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The atomic nature of notes within a zettelkasten provides a thinking advantage in that it: - systematically remembers the ideas you've had before so that you can free up cognitive space for the future, never worrying about that great idea you "once had" but now can't get back - encourages you to get down enough context that your future self will understand what you were writing and what you meant and not much more - it encourages the "just good enough" which helps suppress the need to get something perfect. For those who are perfectionists, it helps them lock in something and then move onto the next thing more efficiently without getting bogged down into the mud. - give you something as a future base from which to add additional material and ideas or alternately a base from which you can edit, rewrite, or hone the idea further
OTR: suggested by mrtnj at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1274393371984662691
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- Aug 2024
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Local file Local file
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All rights reserved. No part of this book over two hundred y words maybe reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic formwithout permission. Please cite the author and book when quoting.First Edition: June 2024Printed in the United States of AmericaISBN: 979-8-218-45014-4
Doto wastes no time getting into the most important aspects of note taking. Even before the book has begun, the copyright page in the front matter is getting you ready for what is about to come:
Please cite the author and book when quoting.
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Doto, Bob. A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer. 1st ed. New Old Traditions, 2024. https://amzn.to/3ztjrfb.
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thesiswhisperer.com thesiswhisperer.comPodcasts1
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https://thesiswhisperer.com/podcasts/<br /> On The Reg (OTR) is a podcast about Work, with an academic slant.
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www.edvo.com www.edvo.com
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Beta app for note taking/productivity.
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- Jul 2024
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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niklas-luhmann-archiv.de niklas-luhmann-archiv.de
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This also means that one cannot think without making allowances for differences.
9/8g The card index technique is based on the experience that one cannot think without writing – at least not in demanding, selectively accessing memory-based contexts.
This also means that one cannot think without making allowances for differences.
I like this slightly more differentiated instantiation for thinking better than Ahren's assertion that one can't think without writing. Luhmann qualifies it over and above Ahrens who elides meaning if this was the source he may have been tangentially referencing. (Was it an explicit reference? check...)
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substack.com substack.com
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The Early History of Counting is a great article focusing on how long humanity has been offloading its brain, which makes me feel way less awkward about taking so many notes and using fancy tools like calculators and LLMs. Ancient philosophers like Socrates complained about books making people lazy because of not doing oral memorization anymore, which solved into people complaining about computers. Stone Age cavemen probably complained about people offloading their number sense onto tally sticks.
makes me think of tools that extend parts of ourselves. terms like "second brain" or "pkms"
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- Jun 2024
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement
"History Workshop movement" here (https://hypothes.is/a/pzSbkDSWEe-GVmsfDdhvrg) is another good example of the serendipity of autocomplete functionality in Hypothes.is helping to link together disparate examples of ideas which I'd long since forgotten. In this case to a tangential idea I'd read about a year prior (https://hypothes.is/a/bxMX5MKJEe2Wkq_zinG3iw) and been interested in, but completely forgotten about.
Now I've got a link from that to the founder of the movement in 1967.
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Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned and surprising connections thereby generated ... All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.
brief outline of Raphael Samuel's note taking tools and some scant description of the method.
I love the phrase "scholarly prestiditation" to describe the "magic of note taking" along with the idea of combinatorial creativity.
Presumably the quote comes from the Samuel piece quoted in the article.
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- Apr 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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The 1975's Matty Healy uses his phone to take notes. They're more important to him privacy-wise than all the text messages he's ever sent.
