What is happening in your ZK journey this week? March 12, 2025

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. 🫵🏼

Would you like to have 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 realizing that my ZK is a big part of what I consider living a good life.
• My ZK is molding my writing life. Slowly, my notes have shaped what I write. The writing shines the light on gaps in my understanding or makes my ideas clear. This is a lot of work that few of us want or are capable of doing. I'm grateful for what success I've had.
• Kindness is the theme of the moment. I'm using what I'm learning from Ms. Callard's 12-hour lecture on the Socratic philosophical life to infuse my understanding of the meaning of kindness, which is not as trival as you might think.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Orlin, Ben. Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. First edition, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Hachette Book Group, 2024.
• Russell-Smith, Jen. The Joy of Sketch: A Beginner’s Guide to Sketching the Everyday. David & Charles Publishers, 2020. Bookshare, Sketch Project
• Callard, Agnes. Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. 1st ed, W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2025. Everand Audio.

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

Lindsey Stirling
Hania Rani

★★★★★

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

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

vvirr

I've made considerable conceptual progress in the development of a framework I'm working on that aims to unify notes, references, tasks, and flashcards. I've generally been unhappy with the "siloization" of these areas (e.g. using different apps) since, for me at least, they are very clearly and closely interconnected. They also generally consist of the same "stuff", namely text. It's usually possible to connect things across apps using links, but I've frequently found these connections to be finicky and brittle.

I've been researching various so-called "PKM" systems, searching for and formalizing common patterns, analyzing app features, etc. Every system I've looked at so far seems to follow the same "laws", and differences between systems appear to manifest entirely as differences in the emphasis of one law or another—or, of some aspect of one law or another.

My ambitions are quite modest. At the moment I'm satisfied to just create a framework for myself, but once I've firmed things up a bit and done some stress testing I'll open it up for whoever might be interested. Even in the best case I really don't expect it to become anything more than a niche organizational paradigm for a handful of curious productivity geeks. I'm sure many will be turned off by the perceived creation of a "15th standard", but my aim is really to create a more general, agnostic framework, within which any more specific system can be implemented.

P.S. I know this is all very abstract right now, but if what I've written happens to generate any ideas in anyone else, then I'd be happy to hear them. Recommendations as far as relevant literature, concepts, etc. are also more than welcome.

vvirr

P.P.S. I am aware of the fact that Logseq, Obsidian + plugins, Remnote, etc. already combine notes, references, tasks, and flashcards. I've tried them out, but they somehow felt cobbled together and/or incomplete.

Edmund

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Fast, Sascha. Die Zettelkasten Methode. Kontrolliere dein Wissen. Independently published. 2025.
  See: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/22802/#Comment_22802

• Applebaum, Anne. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Random House, 2024.

• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollinsPublishers, 1996.

Yes, I would you like to have one more live one-on-one video chat with you about our adventures in Zettelkasting. I'll ping you at @Will, and we can schedule a time.

ctietze

Zettelkasten

Oh boy!

I've extracted implicit themes from old notes about the Zettelkasten. You know, there's this project about presenting the method to programmers. And to simplify working with it, I chose not to rephrase existing notes, but to write 'adapters' of sorts to make the old concepts available under a new light.

This started as an excuse to test the tag completion feature more.

Now I have a couple of statement-y notes that serve as focused entry points into old topics, or things that didn't have their own unique address in the past (like the septic tank metaphor).

15 day production

• 202503101335 Link-first connection superpower of wikis
• 202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten
• 202503100958 Boy scout rule is continuous improvement
• 202503100957 Zettelkasten as septic tank where waste sinks to bottom
• 202503100941 Mapping the golden path
• 202503100934 Falling into rabbit holes consciously
• 202503100910 Capture the coin and its two sides as three notes
• 202503100902 Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held
• 202503100857 Create opposition notes to for counter-arguments
• 202503100848 Link-as-search in note-taking apps
• 202503100826 Backlinks offer bi-directional traversal of network
• 202503100819 No Information without data representation
• 202503100805 Inquiry into your Zettelkasten as designable process
• 202503100757 Title of a note is first HMI contact
• 202503100756 Contractual Obligation in note networks
• 202503100755 Promise of the Note Title
• 202503100723 Malleable Notes, Malleable Content
• 202503090539 Cockburns medical pattern language metaphor components
• 202503081350 Pattern Language for Pattern Writing
• 202503081348 Freewriting
• 202503081339 Playful Sandboxes in Zettelkasten
• 202503071059 Completing SICP exercises takes over 700 hours
• 202503060714 NSTextView insertCompletion changes selectedRange twice
• 202503050534 Internet is Plato's cave
• 202503040825 How NSTextView inserts accent marks and composed characters
• 202503040751 Zero Flag from Compare used in Branch Conditionally
• 202503040626 ARM AArch64 calling conventions
• 202503040611 NSTextView.insertText always has replacementRange sentinel value
• 202503040559 NSTextView.rangeForUserCompletion getter unmarks text
• 202503030858 Disassemble AppKit
• 202503030856 § Denkmalgeschützte Immobilie Ratgeber
• 202503030851 Denkmalgeschützte Immobilie Abschreibung bei Selbstnutzung
• 202503030824 Mietshäuser Syndikat
• 202503030539 Foldable construction lumber workbench setup
• 202503010727 Injecting AVAudioPlayer into view component SwiftUI.Environment
• 202502280740 Humane AI Pin only good for battery indicator use after HP acquisition
• 202502280738 Firefox usage grants license for all inputs to Mozilla
• 202502280556 NSTextView bypasses key equivalent processing for backspace
• 202502260808 Process of selling real estate

