If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

A Zettelkasten (German: 'slipbox', plural Zettelkästen) or card file consists of small items of information stored on Zettels (German: 'slips'), paper slips or cards, that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.

Zettelkasten - Wikipedia

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method - Sascha Fast

A Zettelkasten is a writing tool meant to create an external, dynamically linked notes environment (even database) riddled with varying trains of thought that can be pulled from and expanded on in written content. Emphasis on "written content."

A Zettelkasten is Not for "Making Connections" - Bob Doto

The Zettelkasten method is a personal strategic process for thinking and writing.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Zettelkasten Method - Zenkit

A Zettelkasten is just a low-overhead, high-value way of creating, managing, and making use of a system of notes.

What is a Zettelkasten? - Chris Krycho

A Zettelkasten is a method of organising short, single-point notes and cross-referencing them.

I Do Not Use Zettelkasten - Stephen Millard

What are my options for this review?

• Find my favorite definition.
• Create my own definition.
• Ask the community for a good definition.

And use our survey: Part 1 and Part 2

---

Currently I have found a nice balance between reworking older notes and adding new ones. Two experiments have turned out well:

1. I've been running a tagging experiment for a while, and now I'm happy enough with it that I know I'll keep it, or something like it. I'll make a separate post about it another time.
2. I've been replacing lists of links in structure notes, with a flowing text which includes the links but puts them in context for an overall picture.

An example of both is here:

The workflow tagging system I've used is 'Import, Tidy, Understand, Export', with further nested tags depending on the note details. I'll expand on that another time.

In the past, there would've been a list of links here, which themselves have further links to other notes. But weaving them together into a mini-text is just so much more enjoyable for me. It's nicer to look at, and turns the list of links into a mini-note in itself.

I'm definitely keeping the 'flowing text' structure note as the replacement for the list-style structure note. I'll keep experimenting with workflow-based tagging to see how I can improve it. I'm not completely satisfied with that just yet, but I'll use something along those lines

---

And how is it going for the rest of you? What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month?

I don’t intend to compete with Obsidian, because that app is really powerful. But I am developing this app to actually help people to understand ZettelKasten from scratch and guide them properly through practice and creating notes.

So, I developed a small app that basically serves as an initial guide to the method: It walks you through it step by step and reminds you to review your temporary notes weekly instead of letting them pile up forever. It gives you a nudge when it thinks a group of notes is substantial enough to become a MOC. It suggests creating your own permanent notes when you already have many on a single topic. Basically, the “training wheels” I believe it's needed when someone starts with ZK!

Obviously, this app isn't perfect at all. Maybe, if you try it, you will find so many errors or mismatches with the method I can amend later, but I am excited I can apport something to this community about this

• The app is 100% offline. No account needed, No Servers, No Subscriptions; actually, nothing leaves your device. You can make back ups of your notes and their connections in JSON, but you can also “export/import” using Markdown + “[[wikilinks]],” so if after using this app you want to move everything to Obsidian, or the opposite, bring everything from there over here and use this app as your main ZK... You can do so without any issues!

*** IT’S 100% FREE! *** The only thing I want to know is whether this is useful to anyone here or to anyone in general!

I’ll be happy to hear your feedback: https://zettlekasten-en.netlify.app/

I opened this discussion here just to ask you something that for me is interesting.

What do you think a perfect ZettelKasten App should have?

• For example:
• I know that exists too much discussion about the perfect method, because there are people that defends the Folgettzel, Atomicity, etc.. And also, there are people that don't do it and prefers a more primitive version of ZK... However, nowadays with all technology. If you were to build some ZK app to store your notes, how you would like that to be?

1. Would you think it should store only text, or should contain some functionality to upload images too?
2. Would you think it should have atomicity or simply categorize each notes as if it was an archive system?
3. Would you think it should hav tags, categories, or some type of identified the notes or simply respect the ZK essentials and treat each note as what it is.. "a note"?
4. There are more questions I have, but they will come up down below in discussions...

I am wondering these things, because maybe ZK is not so popular as "mainstream". But it is still perfect for everyone who learn about this system. I have met people that haven't heard about this, and then they learned it and fell in love with the method haha.

How you think the best ZK App should be?

I asked for feedback and consulting which project I should attack next. The title of this journal gives away the answer which project is now on the front burner.

