What is happening in your ZK journey this week? April 21, 2025
Current ZK Report
Swimming with Ideas
This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼
Do you want a live, one-on-one video chat with me about our adventures in Zettelkasting? Ping me at @Will, and we can schedule a time.
Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:
- It has been a busy couple of weeks. I'm freelance writing for a local weekly. I've been covering films and a film festival. This is a stretch for me as I'm an outsider in the moviegoer culture.
- I was caught off guard by @Sascha's comments about self-censoring and writing in public. I had never considered that "personal censorship" and the "internal editor" were the limiting beliefs for not sharing notes. These beliefs erupt from exposure to social media and are a symptom when people live isolated lives. I’d argue that openness isn’t a weakness but a strength. Ideas don’t grow in the dark. They sharpen when exposed to a trusted community. As Andy Matuschak puts it, the goal is to invite thoughtful feedback from those who care. Trusting a smart, critical audience isn’t naive. It’s how blind spots get exposed and thinking evolves. Public iteration is where ideas get tested and improved. Bertrand Russell nailed it: intellectual progress depends on minds clashing, not hiding.
- I'm rethinking my stance on a public zettelkasten. Pieces of my zettelkasten are ripe for scrutiny. I've dipped my toes in this stream by making some notes public. https://willsimpson.netlify.app/
Books I'm reading or have read this week:
- Cohen, Rhaina. The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Unabridged, Macmillan Audio, 2024. Friendship Project. Everand Audio
- Duffy, Chris. Let’s Hang Out. 2024. Friendship Project. Everand Audio
- Duhigg, Charles. Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. First large print edition, Random House Large Print, 2024.
- Brown, Kimberly, and David Michie. Happy Relationships: 25 Buddhist Practices to Transform Your Connections with Your Partner, Family, and Friends. Unabridged, Dreamscape Media, 2025. Friendship Project. Everand Audio
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
★★★★★
The "My rolling twenty-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.
Let me know if you want to see, discuss, or critique these notes.
My twenty-day zettel production
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Zettelkasten Statistics
★★★★★
1465575 Total word count
21387 Total link count
4323 Total zettel count
★★★★★
20-day trend: 17/12 ⬆︎
100-day trend: 91/122 ⬇︎
1.84 notes/day since day zero (20181114).
32 zettels in my proofing oven.
34 incrementally improved over the past 20 days.
–––––
Kinship Project 20250417
- This thinking canvas aims to foster my thinking about enriching and expanding my ideas about who my kin are.
Should I let ideas grow in public? 20250417
- Publishing rough notes invites inspection and imperfection into the creative process and transforms thinking into a living practice, even if the destination isn’t clear.
Writing from the Inside Out 20250417
- Every story operates on two levels, combining visible elements with a more profound emotional truth that provides resonance, purpose, meaning, and lasting impact.
B-Buddhist Happiness Practices 20250414
- Happy Relationships: 25 Buddhist Practices to Transform Your Connections with Your Partner, Family, and Friends.
A Task List Kills Creativity 20250414
- Thinking in modes rather than tasks creates a more fluid, focused, and sustainable way to engage with complex creative work.
How Many Hours to Make Friends 20250411
- Friendships form and grow in a time-rich, repeated, and casual social interactions of lived experience.
Drawing Layered Fir Trees 20250408
- Sketching Project
Simulated Social Media Feed Using AI 20250406
- Transform passive scrolling into mindful thinking.
The Strength of Weak Ties 20250404
- The Strength of Weak Ties' Mark S. Granovetter Johns Hopkins University 1973
Mechanical Steps to Organic Bonds 20250403
- Investing in friendships is not a distraction from growth but an essential parallel track.
The Strength of Weak Ties 20250403
- The Strength of Weak Ties' Melissa De Witte, Stanford University 2023
Outreach Foundation 20250401
- Modern productivity norms obscure the hidden power of casual social interaction.
Introductions Can Make People Remember You 20250401
- Storytelling makes self-introductions memorable.
Notes are like a stamp collection 20250401
- The Collector’s Fallacy—the mistaken belief that gathering information is equivalent to understanding or progress.
Coloring a Line Drawing 20250331
- Sketching Project
Watercoloring Page Setup 20250331
- Sketching Project
AI is Changing Writing 20250330
- Writers face competition and pressure to collaborate with rapidly improving AI tools. Readers care about quality.
I hope my contribution is helpful, and you have even better ideas.
Will Simpson
My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I am continuing to develop my knowledge, ideas and reflections about running, veganism, nutrition.
The zettelkasten shows to be a valuable companion in this work.
I also think it stems from message boards where people are too mean to each other and over sensitive at the same time because they over-identify with their ideas vs. just treating the idea as something detached from you.
@Will on the topic of a public zettelkasten, I'd be open to doing an experiment of a shared public zettelkasten if you or anyone else from Zettelkasten.De (my version of a trusted community) is interested in doing so. I believe you can do it by using Obsidian and having everyone get their sync service or use obsidian and have it be a shared Github. If this is possible for The Archive, I'd be open to trying it out that way either.
I'd love to have a public zettelkasten that I contribute 2-3 notes to per week or that I'm able to browse the notes you create and leave commentary or thoughts on.
In terms of what I've been working on this past week. I've continued my journey of refactoring my notes from my old vault into my new one (will probably take a long while, have 8,000 notes). As I add the notes, I add content to the ones that were barebones (notes that are basic outlines, blank notes), clean up the ones that are messy, and try to add every new note to an existing structure note.