What is happening in your ZK journey this week? March 26, 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. 🫵🏼

Do you want 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:

• This period has been quiet regarding zettelkasting because of health issues and my "Sketching Sprint." I've been too absorbed in sketching and have not captured any notes on sketching itself.
• Kindness is an interlocutor, sauntering around my head. I write, I converse, and we question each other. What is kindness? Is it a value? A wellspring of new and fresh thinking. Nirvana for an amateur philosopher.
• Writing and thinking intertwine in ways that foster a flourishing life. Observing and refining thoughts with writing enhances clarity, sharpens thinking, and leads to more polished writing and thinking. This powerful feedback loop positions early adopters to excel.
• This is a new idea to me. Literary Maps - a network of books. I've read and zettelized enough books to do this. I'm stealing this idea from @Edmund and his super instructional graph at A Taxonomy of Notes — Zettelkasten Forum.
• I'm proposing a new type of note. A MOI - a messy outline of ideas. I'm thinking about how this process could lead to discovery. We'll see where this goes.
• I've developed a way to publish my notes on the web. It is still in it infancy but you can check out the results at Will Simpson's Notes

Books I'm reading or read this week:

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

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

Nils Frahm
Anna Meredith
Adele 21

★★★★★

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 want to see, discuss, or critique these notes.

My fifteen-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful and you have even better ideas.

Edmund

@Will said:

• This is a new idea to me. Literary Maps - a network of books. I've read and zettelized enough books to do this. I'm stealing this idea from @Edmund and his super instructional graph at A Taxonomy of Notes — Zettelkasten Forum.

Here is an updated map: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/22931/#Comment_22931

@Will said:

• I'm proposing a new type of note. A MOI - a messy outline of ideas. I'm thinking about how this process could lead to discovery. We'll see where this goes.

I want to learn more about. 🙂

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• 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.
• Whitehouse, Bonnie Smith. Kickstart Creativity: 50 Prompted Cards to Spark Inspiration. Crown Publishing Group, 2021.

andang76

I am continuing to develop my network of thoughts about nutrition, veganism, health, ethics. The Zettelkasten in this development shows itself to be a very valid approach, since these domains tend to connect each other very well. Currently I am focused on developing arguments and counterarguments about the choice of the vegan lifestyle.

sjm

I've been finding what works for me. Less about specific software - as always - and more about a system or process. I've found that starting with no title and a 'messy' tag helps me to braindump, which I then refine into one or more notes which I then connect to each-other and to other notes I already have. They gain titles last - and when I add a title, I create a file just for that note, without the 'messy' tag.

I've noticed this with other areas - art, software development. You can read all the advice in the world, all the opinions and ideas. You can't even really understand it until you try it for yourself. All of the above seems obvious in retrospect, but until I found it for myself I was struggling. I'm already feeling more comfortable in my notes than I did my first time around.

I've been thinking about - and writing about - writing and thinking a lot. I also started up a blog, with a focus on the process of writing rather than aiming for a particular standard of topic or quality. I'm letting individual notes or groups of notes spark a blog post, and then posting it once it feels coherant. I hope that I can keep the writing process up.

RedShirt_TX

Started a new job, in a fairly 'locked down' IT environment -- trying my best to 1) use OneNote for my work PKM (boo!), and 2) practice good habits of processing my meeting notes to make them more meaningful and discoverable to future-me (yay!).

ctietze

Oof, another week has passed...?

I have made some, but not much, progress on the practice and course plan for "ZK for programmers", and fiddled with a book outline on a pattern language. Am mostly using the quiet half hour or hour when my daughter sleeps 'on me' in a baby carrier for this. Apparently not enough

Also been trying out some tools, namely

• Agda, a very intense programming language to create type systems and proofs;
• C++ for library/command line tools that could run on different platforms than macOS

Been tinkering on a Mermaid diagram renderer. It's a command-line tool at the moment, but the command-line-iness is just a stepping stone to (1) make a simple GUI and (2) create the infrastructure to convert not only Mermaid diagrams, but also graphviz diagrams and LaTeX formulae into pictures. Will become the back-bone for auto-previewing diagrams in your notes without requiring any special app to generate a preview. (Apart from, well, the converter )

Reading

• Brad J Cox: Object Oriented Programming. An Evolutionary Approach. -- the creator of Objective-C, a very small addition to the C language that made building applications quite the pleasure, and powered NeXTSTEP computers and Mac OS X apps (and apps in Apple ecosystems to this day). I miss the ergonomics of Objective-C a bit sometimes.
• Bjarne Stroustrup: A Tour of C++. -- Refresher on this programing language, and best practices.

