What is happening in your ZK journey this week? July 28, 2025

Will

Swimming with Ideas

This is another opportunity to share your current project with fellow forum members. Add to this discussion by sharing your experience with 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. 🫵🏼

Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• Using My Zettelkasten to Master AI Prompting 20250711 has been my primary focus this month. I've been working on a series of prompts to help me think more clearly and with more intention.
• I've been journaling about the intersection of William James and Alan Watts on the nature of the positionality of "I". Not sure why none of this has leaked into my ZK yet.
• I'm closely following @Edmund's Zettelkasten Exploration Maps, seeing how the prompts evolve one's thinking towards clarity and structure.
• The fall session at the University of Idaho starts in a few weeks. I am taking Western American Literature (ENGL 4730); it is the only class currently available via Zoom. Not being able to drive to the campus makes this class doable.

Books I'm reading or will be reading this week:

• Robertson, Donald. How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World. First edition, St. Martin’s Press, 2024. Audible.
• Robertson, Donald. How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. First edition, St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
• Cather, Willa. Willa Cather: Four Great Novels, Pioneers!, One of Ours, the Song of the Lark, My Ántonia. Skyhorse Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2014.

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

Tri Atma
Jellis
Hugh Laurie

           Stats  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022  2023  2024  2025
0        January     0   145   115    54    73    50    45    39
1       February     0    86    75    45    45    49    50    25
2          March     0    91    83    84    62    48    47    20
3          April     0   112    49    71    65    40    36    18
4            May     0    70    46    94    67    79    19    17
5           June     0    30    68    82    48    50    44    17
6           July     0    25    82    44    67    38    40     5
7         August     0    10    89    42    89    49    33     0
8      September     0    16    80    71    35    75    33     0
9        October     0    24    44    57    47    77    23     0
10      November    43    46    58    24    43    48    49     0
11      December    58    66    89    37    58    49    40     0

★★★★★

This rolling 42-day zettel production is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I use Bear to keep my journaling separate from my work on knowledge.

Please let me know if you would like to review, discuss, or provide feedback on these notes.

My 42 day zettel production

–––––

Zettelkasten Statistics

       ★★★★★  
1485522 Total word count  
21478 Total link count  
4367 Total zettel count  
       ★★★★★  

42-day trend: 11/29 ⬇︎
100-day trend: 47/87 ⬇︎
1.78 notes/day since day zero (20181114).
50 zettels in my proofing oven.
37 incrementally improved over the past 42 days.

–––––

• B-Willa Cather's O Pioneers 20250724

  • A novel about the Nebraska frontier, written in 1913. Assignment from U-ENGL4730 Western American Literature.

• U-ENGL4730 Western American Literature 20250724

  • Seminar structure note.

• Watching the watcher 20250723

  • ★Blog Post★

• LLM Dialogues Toward Inner Citizenship 20250722

  • Using an LLM as a Socratic partner and a Stoic mirror lets you probe assumptions, sort what’s in your control, and loosen the grip of “I,” yielding steadier navigation through modern overload.★Blog Post★

• Using My Zettelkasten to Master AI Prompting 20250711

  • Embracing iterative inquiry enriches the evolution of ideas.

• Does AI Use Cause Brain Damage? 20250711

  • Creative thinking precedes AI interaction; maintaining intentional habits prevents intellectual passivity.

• The Harsh Truth That Will Make Me a Better Person 20250707

  • What makes a person truly valuable to others? Real value comes not from intentions or identity, but from developing practical, shareable skills that tangibly help others.

• Intelligence Amplified 20250703

  • AI magnifies the quality of thinking and writing in direct proportion to the skill of its human prompter.

• Thinking About Thinking - Cognative Distancing 20250625

  • My thoughts are not facts.

• Talking as a form of philosophical thinking 20250624

  • Approaching dialogue as an exploratory act.

• Prompting Past the Glaze 20250623

  • We can flip AI's flattery and echo by elevating what we feed it.
    

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

---

KillerWhale

I'm getting the hang of indexing all notes into structure notes and tagging with objects and not subjects. Subtle differences, but I can already feel how this can massively benefit the system in the long run.

I have also been worldbuilding a lot for my mammoth book and, even though I have my own approach and it's a lot messier than the Zettelkasten method, I have been injecting a lot of it through and simple reflexes show me that I will get lots of benefits years down the road.

