A PhD student facing difficulties with his 6 months ZK...
I started a sort of Zettelkasten a few months ago, at the beginning of my PhD.
Now I'm facing several difficulties in my real life practice, so I take a break to think about my overall reading and note taking process (which is my main activity for now).
I do believe in the ZK method, but I need my ZK approach to meet my needs as a PhD student.
Efficiency : I read too slowly. I want to capture each concept I read about, considering that it may be useful, either for my personal understanding of wider concepts, or in a more practical way (choose an experimental technique for example). Maybe this is not a methodology issue but only self management...
Atomic vs. consistency : I spend a lot of time thinking before noting "simple" things : where should I note this idea/information ? Should it be added to an existing note ?
Lets take an example : I often deal with physical phenomena. What should I do with phenomena that are closely related, either because of strong interactions or because they are part of another phenomenon, or not fully meaningful on their own ? I end up with many "index notes" describing physical concepts, with links to smaller notes that I try to make "atomic", but this process sometimes seems artificial to me...Organisation (related to point 2.) : I have an INDEX note with some entry points to my ZK, for example "Friction" which is a major field in my work. The "Friction" note is an index note in itself, containing a mix of explanations (as short as possible), divided in chapters, and links to smaller notes. I am more and more uncomfortable with this approach, but I feel stuck.
Maintenance : I use Obsidian, and I have set up a tagging system to manage the notes status (from fleeting to permanent, loosely based on evergreen notes). Besides, I have a few folders : "Inbox" (fleeting), "Notes" (for what I consider permanent notes), "Ressources", "Projects" and a few others.
But I don't invest much time in the "maturation" process : basically, as soon as a note has links to others, I move it to "Notes" folder, with the lowest "maturity tag". I know that some of this notes are still very incomplete and naive. Am I right to bet on a future visit the next time I address this concept to improve the note, or should I schedule the "maturation" process ?
I would really like to have a more "natural" note-taking process, which would still be ZK-compliant...
Thank you for reading my post to the end, and for any guidance you may give to me!
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
There are a few blog posts on zettekasten.de by PhD and masters students:
I found the first post above, by Henrik, to be especially helpful and interesting (but I have never been a PhD student). Look at at the titles of Henrik's notes in the third image in that post, and compare them to what you are doing. Henrik seems to use well structured note titles, links, and searching more than he uses structure notes.
On efficiency, this post by @ctietze may be helpful:
Welcome aboard, @TriboKiv -- I believe this is a normal process to grow through
When I was a wee lad, I marked lots of interesting passages. Books were filled to the brim with anecdotes I wanted to remember, with interesting twists, with arguments, with definitions of concepts, etc.
Ars longa, vita brevis -- you don't have the time to extract every nugget and every sparkling speck of dust from texts. You're on a deadline and you have a project. So check out the Barbell Method of Reading to hopefully narrow down the scope and gloss over anything that looks exciting but doesn't pass the "can I use this now" filter in the end.
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/
Can't give any general advice on this. Cataloguing may turn out useful outside of the Zettelkasten in a spreadsheet. Some observations are mere data upon which ideas/hypotheses/claims/... are based. So they can live in an 'appendix' of sorts, as a reference.
Everyday example: instead of putting 10000 data points into a note, put the plot through these points into the note, and keep the data outside of it in a CSV.
I experimented with a dashboard -- while the idea sounds lovely, it never sticks. Maintaining it turned into busywork, and since I know what I'm working on now and don't need to remember based on past-me's plans, I just go to the place I want to go and start there. In your case, you won't forget about the "Friction" index if you work on this everyday. If you have a handful of 'departments' like this and know all entry points from the back of your hand, the index linking to all of these doesn't serve any mechanical purpose now. Maybe revisit the idea in five years.
Again, this sounds like busywork you could maybe live without? I'm personally optimizing for enjoying the process of note-taking and keeping the friction as low as possible to get stuff into the system.
Maybe I'm mis-reading your question, but: don't worry, it's ok
You have permission to make mistakes and change things over time. Start with stuff you cannot yet know to perfection, and improve notes as you go. Things mature on their own. Assigning a higher maturity level doesn't make the note more mature. So it's merely for statistical purposes. Usage in your work, which will need to be revealed over time, and depth of processing of the information to get to the interesting stuff and think interesting thoughts will be more rewarding.
There's no ISO ZK compliance committee, yet, so focus on what works for you, recognize and act on friction and bottlenecks, and make the process bearable, or enjoyable enough to look forward to do some more thinking with the tools you have.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
It’s quite a broad topic to discuss…
In these cases, I always make a necessary disclaimer.
I am not a university student.
What I can say about how to study should be taken as just my opinion—it does not come from experiences of success or failure in using the Zettelkasten at university. I'm 49 year old and I know Zettelkasten only for a few years, I haven't used for my school :-)
What I write must be understood as an opinion. I would feel guilty if a student took what I say as certain, and then it turned out to be wrong. And it could be wrong.