Currently, the draft sits at 13k words. I expect the first draft to arrive at 60k words before I will do the first round of pruning and editing. But I am always wrong about the scope. So, don't take my estimate to seriously.

I adapted the vault structure that I used for the basic training protocol:

Live long and prosper
Sascha

1. Define in Zettel, reference Literature

This is the approach seemingly taken here[^1] where the Zettel notes contain the mathematical definition in its entirety and then may hold links to other relevant definitions and perhaps the piece of literature it was extracted from. This method is useful for:

• Linking to specific definitions from other Zettel notes
• Quick, simple reading of a specific definition (atomicity)
• Reading in parts (you don't have to update the Literature note, just add more Zettel notes)

The main problem I see with this approach is it seems to violate the spirit of the Zettel notes being (1) your own ideas, (2) not just exact quotes from a piece of literature you have read, and (3) you may end up filling what is supposed to be your vault of your ideas with other people's definitions.

2. Define in Literature

The second approach I could imagine is keeping all the definitions extracted from, say, a textbook in the Literature note for that book. This perhaps keeps more in the spirit of how I understand the Literature vs. Zettel note split to be. The idea being that exact quotations (which definitions are by technicality) should go in the Literature note, that is what it is for! But then it becomes harder to reference specific definitions, and in the case of a textbook, you may end up with an enormous Literature note filled with 10s if not 100s of definitions, which may be difficult to reference.

Please experienced zettler's, give me guidance! How have you/would you handle(d) this?

[1] https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2604/latex-zettelkasten-project-for-mathematicians-and-other-latex-users

Terminal Velocity opens a note in whatever your default terminal editor is. For me, that's Vim.

Out of the box, and using Vim, Terminal Velocity lacks wiki-style links. Henri Bourcereau's easy-to-install, wikilink Vim plugin largely solves this glaring deficit by providing GitHub Gollum-style wiki links to any Vim buffer. However, preferring the link behaviour of The Archive, I forked the wikilink plugin, calling it wikilink2, to allow links to contain partial filenames — particularly useful when the links are file identifiers.

I've yet to find a way to display images (NeoVim, perhaps?). I'll report back if and when I find a solution.

Software links
Terminal Velocity: https://vhp.github.io/terminal_velocity
Vim: https://www.vim.org
Wikilink2: https://github.com/Mooie/wikilink2

But where should I begin? I shifted one book from left to right, one from right to left. I read the titles and the subtitles. Two of the books are about writing, three are about thinking. My favourite book by Sönke Ahrens is about writing, thinking and 'learning'. Yes, about 'learning'! Only one author mentioned 'learning'.

I should mention that 'learning' is one of my favourite topics in my Zettelkasten. My current area of interest is 'self-directed learning'. To cut a long story short, here is a context map:

The Archive needs a refresher for this new era. It hardly makes sense for our team of 1 developer (me) to maintain two styles for backward compatibility going forward, so when this releases, it'll be macOS 26 or newer, and not compatible with older macOS versions.

We planned an overhaul of the UI anyway in the summer, but now we actually need to embrace this much harder than expected.

The goals for the visual update are:

• Remove "UI chrome". Focus on the note contents and make the toolbar, tabs, etc. less prominent. That gels well with Tahoe's look, although the default is often rather broken. With this, we rethinking the saved search display and consider to get rid of the thick sidebar completely.
• Focus. Focus on the text, on the paragraph, on the part you're working on. Typewriter mode was an essential step 8 years ago, but we can do more with this and want to experiment with section/sentence/paragraph focus modes.
• Search and links. These are our means of navigation. Links were always a priority, but with a cleaned-up UI, we can play with new ways to make search work better and show more relevant context. I'm actually excited for this a bit because the sidebar, while serviceable, also got in the way at times.
• Responsiveness. The Archive started as a single-window application with one configuration, but grew into a multi-window, multi-tab application. There's potential in making it more nimble by adjusting the window contents to fit the space you give the app. macOS can do some basic tiling nowadays, so you can have 50:50 splits and such. In this world, we want to look at ways to make smaller side-windows more useful, so that you can work in a split setup to take notes while you read a website, for example. The current UI is too clunky for that.

I'll be sharing more of the process with you in the upcoming days and weeks as I prepare the app for the next stage.

What of the following book projects is your favorite, and you'd make me to attack next if you had the chance?

