Processing old notes
Trying to adopt the zettelkasten method has opened my eyes to how useless some of my old practices were.
My past method was to:
1) Read a book, usually on Kindle, highlighting things that I thought were interesting or relevant.
2) Go through the book again, taking notes on highlighted sections. (I found that this sometimes led to me nearly re-reading the whole book again to get the context behind the highlight.)
3) Transcribe notes into a notetaking app for long-term, effectively cold storage. Maybe use some tags but they were inconsistent.
4) Later, rely on my memory to cue that I had notes on something (which was actually not terrible), review the notes, realize I couldn't understand what I was saying, and either give up or go back to the book.
There were a few big issues here:
- The notes were taken for the me in the moment of reading the book, not for me in the future. Sometimes I'd have recorded something because it was very pertinent to something on my mind then, but not now.
- Too much time between highlighting and taking the notes. I now have lots of highlights but they're difficult to comprehend without looking at the book again.
- Kindle highlights were good for books that I purchased from Amazon, but not so good for books that I bought elsewhere (e.g. direct from a publisher). Navigating through highlights on the actual kindle is slow and aggravating. It's better on the desktop app, but that wouldn't "see" notes I had taken on books not purchased through Amazon. (If there's a way to do that, please tell me)
I can course-correct my future workflow for this. In the meantime, I have hundreds of pages of notes I now need to go through and evaluate. So I'm curious: for those of you who adopted zettelkasten after taking notes with other methods, how did you handle it? Did you bother going back at all, or wait to see if you actually needed that information again?
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Comments
I’ve written more about it on the forums, but my short on this is: yes, both.
All my notes were already given unique datetime codes in front, that made it more easy. Furthermore, I have an indicator file, like this: 201708192254———————————converted to ZK above.txt
Everytime I move further back in time I simply change this filename’s datetime part to reflect this.
For notes that are older but get picked out of their historical sequence so to speak, those are given a datetime part reflecting their conversion date, like this:
2020203120951-201411281055 Hegels Dialectic Method in the Logic.txt
For such files whenever the time marker gets moved back to their original dates I can cut off the conversion prepend datetime part so they fall back to their original sequence.
You might think this makes the left bar a bit more messy but I have found overall that overall it’s not the case. I have far less notes from back then that I need now for current projects or goals, which is of course highly personal and could vary wildly for others, but so far, for me, this has worked like a charm.
Plus, those files that have been recovered from the timestream and given an earlier timetravel due to their importance to me now, benefit from the extra visibility due to their particular naming.
As for the historical conversion marker, every now and then I seem to scroll by it, and then convert a few notes to my Zettelkasten formatting and move it back in time again.
Hope this helps!
I am a Zettler, ie 'one who zettles'
research: pragmatism, 4e cognitive science, metaphor | you can't be neutral on a moving train
I filter strongly. I ditch what I don't understand with reasonable effort.
I am a Zettler