On 2025-03-10'th, it felt like I was writing a lot. I clocked in just above 7000 words, which isn't nothing, but I've written 7k words before. That day, it felt like twice as many. The actual tiring process was traversing the networks, keeping track of paths, ideas, and leaving breadcrumbs to do this over the course of the day. Curiously, I happen to have created most notes in the hours between 7 and 10 am, so the rest of the work happened in editing other notes, apparently!

Reading

• "Apprenticeship Patterns", a book about a craftsman-attitude to becoming a good software developer
• "Calling Bullshit"

KillerWhale

I'm cruisin'. Still having fun, very simple system, no frills, writing notes. All the overhead is automated in Obsidian in a very simple way (taking care of UIDs in the front matter for example). I have obfuscated all bureaucracy: this is the way.

I am however learning that I should really endeavour to put the notes somewhere. I have so far relied on finding orphans in the graph if a link was not immediately apparent, but putting notes in a tree of structure notes does not cost much with Obsidian for the gain it brings. I will probably try to do that more.

Will

@ctietze said:
I've extracted implicit themes from old notes about the Zettelkasten. You know, there's this project about presenting the method to programmers. And to simplify working with it, I chose not to rephrase existing notes, but to write 'adapters' of sorts to make the old concepts available under a new light.

This sounds like a new and improved method for refactoring notes. Writing 'adapters' seems like a way to rejuvenate and expand ideas. Can you share a simple example? Do you create a connector note that references multiple notes, or do you handle this one note at a time?

• 202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten

I'm interested in learning the types of questions you use to uncover gaps in your ideas?

• 202503100934 Falling into rabbit holes consciously

This sounds fun and decadent. Choosing the rabbit holes to fall into would be the key to a flourishing life or YouTube stupor.

2025-03-10'th was a productive day for you! Me, a mere 451 words and one measly note from my processing of an idea I found at writingslowly.com:

• Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes [[202503100830]]
  • A zettel's value lies in how it guides thought toward meaningful projects and deeper inquiry.

Nick

I've had a bit of a crazy zettelkasten week. I finally ended up purchasing the cheapest Mac mini I could find and am giving Mac OS a try. It is nice that all my other devices (iPad for reading, iPhone) are in sync with it. I am treating this as its own little knowledge work environment and will see if it helps with cutting down on distractions for deep work.

As part of this, I picked up The Archive, and am (partially, maybe fully) consolidating my Obsidian based zettelkasten into it. This has been nice for forcing me to consolidate my notes and refactor a bunch of them (notes I have on zettelkasten & knowledge work). While doing this I'm creating a structure note. It feels good doing so, as it has helped me see the overall structure of the notes I've imported/created so far.

I noticed that a lot of the notes I have created feel a bit useless, as if they are just filler information. This got me to thinking about "separating the wheat from the chaff" and how to go about keeping the most interesting & useful notes at the forefront. My solution to this was to create a new zettelkasten vault in Obsidian. I called it "Ruminant Zettelkasten". I plan on moving over all my notes from my old vault (8,579) slowly, while making sure that each note added is cleaned up (note is filled out, good tags, proper citations). I put every note into folder 1. When that reaches 1000, I take 100 that I find the most useful and move them to a 3rd folder. I then move the rest of the notes to the second folder. Idea is to repeat the process every 1000 notes generated. Finally I would take the 10 best notes from the third folder and move them to my vault floor.

I am considering using AI with this Ruminant Zettelkasten. Where I use ChatGPT to fill blank / new notes that I link to and don't have anything to say at the moment about it. If I find myself revisiting the note repeatedly, then I will recreate it without copy/pasting and in my own words.

I started a third zettelkasten experiment, called AI propagated vault. Where I use ChatGPT to create the body of each note. I create links based off what it writes. Then repeat the process for any new notes created by the links. I started with note on Zettelkasten and Knowledge Work. I plan on doing this until this vault reaches 100-500 notes. I then want to compare it to normal zettelkasten being created in The Archive. See if it is any more useful.

ctietze

@Will said:

@ctietze said:
I've extracted implicit themes from old notes about the Zettelkasten. You know, there's this project about presenting the method to programmers. And to simplify working with it, I chose not to rephrase existing notes, but to write 'adapters' of sorts to make the old concepts available under a new light.