• The Deep Knowledge Work Practice. It will cover all the elements of the practice that aims to produce knowledge. Topics covered: The psychology of knowledge work, a GOST-frame work for knowledge work (Goal, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics), how to treat one's brain like an athlete is treating his body, grounding knowledge to avoid the ivory tower, setting up a healthy information diet, the difference between information consumption and digestion, tools and workflows to process lectures and podcasts, reading tools, processing habits (of which Zettelkasten work is one possible element), using discussions and debates to foster learning and knowledge production, Co-thinking, Co-Thinking with AI.
• Knowledge Work Craftsmenship. It will cover a wide range of specific tools and techniques to create knowledge. It is based on my (almost 1.5 decades long) work on the nature of knowledge and my coaching experience. Topics covered: In depth examination of the knowledge building blocks (difference between metaphors and models, simple meta-frameworks for arguments, types of models and their utilities like systems, maps, tables), building block APIs (from empirical observation to argument, from definition to model, etc.), using AI as well.
• How to Work a Book. Pretty self-explanatory. Perhaps it is best explained by distinguishing from the most famous book by Adler and van Doren How to Read a Book. They put the book as the main object of interest at the center of their approach. To me, books are fuel. They can be clean fuel, dirty fuel, slow burning, fast burning, high energy density, low energy density etc. The best reader can burn any fuel. The metaphor breaks when it comes to direction and substance. A book is not only fuel but also the source of the material of which we build further knowledge and they in themselves are a direction of learning. Naturally, I cover this aspect as well.

Live long and prosper
Sascha

I have difficulties to finish the next planned article. I'd like to ask for help. I am not sure what is missing in the explanation for non-sport-scientists, so the example is actually illustrative.

It is a short article. So, if you like to beta read the article, please send me a private message.

Live long and prosper
Sascha

PS: This article provides content that is part of the knowledge craftsmanship

When I was still active in various online forums for training, it was part of the routine for many athletes to keep an online diary. Interestingly, a lot of the most interesting discussions branched off from these diaries. So, I like to start this as an experiment.

Back then, it was part of the forum member's post training routine: Cool down, drink the protein shake and then check the diary for comments and submit your last session there.

Scholarly journaling is a practice that seems to become trendy occasionally, but seems not to stick. I wonder if it is because of the implementation problem: Whatever isn't self-reinforcing has to be implemented carefully by developing habits and maintaining them.

What if it becomes a social practice? Social practices are indeed self-reinforcing.

This is at the core of this experiment: If scholarly journaling becomes a social practice, will it become a more stable practice? And if yes, what are the effects of it?

For those of you who would like to take a deeper dive into the data than I provide here, there is a reference section for every chapter listing the research articles with the findings I discuss. Keep in mind, however, that I haven’t listed the dozens (and occasionally hundreds) of additional articles that provide background and meaning to this original research. So please consider the reference section for each chapter a starting point rather than a complete list. Additionally, I don’t include footnotes linking specific ideas in the text to their references, as I find such footnotes distracting when I read books like this one. Rather, I’ve used footnotes to highlight details and tangential ideas that might interest some readers but not others. ("Introduction")

Robert Wright, The God Test (2026):

For some time now, information technology has been eroding the logic behind footnotes and bibliographies. Thirty-five years ago, if an author provided only a fragmentary reference—like “a 1986 paper on back-propagation”—the average reader had little hope of figuring out the full reference, much less tracking down the source. But today if you enter that sequence of words in a good search engine, you’re one click away from reading the paper.

This helps explain why, though several of my past books have devoted more than fifty pages to footnotes and bibliography, this book devotes zero pages. I’d guess that 95 percent of the passages in this book that would normally carry a footnote provide enough information for readers to google their way to the source.

And what about the other 5 percent? Well, I’d guess that 95 percent of those sources can be found via a good large language model. Just show the chatbot a passage from the book and ask it what source it thinks I’m referring to, or what sources might back up what I’m saying.

I know what you’re thinking: But what about the 5 percent of the 5 percent—the handful of references (1 in 400 if you do the math) that can’t be found even through the magic of the latest technology? That’s one thing this note on sources is for. Below I list five sources that underlie specific parts of this book and that might be hard to find on the basis of those parts alone. Then, after that list, I name some sources that I found generally valuable as I researched this book. ("A Note On Sources")

I find this trend of not including footnotes and references in recently published books disappointing. Granted, these books are not meant to be academic, and the lay readers they target may not care about the fine print. Personally, though, I read academic-adjacent books hoping they will connect me to trustworthy, expert-vetted information through authors with a baseline reputation for rigor. I rely on these authors to have performed quality control on the information they are communicating. Not having footnotes and/or a bibliography makes it much harder for readers to dig deeper into specifics, which is often a major reason to pick up a book to begin with.

