Objective benefits and outputs from adopting a ZK - personal experiences?

achamess

When explaining ZK to people who haven't heard of it or tried it, often I get asked "so what's the point?"

Of course, we don't have clones of ourselves, so we can't do a controlled trial of ourselves, one with and one without a ZK. But we do have our historical selves to compare to.

I'd like to use this space to catalog what people see as the specific ways that ZK has helped them. Some prompts:

• Do you have more outputs from your work (articles, posts, books, pieces of software, reports, etc.)?
• Do you find yourself remembering more after processing some piece of knowledge?
• More ideas and insights in general?
• More enjoyment from learning?

I realize there are varied ways people use ZK and varied purposes, but it'll be interesting to see what people see as the specific ways ZK has improved their mental lives.

achamess

In my own life, it has helped me to retrieve past information more quickly when performing tasks like writing scientific articles and performing analysis of data.

I have also been able to easily refer people to resources and references around specific topics when they ask me.

Some psychological benefits:

• I used to read/learn something and feel like in some way, the effort was wasted when I would inevitably forget. But the paper-trail of ZK helps me feel like there is always some permanent residual benefit because I fed my knowledge system.
• Seeing the growth of my system gives me satisfaction in seeing the long-term progress, which is easy to lose sight of in the moment
• Thinking atomically helps me to see the structure of larger bodies of knowledge more easily

Sascha

Disclaimer: I might be biased..

Do you have more outputs from your work (articles, posts, books, pieces of software, reports, etc.)?

Yes. Using the method I could increase my daily word count by a couple thousand. (3000-6000 on a normal day, depending on how much reading I have to do, 8000 is a lot, 10000 is record)

I expect to become more productive when I can focus on research and writing with fewer coaching clients.

Do you find yourself remembering more after processing some piece of knowledge?

Yes. To Christian's annoyance, I have the vast majority of knowledge ready for re-call that I processed: When I start to talk I often don't stopp no more.

More ideas and insights in general?

Yes. Way more. The increase seems to be related to my ability to systematically relate ideas and idea clusters to each other.

More enjoyment from learning?

Yes. The reading part is fun, most of the time. But the processing part wasn't. Know my Zettelkasten Days are my favourite days of my working week.