A Collector's Fallacy for Thinking

boxcariii

Is there a version of the collector's fallacy for thinking? Here is an issue I have noticed with myself lately. I enjoy thinking and writing with a paper notebook, but I fear the words and thoughts I am having die within the notebook. Sometimes I will even stop myself from trying to work through an idea and wait until I can sit down within the Archive and do it. It introduces a level of friction that can stop me from making progress.

I struggle to do this kind of thinking within the Archive anyway. When I am working through half-baked ideas, I don't know where they fit and what exactly they are relevant to. Sometimes they will come together and can be connected to other notes, but just as frequently I hit a dead end, meaning the idea wasn't meaningful or relevant to any project.

Does anyone else struggle with this? Sascha gave an example recently (or at least I thought he did, I can't find it now), where he has a project note that has grown into a large collection of ideas, thoughts, and references. It is only later where he will process it down into atomic notes and a tangible structure. That is helpful and is something that has worked for me in specific instances. I know others also have daily or weekly notes that serve as thinking canvases. I wonder if that serves a similar purpose. It gives you the ability to do unstructured thinking in the moment, but then extract any key ideas that develop.

Nick

I’d just let yourself think it. I find that the best ideas end up being the ones I come back to repeatedly unprompted. So good my brain can’t let it go.

ctietze

@boxcariii If it's any help: in general, thinking things through with your "first brain" isn't all useless That's what you really take with you, and that helps make associations and weird leaps of thought, and have ideas.

So spending time to do actual thinking isn't wasted per se.

@Sascha wrote about thinking spaces: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/thinking-environments-way-of-living/

Going for a walk with your dog won't directly benefit your note collection. You still would need to return to your desk and write down what you thought about.

But I can't come up with a way to say that having thoughts and noodling around on paper to facilitate your idea-having is a vice that needs to be stopped

ChrisJoh

@boxcariii
I see it this way: Only if you're genuinely interested in a subject it will carry your thoughts and their connections further. It's a question of interest.
The beauty of the Zettelkasten is that, it also contains ideas whose connections and explication can take place at a later point in time. Nothing gets lost. The Zettelkasten is, so to speak, the ever-ready midwife, just waiting for your interest appearing.
And by the way - in my experience, it's often the fragments of thought that initially seem unimportant but suddenly turn out to be the puzzle pieces needed to put together the bigger picture.

GeoEng51

@boxcariii Here's an idea, if you find there is too much friction in writing full ideas down or waiting until you get to your computer. Instead, take short voice memos (with your smart phone or a separate small voice recorder - this used to be all the rage). You have a thought and can capture it before it disappears. But just capture its essence - a few words, a sentence or two, max. Then later, when you are at your computer or tablet, you can expand it into an initial zettel.

I do a similar thing. I use Logseq for my ZK, and have it on my iPhone. It's a simple matter to have Logseq open, raise my iPhone up, and then scribble or speak a few words (either method works). This is of course facilitated by the good quality speech to text capabilities on modern smartphones.

Sascha

When I am working through half-baked ideas, I don't know where they fit and what exactly they are relevant to. Sometimes they will come together and can be connected to other notes, but just as frequently I hit a dead end, meaning the idea wasn't meaningful or relevant to any project.

I think this is quite normal and part of the process, independent of the Zettelkasten Method.

gescho

This awkward phase of "I have an idea, but it's not ripe yet" is EXACTLY why you need Fleeting (or short-term) notes. Where and how you store them is not imporant in the grand scheme of things, just that jotting down is frictionless (examples: voice memos, Google Notes, a seperate markdown app, daily notes, a paper notebook, a loose leaf index card stack ("hipster pda"), etc).

Those fleeting notes are not part of your Zettelkasten itself, but of your more general productivity stack - Fleeting notes are nothing else than GTD Inbox items. So your todos, groceries and ideas end up at the same place. Then you "just" need to go through that inbox and curate it.

What I've found is that "Time is the Valuator". I like to marinate fleeting notes a bit in my inbox. After a week not touching it, I easily see if the idea had merits or not if I look at it and it speaks to me again. 70-90% of ideas "feel" good in the moment but are trivial later.

In the end, fighting the "Thinking Collector's Fallacy" is just like fighting all other collector's fallacies: Curate almost everything out before it touches your Knowledge Work main system, but follow up thouroughly with those things that overcome that fight for survival.

Andy

@gescho said:

Those fleeting notes are not part of your Zettelkasten itself, but of your more general productivity stack - Fleeting notes are nothing else than GTD Inbox items.

I consider my equivalent of "fleeting notes" and "buffer notes" to be part of my note system (at least for as long as they exist), and I bet there are other people who think the same way, but despite the difference between @gescho and me in how we think about what is "inside" and "outside" our note systems, for both of us there is an important distinction here between types of notes.

I consider this an illustration of what I was just saying in another discussion about how common note types (e.g. fleeting notes, buffer notes, atomic notes, structure notes) reflect different functions within a note system. In that other discussion, @daviddelven simplified the functions to three: IN, PROCESS, OUT. Those are also the parts of a basic black-box system diagram. The workflow in David Allen's GTD adds just two other stages to what @daviddelven said: COLLECT, PROCESS, ORGANIZE, REVIEW, DO. Notice how David Allen explicitly calls the first stage collection. There's no way to escape some collection, and not all collection is collector's fallacy!

EDIT: Here's a direct quote from David Allen's book Getting Things Done: "give yourself permission to capture and express any idea, and then later on figure out how it fits in and what to do with it."

Ydkd

Our brain naturally solves collector's fallacy related to our own thoughts:
If though is not connected to anything (even through emotions), it is not repeated => brain "deletes" it.

About feeling dead end:
Usually it's a sign of lack of associations/knowledge in memory. The wider your memory the more creative you are.
If there's some info that is valuable and worthy of storing on longterm/cold storage like ZK, i'd suggest you to memorise it and learn like a theory.
SRS is preferred for it like anki.
Reason: our working memory (STM) is very limited, but mainly STM is used for problem solving etc. Amount of thoughts/notes exceeds size of STM a lot. Even worse - if idea is complex, it will flood entire STM with its parts, blocking you from using other ideas.
To bypass STM limited size (5+-2 units), you would need to chunk&memorise information. That way brain will effectively use long-term memory in combination with STM, rapidly loading/offloading big chunks as a single unit.
And you will be more creative, as there will be way easier for brain to jump around associative network, make new associations, compare ideas and big chunk of ideas.
People usually downplay a lot the role of memory in thinking and creativity, implying that some abstract complex understanding is possible without memory.

It is also a problem of retrievability: how can you ensure that you will retrieve proper context and content at some moment?
To solve this you will need to tag things or have some system for creating hierarchies on the go.
We spam hierarchies nonstop: some person may belong to friends category, then they also may be associated with some location, and some emotion, even color and smell.
Tags are wide groups and direct connections are forcing hierarhy.

So you need to create inbox where you will be able to effortlessly throw everything and add initial tags and write initial intent, then triage it fast at some moments.