Admittedly, web search and now LLMs have eroded the need for the meticulous curation of sources traditionally found in bibliographies. Still, the trend, it seems to me, degrades the quality of learning. It also runs counter to what methods like Zettelkasten encourage: rigorous citation and a clear separation between sources and one’s own thoughts.

Who is with me on this?

For the past several years, I’ve been primarily using and writing notes on my laptop. When I needed to access these notes on the go, I used 1Writer. I treated this as a read-only exercise. I didn’t really trust the syncing, and so I would use Drafts to jot down something that I wanted to add to my notes later. 1Writer was initially terrible for searching 10,000 files, and so made even read-only access somewhat pointless. However, a note to the developer improved things significantly, and then learning to sort by title rather than by other attributes, made 10,000 notes workable. Still, this was always going to be my last resort platform.

I’ve loved timestamp prefixes, and have used some version of them on my files for probably at least 15 years. Zettelkasten folks were instrumental in getting me to drop seconds, and use a minute-based timestamp as a kind of universal ID. However, working with these prefixes was always somewhat difficult even on an 11- or 13-inch screen. And it was nearly impossible on mobile. So again, mobile was my platform of last resort.

Having a kid made all of this untenable. Holding a sleeping baby is not a good time to be using a laptop, but it is a fine time to be using a phone. A child playing quietly in the corner is inevitably distracted if a laptop is pulled out. The units of concentration available with a kid around are largely mobile- and social-media shaped. I suspect this is part of the reason for the popularity of social media. And yet, I would prefer to be using such interstitial moments for deep reading and long-form writing.

It took me two years to accept that this can only be done by giving up the priority of computers over phones. I kept holding out for my old patterns of attention to reemerge. I’m no longer sure they ever will. The majority of my time available to spend on reading and writing may very well come in the form of small screens and in-between moments. How I use that time is going to be significant.

Ironically, this suggests a liaison between paper and phone. Paper books and paper notebooks are often already in a mobile-friendly format. They lend themselves to being dropped and resumed quickly. And while paper books are faster to read, paper notebooks are slower to write. In this way, they are like phones, enforcing a discipline of slowed-down, ruminative writing.

The key is to have the infrastructure available to lean into this. Paper books require bookmarks. Paper notebooks require pens. And working to analyze and synthesize concepts across a large number of notes, requires affordances for the platform you will actually be using.

I don’t know my or anyone else’s future. But the evidence I’ve seen points in the direction of increasingly interstitial and mobile technology. And if that can be used, not for mindless entertainment, but to support rich and meaningful thought, then I think this may actually reawaken and reinvigorate older styles of cognitive work.

For me, that means starting my note system from scratch.

I’m currently using Obsidian mobile. I’m writing more slowly, composing long-form text using only my thumbs. I’m exploring ways to read dense PDFs on my phone.

And mainly, I’m confronting the assumptions I had when I thought a laptop was going to be the main place “real work” would occur. I no longer think this is a safe or reasonable assumption. Instead, I’m working on discovering what’s next.

See also: Saschas' Definition of Good

I had a chunk of one comment go missing. Maybe it was an operator error but it's hard realistically to see how.

"kind" <-> "child" sounds like a German translation kind of thing. Whatever, something has messed with some recent posts and it has the smell of AI.

Does anyone know about this?

I learned about the Zettelkasten method about five years ago and have been on this forum for the same amount of time, contributing posts and comments fairly regularly. I've seen the discussions on the different apps people are using for their Zettelkasten.

