Stop Merely Pointing at Ideas • Zettelkasten Method

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Stop Merely Pointing at Ideas • Zettelkasten Method

Most people take notes by merely pointing at ideas rather than engaging with them, which produces storage instead of knowledge. The cure is a genuine struggle to capture the complete essence of a single idea, written the way an essayist tries to find their way from A to B. The struggle is not a flaw in the process; it is the process.

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harr

A note on the word essay. I believe that Montaigne chose the term as a form of hedging. He didn't claim to know the absolute truth or the essence or the full picture of something. He qualified his texts as "attempts". Here's a partial quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Choosing the name essai to emphasize that his compositions were attempts or endeavours, a groping toward the expression of his personal thoughts and experiences, Montaigne used the essay as a means of self-discovery.

A note on "mini essay". They are a well-known technique in teaching and writing. I don't know how the term was popularized in the PKM community. But there are two videos I found interesting:

• Nick Milo: How to Write Mini Essays (in Obsidian)
• Odysseas: How to Write a Mini-Essay

@Sascha said:
At least try. Start running, get moving, and figure out the direction along the way.

Yes!

FernandoNobel

Very nice article!

If your notes are idea pointers, they become tasks.

This matches what I often see in knowledge work (not just in the Zettelkasten method).

Software development is a good example. When you build software, it's important to do the struggle to actually finish each block properly.

If you skip writing the documentation, don't define the public API, or don't the specify dependencies, then what you've built isn't really a completed unit of work: it's an unfinished task.

And simply accumulating a repository of these "incomplete blocks" doesn't help you move forward (whether they are notes in a Zettelkasten or code in GitHub). You can't build a wall with half-baked bricks. Every time you choose not to properly finish a piece of work, you're making things harder for your future self.

So... do the struggle now! :-)