I am also thinking on opening my own digital garden in order to help me Zettel more. It would rejuvenate my blog which has close to 15 years of archives, and give me the excuse to take time to work on my notes beyond the immediate need.

imstqtic

Hello! I'm relatively new with the Zettelkasten--I've experimented here and there, but this is my first time committing through a more consistent effort. I now have a decent database and am likewise using the exploration maps for subjects of inquiry. Though I have been tracking my progress with a simple habit streak, I was wondering how you were able to get your script to function? Logging by the # of Zettels outputted is far more effective than just jotting down if you worked on your Zettelkasten, I think.

Will

@imstqtic said:
Though I have been tracking my progress with a simple habit streak, I was wondering how you were able to get your script to function? Logging by the # of Zettels outputted is far more effective than just jotting down if you worked on your Zettelkasten, I think.

Here is a link to the discussion where I unleashed the script. [Plugin] ZK Stats in a table by month — Zettelkasten Forum.

Both logging the number of Zettels and jotting down work are useful. One shows long-term progress, and the other keeps the daily focus sharp.

Such is a quantified life.

andang76

Many thoughts and reflections about ethics, gender issues and the usual study on how to run and eat better.

mlbrandt

So many wonderful "seeds" in this thread! Many of them I've heard (and even tried to plant) before, but they hit fertile ground today. :-)... I particularly like the idea of a focus for the month... and the idea of "opening a digital garden".

As usual, my notes cover a variety of interests (and the serendipity of what arrives on its own)

1603/3b Love the bad things, too
5934/2a.3b The need for spiritual and social transformation in medicine
5902/1a.2 Productivity requires emotional detachment
6364/3d ZK is about thinking i.e. finding the connections and reflecting

Edmund

I am still experimenting with my Zettelkasten Exploration Maps. One new idea is to view these maps in the context of other notes.

wjenkins81

This week I resolved to better balance my ZK time between adding new books and revisiting old notes to see how I can better customize/personalize and link them.

I get excited about adding new things, even though I know I have a bunch of older notes I've been meaning to revisit for a while.

Until now, my ZK has been a multi-purpose one, covering many different topics, but I'm considering focusing on one particular area for a few months to make more progress with it. But even if I do, it would be boring to do 'only' that, so I'll still work on other topics in a more casual way.

imstqtic

@Will said:
Here is a link to the discussion where I unleashed the script. [Plugin] ZK Stats in a table by month — Zettelkasten Forum.

It looked like it was for The Archive, which I don't currently use, but I was able to conjure up a similar-looking script for Zim-Wiki based on the number of notes in the folder. Thanks for the guidance, looking forward to using this!

ZettelDistraction

Today and all of next week, since I am off work, I am organizing a proof of a result in algebraic combinatorics, which I came to me after computer experiments over a period of some months. A few of the computer experiments use a parallelized map-reduce algorithm in Python.

At some point I'll give the statement, which gives the dimension of a relative homology group as an enumeration formula. It relies on an equivalence in homological algebra that, for this application, sidesteps an immense linear algebra computation that I may want to try anyway.

When I found out that ChatGPT o4-mini was capable of solving PhD-level mathematics problems, I tried using it as a referee for Gemini Pro 2.5, with mixed results. Earlier today Gemini Ultra confidently hallucinated citations to results that didn't exist, persistently resorted to hand-waving statements with obvious counterexamples, and made assertions that did not follow from what it did correctly cite. I spend more time refuting it than making progress. Gemini led me down a primrose path, citing increasingly abstract, inapplicable results in circular arguments. I gave it a direct elementary argument instead.

Then, by coincidence or not, after refreshing the web browser in Gemini Ultra, I was offered access to Gemini Ultra's Deep Think, which is supposed to handle PhD-level math. Good timing! Let's hope it works.

As it stands, I have to break the argument into digestible pieces for AI's that lose their footing. This means going back and forth between good arguments in the ZK and a slowly converging LaTeX document.

andang76

I've started reading Lore of Running, from Timothy Noakes.
A very big work (more than 900 pages)

Sascha

@andang76 said:
I've started reading Lore of Running, from Timothy Noakes.
A very big work (more than 900 pages)

Nice. One of the best books in sport science.