Archive... or Thinking Environment?

tomp

@jameslongley said:
As my zettelkasten practice has evolved, I’ve been noticing a tension in my own work(flows) and I’m curious how others here think about and relate to this.

Most PKM conversations focus on capturing, connecting, and developing ideas (note types, tools and the like). But when I reflect on the moments and situations that have lasting impact in business and life zoom out, they tend to be decisions — what to pursue, what to drop, how to respond, which direction to commit to.

So the question I'm working through and which I'd be interested to get others' perspectives on is:

When you’re facing a real, consequential decision, how (if at all) does your PKM system help you think it through (in practice)?

I don't think this question is well-posed. If you think of your Zettelkasten as no more than a PKM then you are missing much of its potential. A PKM can "manage" or access knowledge you've stored in the past. You certainly want easy access to that as you are doing new work.

At the same time, you are trying to do new work. A zettel ("z-card") even at best can only be a flattened, compressed version of your mental state. Even when one is thinking about one "simple" idea, that idea is connected to a rich mesh of other ideas, memories, associations, you name it. Where a z-card can be really helpful is when it can restore that mental context for you, so you can pick up where you left off. It can also capture a version of the final product of some bit of the project.

Since much of the material you want to reference is presumably in the ZK, and today's new work will soon fall into that category, it only makes sense to locate the new material where you can easily find and link other relevant subjects.

The work product, though, may not be suitable for permanent membership in the ZK. How to deal with that will depend partly on the nature if your ZK system. I recently wrote a conference paper where every section was contained in the ZK, but none of them were actually z-cards (my system lets me do this). I could temporarily link a section to any other for convenience in refreshing myself on the link.

I did a lot of the planning and structural work in mind maps and I put links to the images of those mind maps into their z-cards so I could open them while I wrote text. Is that "thinking within the Zettelkasten"? Does the distinction even matter?

When the paper was done I just removed it to an area that is not formally part of the ZK. No links broke because I never included any inbound links in the paper itself. I considered the paper's z-cards as temporary, since the published version will be the definitive work.