I don’t know for sure whether the Zettelkasten can or cannot be used in these situations.
I hope I can give you a hand, but unfortunately, I have no certainties.
As for speed, slowness is an easily understandable problem.
From what you wrote, I gather that you study scientific subjects.
I think it’s impossible for a student to develop inside the Zettelkasten "all the concepts" (as you wrote) encountered in a physics textbook.
I myself can spend hours doing proper work on just a few pages of an article—so for a physics book, it could take months…
During a day you have 2,3,4... hours for study, this is the maximum time you can you can devote to that process. There's no time to spent into rabbit holes, there's no time to make the notes very beautiful, perfect, colorful, and with flowers, tons of metadata, secondary embellishments.
Always focused to straight to the essentials.
As stated, unfortunately I don't have experience of using a Zettelkasten in university but let's see.
Maybe a student must find the way to develop within the Zettelkasten up to the Permanent Notes only the things that “may be most useful”, stopping when the available time runs out.
We need to find what are these useful things.
In the past I've taken some advice in this topic:
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/3134/integrating-zettelkasten-with-university
I don't know if @Mauro still use Zettelkasten for his study, maybe he could add something.
Maybe you should—or could—focus your effort on building the network of "true permanent notes" only around the main concepts that form the backbone of your study, and then attach to these much rougher but quicker-to-write elaborations.
Having a backbone could be useful as a memory aid for recalling the secondary concepts.
Maybe you could focus, into your Zettelkasten, on the concepts that remain hardest for you to chew and digest—those that require a more intense process to be understood. Perhaps this is where the slowness of the Zettelkasten can help you, while it may help much less to transfer the trivial concepts—those you remember and understand well even without it—into permanent notes.
Maybe in this context is much less useful spent an hour to rewrite a single formula into Obsidian because the Zettelkasten implies "rewrite". Or rewrite a theorem in your own words. For memorize this kind of entities we need to find alternatives, I think.
Some months ago I prepared for a IT certification exam in three weeks. I simply didn’t have the time to create permanent notes from a 200-page book, so instead I wrote only literature notes full of bullet points of my reflections and comments—and that writing, without turning them into permanent notes, became my “method” of learning in that month. My support notes were long and complex literature notes, that I've called "learning notes". It was writing in that process that helped me to learn and know, it is less effective than making also permanent notes, but it was doable and it was more effective than simply reading and highlighting. It was an intermediate way between a simple reading and a full Zettelkasten.
I remember clearly, in particular, that I spent more time on the concepts I understood the least. I had made a collection of “pain points,” and around those points, I tried to develop my thinking as much as possible.Having collected them, I knew that during review sessions I had to focus more on those
Here I shared a bit more about that experience of mine.
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2987/zettelkasten-on-oriented-material-writing-on-paper
Regarding the other points, I think it depends a lot on wanting to apply the “perfect” Zettelkasten method.
Try to simplify and cut down the method, even a lot. Reduce constructs, metadata, and tags to the essentials; if making atomic notes takes too much time, make less atomic notes. If you don’t know where to put things, you’ve probably created too many boxes in your system.
Reduce until your process fits within your available time.
Regarding note maturation, there are two conflicting dynamics.
Revisiting a note to let it refine so it matures is useful for learning, as it constitutes a form of repetition. On the other hand, at some point, maturing a note further stops significantly improving it, the effort no longer pays off. Try to let your notes mature if this helps you memorize, understand, and learn, not just to have the 'finally evergreen' tag on them. In your case, notes are a tool for learning, not pieces to expose to the public. Let them mature as long as necessary only, but at the same time revisit them enough so that you don’t forget what you are learning. Studying for an exam implies remembering, too, I think you can't use Obsidian during your exam test, so simply writing notes and just leaving them at the bottom for months is not enough, I think.
A very, very important thing: revisiting your process, test it for some days, and see if it works. If, after you have tried, you’ve understood and you’ve learned. If this happens, the process works; otherwise, it’s not good. Having a short cycle feedback is fundamental.
I don't know if this post can help you. I hope so :-)
Again, take this as my opinion.
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask, we are glad to help you.
Let's try to understang, in particular, what are the bottlenecks that slows your reading. For this process you can find something even in this site, I remember.
Oh my gosh, until now I thought that PhD simply meant university student... Now I've discovered that it's the third level (in Italy it's the researcher, not the student). I thought you were much younger than you actually are.
Now I realize that many things I’ve written may seem… really trivial to you...
I leave it written in its original form for the benefit of others
Which field?
I am a Zettler
Thank you very much @Andy, @ctietze and @andang76 for your detailed answers!
To give more context, I'm a 45yo mechanical engineering teacher, and I decided to start a PhD quite lately, applying the adage "Never too late"... so I'm even older that what you thought @andang76
But anyway your pieces of advice are very valuable in helping me to re-evaluate my reading and thinking process.
