, you have the code and text in front of you, it has X, don't say, "If it has X"), write "why this works" about something that obviously doesn't, and exhibit dubious judgment. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the best of them, so far, but ChatGPT's more expensive models will search the web. Claude sometimes has to be reminded to read documents supplied with its projects and to avoid marketing blather. ChatGPT sometimes decides not to look at project documents unless you ask it to.
Sometimes it helps to go between systems. Grammatically, both systems fall short, with ChatGPT being the worst. I cancelled my overpriced Grammarly subscription for ProWritingAid (hat tip to @GeoEng51), since ProWritingAid offered a lifetime subscription at 50% off for better writing advice with more control over style.
LLMs will make you intellectually lazy if you let them. I haven't been adding as much to my Zettelkasten lately, perhaps because I have become lazier. Now I add to my ZK after writing outside the ZK, unless I sense I will forget some fact, event, reference, or broken resolution I will need later. Because Zettels have limited space, I have to distill my notes to fit. A Zettel is too small, at least on the side screen I use for Obsidian, to contain more than a few sub-atomic particles; this is my revised understanding of "atomic note."
I have forgotten about my FOCUS notes. I used those to direct my focus on various projects. The Zettelkasten.de forum serves as a Zettelholics Anonymous: you return when you slide off the Zettelwagon, confess your sins against the Method, and promise to resume with rejuvenated faith. An LLM cannot replace that. Not yet.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notes drift into the cosmic void, sending projects tumbling through zero gravity. The Zettelkasten.de forum serves as Mission Control for wayward zettelnauts—you check back in after losing orbit, acknowledge that you’ve veered off course, and commit to re-entering the disciplined atmosphere of the Method. Don't get stuck on the launch pad.
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
This is an interesting group of notes. I love the surprising juxtaposition of common expectations in the titles.
Will you share more about these notes? I'm curious about the threads [10] and [4]. Have you developed a [4.2] or a [4.1b]? Maybe this is the wrong question.
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
@zettelsan is cultivating a Zen-telkasten.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@zettelsan might be a Koankasten Sage.
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
@Will @ZettelDistraction Indeed, you guys are right on in that the brief note is about an anecdote in Zen Buddhism.
I wish I could do the visibility toggle thing that Will is using to keep the post well-formatted at a reasonable size, but it looks like the markup is available for posts but not for comments.
So I'll just copy and paste the said notes, with DeepL translation in parentheses when relevant.
⸺⸺⸺
[10.1] [20250225] 物を知るためには無知でなければならない (One must be ignorant to know things)
モノを知るためには無知でなければならない。禅宗の逸話に次のようなものがある。たくさんの知識を湯呑み茶碗に流し込むと、いずれこぼれだしてしまう。そのとき、新しい知識をさらに流し込むことはできない。(To know things, one must be ignorant. There is a Zen Buddhist anecdote that goes something like this: "If you pour a lot of knowledge into a teacup, it will eventually spill out. If you pour a lot of knowledge into a teacup, it will eventually spill out. When that happens, new knowledge cannot be poured into the teacup. )
正しく学ぶためには空の湯飲み茶碗のようでなければならない。(To learn correctly it must be like an empty teacup)
この見方は一見美しい。しかし、新たな発見は既知をつなげる網目状の構造から生まれることを踏まえると、すべてを無から学ぶという態度が正しいとは言い切れない。(At first glance, this view is beautiful. However, given that new discoveries come from a web of connecting knowns, the attitude of learning everything from nothing cannot necessarily be said to be correct.)
⸺⸺⸺
I started out with 10.1 because I found the anecdote interesting. It tells about the mindset you should maintain to keep learning. The book is written by an American guy who hosts a podcast on secular Buddhism. I enjoy learning Buddhism through the eyes of Westerners, as they often take an analytic approach whereas Easterners sometimes struggle to see it objectively, as it's quite embedded into their culture already.
