Comments

• andang76

  May 14 edited May 14

  I remember I've already read about her experience.

  I promised myself I would try to mentally solve the problems he had encountered and write about, but in reality I never did it completely

  I'm very curious and interested to see the video, now
• andang76

  May 14 edited May 14

  I've retrieved my first (and last for now) post about, written in Reddit.

  Here it is

  -

  I gave it a quick first read, next days I'd like to analyze well and address the issues that have been highlighted. I Think that they can be easily managed.

  I think that when the "standard" Zettelkasten we have been told on the internet and in books does not fit well with our attitudes, that model can be easily adapted to fit it. No one forces us to faithfully adhere to a standard model.
  The way we take literature notes or zettel, if we use or not the folgezettel, how we interpret the concept of "atomicity" or "thought", we can integrate journaling or structure notes, and many many other things.

  I think that "we must do Zettelkasten as Luhman did" is one of the most relevant misconception about learning how to do a Zettelkasten. There is a huge margin to tailor it on us like a dress

  One thing that hit me immediately in the article, the anxiety of having to and wanting to be complete and perfect. One of the characteristics of the Zettelkasten, in my opinion, is precisely being always incomplete and imperfect, in constant evolution.

  Another important property of the Zettelkasten is precisely to function as a forgetting machine. Thanks also to this property that the system remains scalable over time. We don't have to give the same value to all the thoughts. Good, useful and usable thoughts thrive, when they lose their releveance are forgotten in a natural way.

  As stated, I'll try to develop further thougths about.
• Andy

  May 14

  The final words from Nori in the video:

  I'm a little bit surprised [...] It's clear to me that the Zettelkasten Method is not what I thought it was, and it's much more flexible than I thought it was. And I guess there are just a lot of examples out there that are very cookie-cutter. And I feel like maybe what I have been converging toward is still within what could be called a Zettelkasten.

  Yes. She thought she let go of her Zettelkasten journey, but perhaps not! The journey continues.

  At an earlier point in the video, Nori said:

  For most people, a Zettelkasten is massive overkill, because the depth of processing that it requires [...] I have a full-time job, an extra job, two small kids [...] I don't have that many hours to spend on these things, and when I'm reading, it's almost like, I do want to remember things, and I do want to think deeply about them, but there's usually not enough time.

  Here I would point out that depth of processing, or systematicity, or the higher levels of understanding in the SOLO taxonomy that I mentioned back in March: these are orienting ideals that we can only approximate to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much time and other resources we have available. The depth, systematicity, and level of understanding in our minds and in our note systems will never match the ideal. We just do the best that we can do with what we have. Much of it may end up being, as Luhmann said, "a disorder".

  At the end of Nori's earlier blog post, "Goodbye, Zettelkasten. I quit", she wrote:

  I went back to what worked before and what I enjoyed and loved the most. I write. In my journal. I open it to the next empty page and write what I want to write. If it feels important a few days later, I add it to the notebook's table of contents. [...] My mind does not work in an interconnected map of atomic ideas. It works in narratives. Where the Zettelkasten is a map of the mind's landscape, free-form writing is a walk through it. [...] And just like the photographs we take on a real-life walk are not the point of it, the scribblings on the page are not the point of my mind-walks. It is the experience that counts.

  I journal in my note system. The topic of how to combine a journal and Zettelkasten (or not) has been discussed several times in the forum, most recently in April at "ZK for personal journals?".

  At this point in my life, I am less of a narrative thinker and more of a cartographic thinker, but often I write notes that simply describe my experiences that I think are important. A helpful concept here is the concept of modes of discourse that I mentioned last June. Sometimes we write in different modes such as description, narration, and argumentation. As I said, I don't do much narration these days, but you can definitely make space for different modes in your Zettelkasten.
• ZettelDistraction

  6:08PM edited 6:29PM

  I had a fallow period during which I kept Obsidian (hereinafter "Absurdian") in a small screen I have to the left of my main screen. I found this was too cramped, and I didn't like having to click on the small screen to reset the focus. What helped was to use the little screen for Zotero, which I now keep open always. This is the first program I open at startup. The reasoning is that references are almost always prior to notes, and often more important. I can indulge the collector's fallacy in Zotero.

  

  It also helped to decide what I wanted to work on. I open Absurdian when I want to take notes. If I add a reference and I still have energy to write something in Absurdian, I will add something to Absurdian, mostly after writing notes on paper. Those notes, which are the closest thing to the fleeting notes of Ahrens, get thrown out, just like the fleeting notes of Ahrens, but because their value decays instantly from the moment I write them, I usually throw them out the same day I write them, unlike Ahrens, who keeps his around for a day or two. Sometimes they get discarded within minutes.

  Their value decays as I write them because they are wrong, stupid, stupid and wrong, or wrong and stupid, and stay that way until rewritten so they are not as wrong and merely miss the point instead of being altogether stupid and irrelevant. Very occasionally they make a reasonable point worth noting. I haven't said what I mean by "stupid." That could be too harsh, but if I were being diplomatic, I mean somewhere between irrelevant and possibly interesting but not important. I don't see a reason to be so diplomatic--life is short. Since stupid isn't an unfair assessment, they end up on post-it notes. This has the virtue of limiting the stupidity to small squares of yellow papers that stick to each other in a convenient clump for the trash can.

  Reflecting on this, or merely noting the usual trajectory is almost enough to organize my thoughts. Almost.

  Post edited by ZettelDistraction at 6:29PM

  GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Andy

  7:50PM

  It's always a pleasure to see a screenshot from @ZettelDistraction. I found an "Easter egg" in this one: the tag #disorder in the Zotero window!