Zettelkasting with a condition
Hello everyone!
I’m a diagnosed OCPD person trying to get the most out of my Zettelkasten. I’m curious if there are any other Zettlers who are also dealing with a condition or constraint, and how they’ve approached it.
I’ll go first.
In my case, therapy has taught me that I tend to run away from strong emotions and take refuge in problems where I feel more in control. My long list includes hi-fi systems, ergonomic keyboards, and the Zettelkasten itself. Because of my OCPD, I often get stuck in a never-ending pursuit of perfection, which ends up undermining other areas of my life. And I don’t even enjoy the results, for example: always tuning my sound system, never actually listening to music.
Since the diagnosis, I’ve given up most of these "hobbies". But I don’t want to abandon my Zettelkasten. It’s been a double-edged sword: I’ve wasted entire days migrating notes from one app to another and back again, but it’s also the only place where I can productively think about myself, turning vague thoughts into concrete ideas and growing knowledge around them.
So, what have I learned? My nemesis is choice. The time I waste before using something grows exponentially with the number of options available. Obsidian, for example, is "unsmokable" for me.
Realizing that, I stopped using folders and tags, reducing my organizational dimensions from three to one: just links. It's nothing new, I read about it several times in this forum, but it was a hard decision to take, like jumping into a pool for the first time. Now I’m so relieved I did it. Nothing bad happened. It helped me spend more time using my notes rather than organizing them.
Thanks for reading 
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
@mibanez Thanks for sharing your experience - I can totally relate to what you are saying!
@mibanez: I googled OCPD because I didn't know how it differs from OCD, and when I read the list of OCPD characteristics in Google's AI overview, I thought: that sounds quite familiar! I don't usually exhibit OCPD characteristics, but when under a lot of stress I can exhibit mildly similar defenses against anxiety.
Whether or not we have a clinically significant level of symptoms that would lead to a diagnosis such as OCPD, I guess that all of us face the same basic challenge of effective self-regulation so that we can live our best life. That challenge comes with being a living organism, which is a "condition" that we all suffer. So, as @GeoEng51 said, the challenge of self-regulation should be relatable for everyone to some degree. This includes effectively regulating our relationship to our tools and other physical things.
Part of effective self-regulation that I don't see mentioned above is what David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) calls perspective. David divides self-management into two dimensions: perspective and control.1 Combining the two dimensions generates a matrix with four quadrants into which we can classify our current level on each dimension:
There is a brief online assessment called GTD-Q where you can learn your score on each of these dimensions.
When I took the GTD-Q in 2019, my perspective score was 2 and my control score was 4, classifying me as a Micromanager/Implementer. Lack of control is generally not my self-regulation challenge; lack of perspective is. The GTD-Q feedback included the statements, "The pressures you feel may be coming from the lack of perspective, rather than from your workflow" and "Over-adherence to structure under changing circumstances can look like misguided perfectionism."
Your original post above shows that you are working on your control issues, but like me you may need to find ways to get more perspective as well.
You can read more about this in chapter 4, "The Fundamentals of Self-management" in his 2008 book Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life. ↩︎