My questions relate not only to the Zettelkasten process of reading and note-taking, but also to my attitude towards learning on the one hand, and the generation of ideas on the other.
After reading your answers and a few links, I come to these thoughts :
I realise that I put too much focus on learning and writing down every piece of knowledge that may be useful. In fact I'm building a kind of home-made wiki on my topic. it's probably a professional bias as a teacher I must fight against.
This first experience leads me to believe that the ZK method is not suitable for all reading and learning situations, just as you said @andang76. I like the idea of "learning notes", or "literature notes", that could exist by themselves. In fact this is what I practice already in Zotero, with some notes I attach to articles and academic books I read and process. So I could just stop trying to inject theses contents inside my ZK when it's not relevant.
About the method itself, @Andy's first link is essential to go back to the primary objectives of the Zettelkasten method : processing a lot of meaningful and non-trivial ideas, practice deep thinking, make connections between ideas. This supports the 2nd point.
Notes titles should be meaningful in themselves : my current titles are just names of subjects or concepts. ("Topography techniques", "Surface layers"...). Tell me if I'm right : I should tend to notes like "Oxide layers tend to lower adhesive friction", "Oxide layers can create a third body that reduces wear"
@ctietze I agree : ZK is not a rigid frame we must respect at the risk of definitive intellectual misery. I should simplify my process until the friction is low enough to make me productive.
@Sascha my field is tribology (science of friction), a multidisciplinary area at the intersection of materials science and mechanics.
I wrote a long answer, that I tried to edit : my post disappeared after that
Is there a way to recover it, maybe with the help of an admin ?
Edit : post reappeared above!
to delete
)
(what a debut on the forum!
@TriboKiv said:
Yes, I recommend writing note titles as claims like your examples, but you can have note titles that are concepts too. Henrik's list of notes in the third image in the blog post that we mentioned above includes both types of titles. I recommend thinking of these two types of titles as two types of notes. And you could have other types of notes too (but not too many types), if it would help you stay organized. Check out Joel Chan's types of notes, for example.
Rather than "not suitable", I prefer to think that it’s useful to approach Zettelkasten flexibly and adapt it to specific situations.
Sometimes even a "partial zettelkasten" works.
Always staying within the Zettelkasten framework, when it’s useful to do something differently from the “standard practices,” it can be done differently—being aware of both the advantages and disadvantages of that deviation.
Those famous “learning notes” of mine, made while preparing for that exam, didn’t lead to any permanent notes before the exam (though I did create some permanent notes afterward), but they themselves were a support for my learning and thinking, so they have a place in the Zettelkasten. I've called that experience "Half Zettelkasten", rather "Not a Zettelkasten", because I gave up on creating a real network of permanent notes, but I did do other aspects of the Zettelkasten (the initial process from reading to writing the learning notes).
In my system, I’ve often done things in a “non-canonical” way because, in a specific case, that’s exactly what I needed.
I have several notes that resemble small wiki pages more than actual zettels, but they are like that because I needed them that way.
The canonical Zettelkasten system doesn’t include Daily Notes, but at a certain point in my life, I needed them, so I included them :-).
I don't feel comfortable with many canonical practices (note coding, use of an index, folgezettel,...), I've learned why they exists and I replaced them with other things.
Default advice is having a emergent bottom up development, but in many circumstances doing top down and systematic works better.
At the beginning of practicing Zettelkasten, it’s a good idea to follow a basic model, but it is useful from the beginning knowing that we can try to adapt it when we feel that the system as it is doesn’t work the way we’d like. For a specific case, or for the general practice.
This month I’m reading a rather “authoritative” book about running, of almost 1,000 pages.
I’m just an amateur runner.
Doing a state-of-the-art Zettelkasten “by the book” would make sense if I were a coach or preparing for the Olympics, perhaps :-).
But I don’t have that need, my purpose is only run better. If I were to do that state-of-the art zettelkasten, it would take me several months to finish this book. I’m content with creating a very modest, very partial Zettelkasten for this book, as far as it’s useful for my goals. Having zettels unusable for writing even a simple article about running, but useful enough for run slightly better.
In a totally different context I remember I spent hours and make dozens of notes from a few pages paper.
>
I write many titles like your "Oxide layers tend to lower adhesive friction".
They are perfect in many of my use cases. They compose very well with others in chains or structures when they are used in links.
I was inspired in that approach reading Matuschack notes. His considerations about note titling are a foundation for my Zettelkasten.
I don't have all notes titled in this way, anyway. Trying to always apply the principle "adopt the best approach for that specific case," many times a neutral, descriptive, or even question-style title works better for a specific note.
I think that you'll benefit from one particular paradigm shift: Instead of using a push paradigm, with which you try to put something in your Zettelkasten, you adopt a pull paradigm: Identify specific structures in your Zettelkasten that "want" material and then check your possible input against the wants of your Zettelkasten.
Think specific to your expertise: What tools and structures do you want as a engineer?
I am a Zettler