He also uses an A5 sized notebook as one of his 10 most important things. He's placed reward notices in his notebooks ranging from $500 to $5000.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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How to Write Mini Essays (in Obsidian) by [[Nick Milo]]
meh... a nearly complete retread of [[Odysseas]]' Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool by [[Odysseas]]
Reasonable advice to beginners in the note taking/creation space. Very old hat for me; nothing new. Watched at 2x.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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So, how do you actually transfer a book with a systematic theory into your ZK/Evergreen notes?
reply to u/judugrovee at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1cb1s8j/so_how_do_you_actually_transfer_a_book_with_a/
Others here have written some good advice about the note taking portions, but perhaps some of your issue is with your reading method. To reframe this, I recommend you take a look at How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading (Touchstone, 2011) by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren and Adler's earlier article “How to Mark a Book" (Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/)
The careful reader will notice that they recommend a lot of the same sorts of note making and annotation practices as Ahrens does (and by extension Luhmann), though their notes are being written in the margins and in the front and back pages of the book. On the reading front, you may be conflating some of the reading/understanding/learning work with the note taking and sense making portions. If instead, you do a quick inspectional read followed by a read through prior to doing a more analytical read you'll find that you have a stronger understanding of the material conceptually. Some of the material you took expansive notes on before will likely seem basic and not require the sorts of permanent notes you've been making. Your cognitive load will have been lessened and you'll instead spend more productive time making fewer, but more useful permanent notes in the end.
On the first reads through, reframe your work as coming to a general understanding of what is going on while you're creating a quick-and-dirty personal index of what is interesting in the work. On subsequent focus, you can hone in on the most important pieces of what the author is saying with respect to your own interests and work. It's here that the dovetailing of good reading method and good note making method will shine for you, and importantly help cut down on what may seem like busywork.
It's not often discussed in some of the ZK space, but reading method can be even more important than note taking method. And at the end of the day, your particular needs and regular practice (practice, and more practice) will eventually help hone your work into something more valuable to you over time. Eventually you'll more quickly rise to the level of what C. Wright Mills called "intellectual craftsmanship" (1952).
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augmentingcognition.com augmentingcognition.com
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I can't replace note taking with Anki – it's too slow, and for many things a poor use of my long-term memory.
Why not this?: Idea -> Note-taking -> (Filter) -> Anki
How to optimise for: * Time * Memory
And what are the opportunity costs?
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The act of constructing an Anki card is itself nearly always a form of elaborative encoding
The same happens when you make atomic notes in Roam or Obsidian, where you can link things. Non-linear note-taking
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It's like re-suming an interrupted conversationwith the advantage of being able topick up where you left off.And that is exactly what readinga book should be: a conversation be-tween you and the author.
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Finally, writ-ing helps you remember the thoughtsyou had, or the thoughts the authorexpressed.
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Discrimination
in ¶90-96 he provides some advice about selection and discrimination of reading sources and materials for indexing as a means of cutting down on the information overload problem
Some of his factors include: - relying on experience in a field/area to narrow down - limiting one's scope of activity - staying away from reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias - discriminate in favor of the specific versus the general - don't admit duplicative literature (unless one is working syntopically—though he doesn't admit this caveat), and prefer the most authoritative sources - prefer authoritative authors, when given, but make space for new writers who may be more careful in their writing and argumentation - discriminate by style and composition and in particular stay away from pernicious advertising-related material (today he might advocate away from listicles, content farms, etc.)
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Experiencein dealing with quantities of literature and our special knowledgein our particular field should enable us to discriminate so thaton the one hand no information of value is allowed to slip byand on the other hand we are not burdening ourselves withuseless material.
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Words are brought into relation according to recognised rulesand thus give language. Language is that by means of whichwe describe or record intelligently. Records represent know-ledge, they give information, information belongs to our businessmaterials; we use it, we apply it, hence we group it into classesto make it accessible, we index it. Broadly speaking literatureis the result of1 observation of concretes2 translating our observations into language.
While Kaiser's definition of literature presumes letters and writing, his use of it doesn't narrow it down to require literacy, it speaks only of observations and language.
Similarly his use of "records" doesn't need to only to require writing.
As such, the description here of recording information, while applicable to literate cultures, leaves plenty of room for oral cultures who use similar systems to do the same thing.
Songlines and related mnemonics are certainly means of indexing information.
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Classification work is however not quite as simple as it maylook, on the contrary, it is a rather tricky subject, for wemust give our classes a name, we must define them, we mustknow at any rate ourselves where they begin and where theyend. It would never do for the classes to interfere with each,other, they must be defined so that they neither overlap amongthemselves nor leave any ground of the organisation as a wholeuncovered. That is certainly a difficulty but it is not insur-mountable where patience and perseverance are brought to»bear.