I was looking for something that would allow me to incorporate a daily journal, task planning and management, and resource identification into my Zettelkasten. For the past year or two, I have been using Logseq, which is an excellent program. I learned a lot from exploring all of its capabilities and interacting with the Logseq community. Unfortunately, several issues have started to weigh on my mind:

1. I really don't like the flaky synching between Logseq on my computer and the iOS Logseq app, which happened way too frequently
2. I don’t like that Logseq is going towards a database model, whereas other software has stayed with plain text files and a simple folder structure
3. While Logseq has excellent task management, I wish its integration with a calendar app was better (honestly, it could be much better)

As a consequence, over the last couple of weeks I have gone back to another app that I really liked - NotePlan. It provides all the features that I'm looking for with none of the downsides that bugged me in Logseq. The reason I did not fully adopt it before was my ignorance about how it "finds" each note or zettel and how its linking worked. Also, I was daunted by the need to massage all my Zettelkasten files to fit into NotePlan, mostly associated with my rudimentary Python scripting skills.

So, in an effort to give NotePlan a fair consideration, I educated myself about how it works, internally, and I spent some time upgrading my Python skills. The result is that I have transferred all of my Zettelkasten, journal notes, and tasks to NotePlan. I've been very happy to overcome some of the issues that I found with Logseq. Everything new that I'm learning about NotePlan has only increased my pleasure in using it.

NotePlan is not "free" - you either get a subscription through the Apple app Store or access it through Setapp. Since I already subscribe to Setapp to access other software, that was a no-brainer.

I'm still in the early stages of test-driving NotePlan, so I'll provide some updates as I learn more.

The problem is that I find myself fleshing out my ideas as I write, including excursions and embellishments that will make it easier to recall and use the idea, but may lead to Zettels of two or three hundred words instead of one hundred. I see two advantages in this: first, it gives me ideas for other Zettles along the way, and, second, the expanded ideas are easy to combine into finished papers.

Finally, this approach appears to meet my workflow. Breaking my long flowing ideas into a sequence of shorter Zettels takes will-power, the need for which the Zettelkasten approach is supposed to reduce.

But this does seem to run counter to the fundamental "less is more" idea on which Zettelkasten is based.

My intended audience for the idea in this Zettel is students in technical curricula or young engineers (many of whom have yet to master a concise English sentence, let alone paragraphs or papers).

I'd appreciate any comments you might care to make.

202411302052 Writing Style

In writing, the idea you want to convey is the most important thing. The next most important is the style in which you do it.

You write to convey an idea from your mind to another's. That mind may belong to another person, or it may belong to you, sometime in the future. (Who'll really be another person by then anyway.) Your style is package in which that idea is wrapped. Like any package it must be rugged enough to withstand the journey, yet delicate enough to be unwrapped at the other end.

Here are a few quick thoughts:

1. Active voice is better than passive. "The results showed..." rather than "It was observed that..."
2. Shorter is better:
   a. Short words are better than long, and the old words, when short, are best of all (Winston Churchill). (Technical topics sometimes require long technical words. Pick the shortest and most intuitive and try to make their meaning clear, either explicitly or in context.)
   b. Short sentences are better than long. Each sentence should contain one thought, unless two ideas are so closely related that they stand better together (as do these two).
   c. Paragraphs should contain a collection of sentences (thoughts) that convey one concise idea. The key idea of the paragraph should be compact enough to be stated clearly in a single sentence. The rest the sentences should contain just enough examples, nuances, and details to make the key idea clear---and no more. If it takes two sentences to state the a paragraph's key idea, then probably there are two ideas, each of which deserves a paragraph of its own.
3. Follow the rules... The rules of grammar have evolved to make it easier to present thoughts clearly. Use them. You needn't be a grammar Nazi, no one will be diagramming the sentences in your paper, but you do need to understand the basics. I suggest a simple book such as Strunk's (or Strunk and White's) "Elements of Style" or William Zinsser's "On Writing Well." (I particularly like "Elements of Style" because it's broken into small chunks. I used to keep a copy on my desk to take to the mens room.)
4. ...Except when it's better to break them. Sometimes you can be more effective by bending, or breaking, the rules. True fact! But you need to know how and when. Break them only when doing so will clearly improve the reader's understanding---and knowing when that happens will come only with experience. And speaking of experience...
5. Read good writing. Knowing the rules is one thing; seeing them in action is another. Read books by good authors: Churchill for history, Heinlein and Hemmingway for fiction, Tolkien for fantasy, Gilbert Strang and Richard Feynmann for technical writing---among many others. Absorb the rhythm of their writing: the words they use, the way they construct their sentences, and the way they use those sentences to build their paragraphs. If you read enough writing by good authors you'll naturally absorb what makes them good and it will make your writing better.
6. And, most important, write! (and not just papers). Saving your writing for official occasions is like suiting up for the big game after skipping all the practices. You don't make your first run a marathon. When you highlight a book passage, write a marginal note to explain why. When you read something interesting, write a note summarizing and explaining why it caught your interest. Write essays to yourself. I practice by writing notes (and short essays) summarizing what I read and what I think. The result is a freezer full of thoughts and ideas I can pull out and defrost whenever I need them. (I organize my notes using the Zettelkasten system. See https://zettelkasten.de.)