Then 4.1 & 4.1a are from my reading of John Gray's Silence of Animals. They are both about his criticism of self-help virtue. Gray actually uses two paragraphs to say essentially the same thing but expressed slightly differently.
⸺⸺⸺
[4.1] [20250225] 幸せを見つけようとしてはならない (Do not try to find happiness)
現代人は幸福の追求こそ人生の究極目的であると考えがちだが、少し視点を変えてみると新しい境地が見えてくる。哲学者ジョン・グレイは「幸せなんかは探さないほうがよい」と言う。
(People today tend to think that the pursuit of happiness is the ultimate goal of life, but a slight change in perspective reveals new ground. Philosopher John Gray says, "It is better not to search for happiness.)
⸺⸺⸺
I especially loved this framing of Gray's: "Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live."
⸺⸺⸺
[4.1a] [20250225] 自己実現とは人生が既に終わったかのように生きることである (Self-realization is to live as if life were already over)
自己実現には理想的な人生のモデルが必要となる。幸せな人生とはその実現のことになる。アリストテレス以来、哲学者は我々にこのような後ろ向きの思考を促してきたが、実際の人生は十人十色であり、生きる道は様々なものである。型にはまった自己実現の成就こそ良き人生とすることは、自分の人生を既に終わったものであるかのように考えているということなのだ。憧れの人の訃報を書くために日々を過ごすのは、奇妙な生き方といえないだろうか。
⸺⸺⸺
When young, we all aspire to be something. Being rich, being happy, being healthy, etc. We are handed out which role models represent the status, and many follow the mimetic desire. But to live like that is not a realization of self. It has been realized, and an obituary has already been written about it.
I felt a bit sad, since I, too, may have been writing an obituary all these years.
Dan Kaufman's essay Endings offers a constructive and encouraging alternative philosophy; here is a relevant excerpt.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
For me, Stoicism collapses into triviality. It says there are things we control (our attitudes and judgments) and things we cannot control. Since I am a biological determinist, nothing is truly under our control. The appearance of choice is a phenomenological illusion determined by prior biological and environmental causes. The Stoic rejoinder, if it is one, that only the perception of control matters undercuts the Stoic Logos, abandoned in favor of phenomenology. In the therapeutic terminology of ordinary language philosophy, we have dissolved the project to reconcile the Manifest Image with the Scientific Image. But the dissolution leaves us with no way to quit Stoicism.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
My background is physical science, so I had naturally tended to a materialist view of things, but after losing the sense of meaning, I'm now drawn into a view that it's okay for us human beings to see the world through the lens of illusions. Those who cannot stay happy or find a meaning of life may be less capable of seeing such illusions. Our cognition evolved so much to the extent that we see things we don't need to see. Illusions may be a shielding mechanism to save us from abyss.
Thanks for the essay by Dan Kaufman, by the way. I enjoy learning ancient thoughts like Stoicism and Buddhism these days.
This is the best bot so far. Just wanted to keep this, since it seems that humanity seems to start its losing battle with AI.
I am a Zettler
@zettelsan What do you mean by "illusion"?
I am a Zettler
Otto Rank once said
When people see the "truth" directly, people cannot bear the emptiness. Thus people need illusions to look away from it. And that (ironically) created all that we consider wonderfully human today, e.g., art, culture, civilization. This is roughly the thesis Ernest Becker presented in The Denial of Death (1973). I'm not sure if the Pulitzer-winning book has had any traction outside the U.S., where we still see it occasionally on the bookstore shelf these days.
A perspective that I'm fond of is from evolutionary psychology of suicide. Why do us humans choose life over death, when the former can be nasty, brutish, and short, to which the latter provides a quick, effective solution? In The Evolution of Life Worth Living, C. A. Soper presents an argument that evolution equipped humans with mentality to see life positively to guard against them choosing suicide as a solution. The normalcy bias, the Lake Wobegon effect, etc. These may be for us to see the illusion of self-worth, so that we don't have to see the "truth" that Otto Rank mentioned.
So that's the sense in which I used the term illusion.