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How to get the big picture first?

iylockiylock
in Workflows

How can I get the big picture first and then learn the details with Zettelkasten?

I think that learning the big picture first and then learning the details is the way to learn faster. This is my experience. The video below is what I agree with.

However, when I do Zettelkasten, I spend a lot of energy turning each detail into a Zettel. When I try to follow the "Principle of Atomicity," I keep getting caught up in the details.

For example, when I learn the history of philosophy, the process is as follows. 1) Read the first chapter. 2) Write down the main events in a structure note. 3) Write a Zettel for each main event. 4) Read the next chapter and do (2)~(3).

The problem is that if you do this, you will not be able to grasp the overall flow of the history of philosophy and you will spend a lot of energy in the first part. So you will continue to fail to learn. If there was no time limit, you could solve this by doing it every day. However, in reality, I have limited time.

If you want to 'learn' a topic quickly, not just for research, you need to understand the big picture first. To do that, you need to miss out on the details.

For example, if you are learning about deep learning, getting the big picture means first learning the core concepts, and then learning the details by looking at each formula. This is like learning the process. When you check the whole map, it is easy to grasp the main content because the details are omitted as if you zoomed out, making it simple.

I think there is definitely a way to solve this, so I would like to hear advice from you experts.

Do you have your own workflow for this? Has anyone solved this problem using Zettelkasten?

Comments

  • JackhansoncJackhansonc

    Well, personally, I won't rely on Zettelkasten to get the picture. Instead, I often first do subject scoping, then ask active questions, and sometimes talk to AI to see where I still need improvement. Zettelkasten thing happens after I know I understand the topic and then I go through my active questions to see if anything arises my attention and could fall into my main notes.

  • AndyAndy
    edited April 13

    My first reaction is to think that there is no one (or the) big picture; there is only a big picture for some purpose, a conceptual structure that you construct, or that someone else constructs for some purpose. (See also Ron Giere's template "S uses X to represent W for purposes P" that I mentioned in a previous discussion.)

    When I want to start with a big picture of some area of knowledge, I look for information sources that already have ready-made structures in the form of a good detailed table of contents (or TOC, and often more than one TOC: a brief TOC and a full TOC), and other tables and diagrams. Good textbooks will have all of these, and for this reason good textbooks are often the best place to start. I often copy-and-paste the whole table of contents of an information source into my reference/bibliographic note for that source, because the source's TOC structure is so valuable as someone else's big picture for some purpose. Obviously one's own structure notes in one's own note system serve a similar purpose, but if you don't already have such big-picture structure notes, go looking for them in published information sources, where they are called TOCs, tables, timelines, etc.

    I'm reminded of Richard Saul Wurman's acronym LATCH as a way of remembering some of the most important kinds of structures; here is a passage from his introduction to Richard Saul Wurman & Peter Bradford (eds.), Information Architects (Zürich: Graphis Press, 1996), emphasis added:

    As I looked into the organization of information, I realized that there were only five ways to do it. They can be remembered by the acronym LATCH: L) by location, A) by alphabet, T) organized by time (many museum shows are organized by timeline; the famous Charlie Eames 'Franklin and Jefferson' timeline of those two great men was probably one of the best ever devised), C) by category (as I've alluded to; it's the way department stores are organized), and H) by hierarchy, from the largest to the smallest of something, from the reddest to the lightest red, from the densest to the least dense, and so on. The primary choice of which way you organize something is made by deciding how you want it to be found. [...] But, the structures of information go well beyond basic organization. Many principles of clarity can be employed. For example, you only understand something relative to something you already understand, whether visually, verbally, or numerically. [For example] Something will have an understandable size if it is related to the size of something you know. [...] In 1962, now more than 30 years ago, I produced my first book with plans of 50 cities in the world, all the same scale. Nobody had done that before. [...] It has been 30 years now that I have been lecturing about this oncoming wave of greater and greater amounts of data, and the need to establish school courses and degrees to manage it—the architecture of information.
    Post edited by Andy on
  • JasperMcFlyJasperMcFly

    Skim a chapter for an overview. Do not outline or summarize. Pick out one concept or idea at a time and write a note about that. There is no need to rewrite the book, just pick out key ideas that are useful to you or are foundational concepts you need to understand for your domain. You are taking too many notes on things best left in the book.

  • AndyAndy

    I wouldn't be able to "grasp the overall flow of the history of a topic", as @iylock wanted to do, without an outline or timeline of some kind.

    So, "Do not outline" is not advice that I would follow.

    As I said, if I wanted to start with a big picture first, and I don't already have one, then I would look for an outline, timeline, or similar structure that's already available in an information source, something that I can make sense of with my current knowledge without too much effort learning many new details at first.

    The point of putting such a structure in my note system would be that I can then build on it and transform it with additional knowledge in the future. Putting something like a big picture in the note system makes it something that I can transform like an object: again, not the big picture, but an (evolving) big picture. This becomes knowledge building instead of just learning.

  • iylockiylock

    @Jackhansonc After reading your article, I realized once again that Zettelkasten depends on the person using it. Pre-work is something that I have to think about. I used to be reluctant to talk to AI, but I tried it and it was quite helpful.

  • iylockiylock

    @Andy Wow! Amazing. You made me see this clearly. Thank you.
    I especially like Ron Giere's template.
    Thanks to you, my vague concept of the big picture has been concretized.

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