But all of this finally boils down to one simple principle. Anything helps get your idea from your mind into someone else's is good writing. Anything that doesn't is bad. Keep to that, and you can't go too far wrong

[[202411301712 Writing]]
[[202411301730 Writing as a Jungle Gym]]

Atomicity refers to the idea that knowledge is made up of discrete building blocks. The Principle of Atomicity is a processing direction in note-taking, aiming for one knowledge building block per note. It is not a rigid law, but a guiding compass. It needs to be contextualised for each application.

https://zettelkasten.de/atomicity/guide/

I would like to briefly introduce Baimon Zettelkasten, my personal digital Zettelkasten, which I now use exclusively. Perhaps this variant might also be of interest to those who like the idea of a Zettelkasten on a USB stick.

The key points here:

Baimon is free software (GPL license) and runs in your browser on a little Python server. The 1.1 MB zip file contains a whole suite of tools for writers, teachers, students, and every Zettelkasten enthusiast – comes with many themes and 33 languages. Modes: Desk as reading mode, editor with live preview, text composer, weblog generator, comparison mode. As a single-user desktop app, it is ultra-portable (Zettelkasten on a stick). All text files (Zettel) in Markdown are autosaved, not manipulated with any extra code, and are stored locally, ready to work with them in any other text editor. Many tools like automatic backlinks, a local node treeview for each Zettel (depth 4), export, import, simple link and media insertion to your texts, link to a text block in another file, formula rendering, serendipity functions, and much more. Baimon also can handle large note collections (tested with 10.000 *.md files).

I look forward to any testers and helpful feedback on possible improvements.

You can download the program here: djaakthungna.info

Ahoy from Thailand,
Chris

I'll give you an example of my experiment in conversing with ChatGPT. Bear with me as I explain a few details...

I am reading the book "Super Gut" by Dr. William Davis, and learning a lot about the human microbiome from it. While many of the ideas and statements in the book are referenced to solid scientific studies, I noticed some of Dr. Davis' statements are based only on anecdotal evidence and a few do not jive with my limited understanding of the topic (from previous reading). When this happens, the obvious question is "Why?".

Here's one instance. "...removing wheat and grains yields substantial improvements in GI (gastro-intenstinal) health that aid in your efforts to reverse dysbiosis...and regain overall health". His stated logic is based on the toxic affects of gliadin (a component of gluten) and wheat germ aggultinin on the intestinal wall. I understand this concept when applied to wheat, and have observed the benefit for myself when removing wheat from my diet (I have long known I was "gluten sensitive", but it took a while to find out what that actually meant). My departure from Dr. Davis came when he applied the reasoning to all grains, as the "offending" components in wheat are not found in other grains, such as millet, sorghum and teff, which I use to make a gluten free, sourdough bread that causes me no problems.

Apologies for too much detail, but I was trying to explain the type of internal discussion that I get into when reading a non-fiction book. I could (and have) gone to other sources when such a question arises - other books, internet searches, etc. In this case, I decided to instigate a conversation with ChatGPT with this question: "Dr. Davis argues for the removal of wheat from your diet based on the effects of gliadin (in the gluten) and WGA. He also says to avoid other grains. However, other grains such as sorghum or millet do not contain gluten or WGA. Therefore, there seems to be much less reason to avoid them. Please comment on this idea."

The conversation went on for a while, exploring not just gliadin and WGA, but also other types of lectins in various grains and vegetables. The conversation is sporadic and progressive, both because I want to further explore some aspects of the answer I get from ChatGPT and because I continue reading Dr. Davis' book and coming up with supplemental questions. Regarding the former, I am very careful to poke at and explore all aspects of what ChatGPT tells me and not just accept its answer at face value.

I intend to continue the conversation with ChatGPT as I read more in Dr. Davis' book, to see where it leads. At present, my impression is that I am getting a more nuanced assessment of the ideas in this book than I might on my own, but at the same time, wonder if that is actually the case.