Kaiser's idea of classification work bears close similarity to Mortimer Adler/Charles Van Doren's concept of coming to terms. There are subtle shades between ideas which must be differentiated so as to better situate them with respect to others.
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That is not the case.It is true, a variety of published indexes, catalogues and biblio-graphies to periodical and other literature exists, but they donot and cannot meet our individual case, for1 Every individual moves in a sphere of his own and coversindividual ground such as a printed index cannot touch.2 Printed indexes although they give usable information,cannot go sufficiently into details, they must studyabove all the common requirements of a number ofsubscribers sufficiently large to assure their existenceand continuance (apart from the question of adver-tising).
Kaiser's argument for why building a personal index of notes is more valuable than relying on the indexes of others.
Note that this is answer still stands firmly even after the advent of both the Mundaneum, Google, and other digital search methods (not to mention his statement about ignoring advertising, which obviously had irksome aspects even in 1911.) Our needs and desires are idiosyncratic, so our personal indexes are going to be imminently more valuable to us over time because of these idiosyncrasies. Sure, you could just Google it, but Google answers stand alone and don't build you toward insight without the added work of creating your own index.
Some of this is bound up in the idea that your own personal notes are far more valuable than the notes someone else may have taken and passed along to you.
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we shall beginto realise that a more judicious selection may be desirable.Experience alone can guide us in this.
Only personal experience in your note taking practice will guide you on what is most valuable for excerpting. After time you will come to know and understand what is worth spending your time on and what isn't. You will not learn this from others experience, only your own, and this is why we call it practice.
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o businesses of varied sizes are set forth and their working illustrated."We note with appreciation the author's use of "flags" as indic.itors.Our experience of these handy and ingenious little devices datesfrom their first introduction in the States, and we can endorse all that"he says in their favour.
When were bookmark-like "flags" introduced in America? (Certainly prior to 1908, based on this reference.)
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So far as we are aware, this is the first adequatebook on the card system which has been published in this country.In the main, information on the subject has only been procurablefrom the catalogues and booklets (many of them excellent andinforming; issued by the manufacturers of the impedimenta of thesystem,
anecdotal evidence from Ironmonger (1908) that this is the first card index book and prior versions are only of shorter booklet-like forms.
(Naturally, I don't trust this in the fullest sense.)
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Kaiser, J. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.
Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:2acc267d4cbe455af640e4a707a84692
See alternate version at: # or https://www.google.com/books/edition/Systematic_Indexing/iwFDAAAAIAAJ?hl=en Google-Books-ID: iwFDAAAAIAAJ
(Switched for better OCR)
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- orality vs. literacy
- Google Search
- indexing
- note taking process
- note taking practice
- card index for business
- songlines as indexing
- bookmarks
- References
- The Card System Series
- discrimination
- Mundaneum
- open questions
- note taking in oral cultures
- classification work
- information overload
- judgement
- borrowing notes
- flags
- published indexes
- card index manuals
- zettelkasten are idiosyncratic
- Google advertising
- ars excerpendi
- note taking advice
- classification
- group note taking
- search
- coming to terms
- Systematic Indexing
- card index
- Julius Kaiser
- selectivity
- note taking practices
- note taking manuals
- note taking
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substack.com substack.com
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read Tupac's Revolutionary Notes by [[Jillian Hess]]
Brief overview of some of Shakur's notebooks and lyrics with a mini-biography.
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- Mar 2024
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Frequent re- arrangements are a distinct disadvantage,for with every change the filer loses much time in becoming familiaragain with the new positions.
While Kaiser recommends against the need to re-arrange physical cards from one drawer to another, which creates the need to refamiliarize oneself with their new locations, the same idea applies to switching from one digital note taking application to another as a similar switch of user interface functionality may cause additional overhead and stress thereby preventing quick use of the system itself.
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As the functionof the caU number is separation, so the function of references isconcentration.