Production in the Zettelkasten

First dozen+ notes are programming fundamentals to bring into context the new stuff I learn, and connect it with things I did in the past:

• 202503261032 Pass string to Swift Process as STDIN
• 202503250843 Constness permutations of containers and elements
• 202503250822 Destructuring in C++ via structured binding declarations
• 202503241131 Constant initialization with lambdas to extract mutable creation
• 202503241058 Move rvalue reference parameter from functions
• 202503241024 Pass unique_ptr by moving thorugh expected transformers
• 202503221340 Curiously Recurring Template Pattern (CRTP) compile-time polymorphism
• 202503221334 Use opaque shared_ptr with typed destructor
• 202503220719 Idiomatic C++ initialization uses {}-list form
• 202503220508 make_unique factory forwards to constructor
• 202503211354 CFSTR loads static string constants from binary
• 202503201655 CFTypeRef smart pointer support
• 202503200631 C++ library with Swift executable setup
• 202503190955 Example of how vibe coding without skill backfires for SaaS
• 202503190855 Stopped performKeyEquivalent to override shortcuts in text view
• 202503190544 Too many adapters, adapter hell
• 202503181416 Agile software craftsmanship manifestos combined -- I just realized then that the original https://agilemanifesto.org/ and the https://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/ can be combined. Both express relations ("we favor X over Y"), and by combining them you get "we favor X over Y, and Y over Z", e.g.: "Instead of following a plan, value responding to change, while steadily adding value."
• 202503181408 Software craftsmanship manifesto
• 202503180533 Post to social media first as inbox for links
• 202503171049 Switch lldb language to Objective-C or Swift manually
• 202503150615 Count LLDB breakpoint hits
• 202503150543 Set LLDB breakpoints for selector
• 202503130925 Eudaimonia requires acting-out future-dead-you's life -- based on a quote that sounded clever:

Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live. (John Gray (2013): The Silence of Animals, London: Penguin Books.)

• 202503130856 Scholarly squares, metaphor for notes
• 202503130839 Provisional life anticipating a future self disowns its value
• 202503130829 Role of the Future Self in Zettelkasten work
• 202503130800 Notes like stamp collection
• 202503130752 Risen apes more inspiring than Bible's fallen angels -- via Terry Pratchett, but actually attributed to Robert Ardrey: "But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. ... The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

ChrisJoh

@ctietze
Maybe it seems impolite to ask, but I am curious about the idea in "202503130800 Notes like stamp collection".
I like comparing the production of Zettel to, for example, the curiosity of an entomologist or botanist, where collecting serves scientific advancement and is simultaneously coupled with the passion for collecting and hunting (scientia amabilis). It's always fascinated me. I haven't yet thought of the idea of ​​a stamp collection. Sounds interesting to me.

ctietze

@ChrisJoh not impolite at all! This is meant to be shared anyway eventually.

Here's the work in progress:

# 202503130800 Notes like stamp collection
#collectors-fallacy

## Problem
You're bored by all the work in front, or you feel the urge to evade
what ought to be done.

## Solution
Collecting is a rewarding experience in itself, so just take note of
things that pique your interest. Instead of procrastinating on doing
any Zettelkasten-work, do work in your Zettelkasten that sparks joy.

## Overdose
You end up collecting without integrating what you collect. You amass
things but don't take the time to make sense of what you find
interesting. So the burden of sense-making falls exclusively on Future
You.

The farther removed the collected information is from what you'll be
doing in the future, the more time Future You will need to spend to
come up with an answer to: "why is this in my Zettelkasten at all?"

This increases the likelihood that this information turns into mere
noise, or waste: Garbage in, garbage out in a
Zettelkasten.[[202101110913]]

## Recommended Actions
While collecting can be a rewarding experience in itself for us
evolved gatherers, unlike gathering food, gathering stuff doesn't
serve a purpose.

Every stamp collector knows that a good collection needs to have a
purpose imposed by the collector, a theme. You don't just throw any
old stamp into a bucket of other stamps and call it a "collection".
That's just hoarding.

Processing notes diligently (Verzetteln) makes it partly impossible to
merely collect.[[201401211423]] You're too slow to amass a large
collection if you _also_ need to think about the collected piece, and
_also_ incorporate it into your existing web of knowledge.

The _Collector's Fallacy_[[201401180954]] is a false conflation of
merely amassing, collecting stuff, with having done something useful.

- Eco: Collecting quotes and PDFs can be a distraction, a mere alibi
  to appear busy.[[201205300916]]
- Pressfield: Research can be addictive; you need to stop it
  eventually and produce something.[[201312282153]]
- Note-taking can be addictive, too. A self-reinforcing,
  self-rewarding process.[[201711072032]] Rabbit holes are dangerous,
  but can also be used to dig deep.[[202503100934]]

So instead of producing something with the lowest of effort, something
that's likely to be useless in the long term, and potentially even
hindering Future You getting meaningful work done by polluting the
environment of good notes, _collect with intent._ Come up with some
way to organize the information so that you don't increase the noise.

- "Capture the coin and its two sides" (as three
  notes)[[202503100910]]: come up with structures to group related
  information to-down.
- Tend to the Zettelkasten Orphanage[[202503101347]]

ChrisJoh

@ctietze
Great, thank you very much!
The distinction between collecting and hoarding is spot on.
The Zettelkasten - if you do it sensibly and take your time - prevents mere accumulation through meaningful linking (Verzettelung).
And that, for me, is precisely the double source of pleasure here:
1) The pure joy of branching out ideas (the joy finding connection points) leading to
2) the nearly magical emergence of unimagined new fields of thought that are waiting to be explored. So, that's the source of the collector's happiness.