Any comments would be much appreciated.

---

This month I'm doing overdue, but important, reworking.

The big revisit and rewrite

I've had a ZK for over three years now, and there are many groups of notes I always knew I should revisit and rework in some way. Finally, something has pushed me to stop putting it off and really do that.

I've decided to start looking for a new job. I have notes from three years ago that I made from books about cover letters, psychometric testing, and interviewing skills. These are some of the oldest ZK notes I have. They were never well organized or deeply linked, as at the time it was rushed work. But I always put off revisiting them because I didn't need them anymore after finding a job, so they were no longer a priority.

But now that I'm going to search for a new role, they've become some of the most important notes I have.

Today I started reworking them one by one. The main work is rewriting, and synthesizing different sources, but also I'm taking the opportunity to organize them better and have better links. However, some of them need to be updated so much that they actually need to be replaced with notes from completely new sources. Here are two examples of things that have changed a lot in three years:

1. We used to write cover letters and resumes thinking about how the human on the other side would read them. Today, companies use AI to screen applicants, and the AI creates the shortlist for a human to look at. So we need to think about how an AI would interpret our documents.
2. As it's almost always electronic these days, some of the old 'golden tips' are meaningless today. E.g. printing your cover letter and resume on expensive paper and practicing a beautiful ink signature.

Now that I'm getting some momentum on reworking these older notes, I want to keep up that momentum afterwards and revisit all older notes that I haven't looked at for a while.

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And how is it going for the rest of you? What's happening in your Zettelkasten this month?

Here is my current thinking, right off its z-card:

A note system should -

• Align with peoples' minds fit well with how a person's mind works;
• Be associative notes should associate with others;
• Building blocks notes should act like building blocks;
• Restore The Context notes and structure should remind one of
  and restore one's concepts;
• Keep attention apply principles of cognitive and psychological
  science to overcome attention drift;

• Surface tacit semantic information.

  To have a note system we should have it work well with how a person's mind works. That is partly associatively. So notes should associate with others. Humans have learned that using building blocks is useful. So notes should act like building blocks. Humans attention is easy to divert, so notes should try to overcome this tendency by applying principles of cognitive and psychological science.

  People have a great deal of semantic information that is usually tacit. A notes system should try to surface some of it.

  Both notes and the structure should help to restore the conceptual context of the captured thoughts.

Luhmann seems to have gotten about half of these items, I would say. Pretty good given how the paper system constrained him. He got some association with links, some with propinquity using fogelzettel. He used cards like building blocks to some extent. He obviously had some ability to restore his working context, though IMHO not as effectively as he could have. I think he must have had an unusually strong ability to focus, which was a way of countering attention drift.

As we all know, he used focused cards, a system for making links between cards, and a numbering system to make sure he could find cards again. Naturally he had a way of creating and working with cards that probably got refined over his working life. His focus was on working out ideas to the point of getting them published in an academic (or bureaucratic) context.

Let's say that a capital-Z Zettelkasten is a system that more or less adopts a linked building block, associative type of approach, in the hopes of increasing productivity and creativity. With modern technology we can approach more of the six bulleted items I listed above. The manner of working with the system can be system, purpose, and user- customized. The purpose of the note system can be broader than Luhmann's

If we leave it at that, we can avoid most of the discussion or arguments, while keeping the starting point, namely (as I take it), "I want some of what Luhmann got".

Basically, i have AuADHD (not medicated) i finnished school, relativley long ago, but, i noticed a problem, when i want to learn something, i first get " i want that" feeling, then, i try to acually do it, and im like " how do F i do this" i realised i don't know how this should look like, how do i know it works etc, it made me sad at beginning, but as i age, last year, i got severley depressed, reason being, i felt like time is moving and im same place, i want to do many things, from languages,Chemistry, Philosophy, but im incapable of doing it

Few months ago, thinking, i came to conclusion that there are fundamentals in life, or i bealive that they are.

Studying
Note taking
Researching
Cross-referencing
Testing

Probably more,but forgot them, i bealive if i learn how to do these activity's, i can learn anything to extenct, not that i would be better at X bc i know how go take notes, but the progress in the field would be more smoother if i know so called " fundamentals"

Wdy guys think? And suggestion,Advice is welcomed, and i apologies if i missed the point of thhe forum, forum seems nice. Thank you