Placing call numbers or location numbers on items to be filed allows them to be separated from other items while placing cross-references or links allows them to be brought back together again. These two affordances allow for divergence as well as convergence of items or ideas.
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The card system suffers at presentunder one great disadvantage, it has no fixed terminology.
Kaiser might be surprised at the overuse and confusing nature of terminology in the modern note taking space now. Somehow the terminology still suffers from lack of consistent and fixed terminology.
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Devising Once a proper system has been devised, it requiresCard Systems
Devising Card Systems
Many modern-day note takers and knowledge workers might take solace in the broad advice provided by J. Kaiser in 1908. In describing some of the broad categories of uses of card index filing systems for business use he says that each entity "has its individual character and individual requirements, and its individual character" (ie, everyone is different and has different needs), therefore everyone "must devise [their] system in accordance with [their] own requirements" and should "be the best judge as to what these requirements are." He continues on in the rest of the book to outline a variety of suggestions and methods which one might use or adopt, but he doesn't dictate specific methods and leaves those decisions up to the end user.
When devising their own systems, one certainly ought to heed this advice when looking at a variety of alternative methods like Forte's P.A.R.A., Milo's LYT, or even in mimicking Luhmann's idiosyncratic Zettelkasten set up. Are these methods best for your particular use cases? Are they simple enough for what you want to do, or are they overly structured and complicated? The key is to be able to classify and file things quickly so that they can be easily accessed in the future, all the rest becomes additional details and overhead to support on an ongoing basis.
(¶76)
Tags
- note taking affordances
- card index affordances
- separation
- concentration of ideas
- fungible definitions
- terminology
- note taking advice
- divergence/convergence
- shiny object syndrome
- zettelkasten numbering affordances
- card system
- argot
- Julius Kaiser
- separation of concerns
- note taking
- definitions
- note taking applications
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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02:18Timothée Chalamet read and annotated Dune heavily before first interview with Denis Villeneuve
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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in literature notes, do you write all of the stuff from a single article/book/whatever in one note, or do you split them all into individual notes of their own, one little piece on each card/note?
reply to u/oursong at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1bideq7/literature_notes_question/
My bibliographic/literature notes are my personal (brief) index of what I found interesting in the book. I can always revisit most of what the book contained by reviewing over it. When done I excerpt the most important and actionable items on their own cards with a reference back to the book and page/loc number. Depending on my needs I may revisit at later dates and excerpt other pieces from my indexed items if it turns out I need them.
From an efficiency perspective, I find that it seems like a waste of time to split out hundreds of lower-level ideas when I may only need the best for my work.
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Instead of jotting down every note, thought, observation, excerpt, andreading on a single slip of paper and leaving them there, Placcius recom-mends grouping them, by dint of appropriate libros excerptorum (see figure2.5),39 excerpt books that follow the pattern that had guided the design ofregisters and bound library catalogs since Konrad Gessner; Placcius citesthe entire section “ De Indicibus Librorum ” from the Pandectae .40 Perhapshis strong vote for the bound form of this storage technology and againstJungius’s method is a way of warning against lifelong knowledge accumula-tions that merely gather treasures without being recombined and pub-lished as new books. Jungius, keen on including new resources, delays hisown publications time and again, leaving them unfinished or simply asraw paper slip potential in storage, on call. 4
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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writing about something you have read or researched should serve at least three purposes: to explore the material; to describe your reactions to it; and to communicate with yourreader.
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hookproductivity.com hookproductivity.comHome1
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I also recommend a book called "An alphabet of the intellectual labour" (азбука интеллектуального труда). It had at least ten editions, I've read the 10th edition from year 1928.
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- Feb 2024
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chat.openai.com chat.openai.com
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https://chat.openai.com/g/g-z5XcnT7cQ-zettel-critique-assistant
Zettel Critique Assistant<br /> By Florian Lengyel<br /> Critique Zettels following three rules: Zettels should have a single focus, WikiLinks indicate a shift in focus, Zettels should be written for your future self. The GPT will suggest how to split multi-focused notes into separate notes. Create structure note from a list of note titles and abstracts.