This sounds like a new and improved method for refactoring notes. Writing 'adapters' seems like a way to rejuvenate and expand ideas. Can you share a simple example? Do you create a connector note that references multiple notes, or do you handle this one note at a time?

The concept is, again, taken almost literally from the context of (object-oriented) programming patterns, where you have something, and something else, and they don't communicate well with each other, so you create a third thing to just adapt both interfaces. Like a physical USB-C to PS/2 adapter, too.

• 202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten

This one's a great example, because it starts its job with almost nothing besides the new "interface", the new title:

# 202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten
#zettelkasten #reflexion

The _Feynman Technique_[[201210271300]] instructs us to write about what we know at the present time in a linear fashion to uncover gaps.

That note from 2012 (in German) basically started as a summary of http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algebra-in-10-days-astounding-experiments-in-ultra-learning/ with this 3 step process:

1. Get a piece of paper
2. Write at the top the idea or process you want to understand
3. Explain the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else

Also see this on the forums: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2255/zettelkasten-as-a-superset-of-the-feynman-technique

As you see, 202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten isn't doing much work itself. Like everything in life, it's also work in progress, so it's a great time to share its underwhelming content

The title does the heavy lifting here. It'll likely change, as I extracted it from a project note to give it (1) an address, and (2) an address outside of the project note Jumping up and down in the same note got old quickly.

The adaptation is from

201210271300 Discover knowledge gaps by writing what you know, which is about learning and preparing for tests, for example,

to

202503101333 Thorough questioning to uncover gaps in Zettelkasten, which is (or rather will be) about Zettelkasten-specific application.

In this case, the old 2012 title would fit somewhat naturally into the Zettelkasten domain as well ("something something knowledge"). Other adapters achieve more of this. Like the ZK "principle of atomicity", which is more removed from its inspirations in programming, and where the technical notes are oblivious to 'being adapted'.

• 202503100934 Falling into rabbit holes consciously

This sounds fun and decadent. Choosing the rabbit holes to fall into would be the key to a flourishing life or YouTube stupor.

2025-03-10'th was a productive day for you! Me, a mere 451 words and one measly note from my processing of an idea I found at writingslowly.com:

• Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes [[202503100830]]
  • A zettel's value lies in how it guides thought toward meaningful projects and deeper inquiry.

The Barthes references you shared there are interesting! I looked at them much later

ctietze

Went to a programmer un-conference/meetup on Saturday and offered a 40min session of Zettelkasten for programmers. This time, no hands-on workshop, but a bit of showing and talking about the application of the method. Demoed traversal and how 'boring' and simple the actions really are, but what one can do with notes that grow and grow over the course of 10+ years.

I got the most surprised looks by answering the question "do you keep separate note directories, or do you mix stuff like recipes with your programming notes?" by actually showing a couple of recipes

I believe that the surprised laughter in part stems from the fact that these recipes were absolutely invisible until then, and that, yes, you can mix topics without one getting in the way of another unless you make it so.

The segue into my favorite recipe note, one for Chimichurri, turned out to be a powerful example. I'm definitely going to put this in the actual workshop I'm working on. If you like to know more about the recipe, check out:

Ethan Chlebowski: "Why I get obsessed with Chimichurri every summer.", YouTube, 2022-06-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXesSmxVNMs

I especially love this:

It breaks down the recipe for what's a parsley-based kind of pesto into its components -- and then you can recombine these components, choosing vinegar/lemon juice/... as acid, parsley/basil/... as herbs, etc. to create new flavors.

1 recipe, generalized into an abstraction, produces many more potential recipes; and in the Zettelkasten the blueprint for how this recipe works can become its own note.

That gels really well with how programmers think (and work) anyway. And tastes good. Really happy accidental discovery/insight during that meetup

Will

@ctietze
Thanks for sharing this workflow. It is a way to work with what I already have in my ZK. It may point to gaps where I need to explore more, but that is only a side benefit.

It sounds like you created a sort of intermediary miniature annotated structure note. A kind of question about uncovering gaps in Zettelkasten. You generate this note with "almost nothing besides the new "interface," the new title." Then, search for the answer. This creates a three-way idea thread reusing and connecting seemingly unrelated notes.

This would be a great use of zettelkasting time. I am not gathering any new material, just swimming in the warm waters of prior ideas, surfacing new connections. This and a review habit are thinking tools for developing understanding.

I hope I've understood your idea.

ctietze

@Will I believe so! I'm afraid of making this a principle, because sometimes rewriting the original thing is the best approach. Creating adapter notes for every perspective and angle on a single idea can also create a lot of clutter. -- In programming, from where I took the approach, adapters are great to create bridges between 2 subsystems you don't own, but which you need to connect. They can also be great to connect 1 subsystem you don't own with another you do, so that the existing one doesn't need to change.

But if you own both the adapted and the adaptee system, rewriting them to fit together can be the easier, cleaner, more beautiful, and more flexible approach in the long run, where you actually learn from past mistakes in design and not just plaster them over