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.