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! :-)

harr

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

What you can also learn from software development, is that "block" and "finish" are a matter of definition. What features should a block have? What are your quality criteria? How do you know it's finished? How do you know it's good enough? How do you know the difference to harmful perfectionism?

If a "pointer" is in fact just a task, then it can and should be managed as such. Why not capture it in some kind of bug tracking system? And why not use the zettelkasten itself as such a tool to track such tasks? (I've been doing this for a while. I mark open ends and possible tasks in my ZK with tags. I fix them as needed. It turned out that I can live with a huge backlog—as long as it is properly managed.)

@FernandoNobel said:
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.

You could also choose a different metaphor. :-) You can cultivate a digital garden with the tiniest seeds and sprouts.

And if you have a more holistic approach to knowledge and think of notes primarily as nodes in a complex system of relations instead of discrete entities of knowledge (possibly clustered as molecules), then a lowly "pointer" becomes a valuable connection. (In my experience even empty notes can be valuable, simply by being nodes in the network.)

What one person might consider "ineffective", might be effective for another, because they have other priorities in their note-making practice.