ᔥ[[ZettelDistraction]] in Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. February 20, 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Tinderbox Meetup Sunday 18 February 24: Tools for Thought with Chris Aldrich
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writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
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Keeping the Zettelkasten in Mind When Creating New Notes
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Some weeks ago I explain the philosophy of Antinet Zettelkasten to my girlfriend. She was sceptical at that moment but when she saw my purple metal box full of cards and dividers she started to gather information and with her father made this one. The name is zauberkasten (magic box in german) and this is not the final version. Hope you like folks! :)
by u/osservazione at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1anwrez/zauberkasten_work_in_progress/
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Despite a weak constitution, hewould walk several miles a day in the countryside of his native Lincolnshire,spotting plants and making copious notes in his diary, which he carried, alongwith a pen and inkpot, in one of the many special inner pockets that he hadsewn into his jacket.
Adrian was the son of Edward Peacock.
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the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr whosent Dr Murray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill who sent in 151,982slips over twenty-two years; third place to Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield ofDevon, with 70,277 over twenty-eight years; with Dr William Chester Minorof Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720slips.
Top slip contributors to OED: 1. Thomas Austin Jnr. 165,061 slips over 10 years (45.22 notes per day) 2. William Douglas 151,982 over 22 years (18.92 notes per day) 3. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield 70,277 over 28 years (1.98 notes per day) 4. William Chester Minor 62,720 slips over 23 years (to 1906) (7.5 notes per day)
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He had written the names and addresses of not just hundreds butthousands of people who had volunteered to contribute to the Dictionary.Finding Dr Murray’s address book
James Murray kept an address book with the names, addresses, and notations about the thousands of people who had volunteered contributions for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also included were the lists of material they read, the level of their contributions in number of slips and dates sent, as well as various personal details including relationships, marriages, and deaths.
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capacities.io capacities.io
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Different types of notes and use cases
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- Jan 2024
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writingslowly.com writingslowly.com
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My journey is subjective, because it’s my journey.
or as Vannevar Bush might have said, everyone will have their own idiosyncratic associative trails...
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writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
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This note would live among others of the same topic, only to be called upon when the topic was explored.
Not mentioned here is that with a top-down approach, if a card had related topics on it, then it would have to either be copied to those areas separately, or would need to be carefully cross-indexed to those areas to be able to be found again when needed.
When the number of topics, n, begins to exceed 2 the amount of additional work and cards can grow quite a bit, though generally only linearly with respect to n. (Don't discount the work on the back side of searching for and finding these easily at later dates.)
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vimeo.com vimeo.com
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Watched [[Dan Allosso]] on teaching Note-taking at https://vimeo.com/905323967/90544a580f
Solid overview!
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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here are I think some of the reasons why DIY 00:32:44 beats AI um I noticed one or two of you taking notes on the computer now I don't want to pick in anybody out but it is scientifically demonstra ated that 00:32:57 handwritten notes go into your brain better than typed notes because you have to think a little bit more about what you write on the page just like in consecutive interpreting and because you 00:33:11 think about where it is on the page you remember it if you don't process you can't remember there's also a very human element of sort of geospatial if you write with your hand 00:33:24 you can actually remember oh yeah I wrote that at the top right hand corner I wrote that bottom left when you type on a computer even on a I find even writing on an iPad you lose the 00:33:36 geospatial element of where you put things
physically writing, memory "geospatial" tactile
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Hiya - I'm just curious about how people use Obsidian in academia. I guess you could say I'm looking for examples of what it's used for (e.g. to take short notes or to link ideas) and in what kind of systems may guide people's vaults (e.g. Zettelkasten). I'm also just keen on connecting with other PhD candidates through these blogs. No one at my uni that I know of is currently using Obsidian for academic work
Reply to Couscous at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/722584061087842365/1197392837952684052
A quick survey of currently active academics, teachers, and researchers who are blogging about note taking practices and zettelkasten-based methods.
Individuals
Dan Allosso is a history professor at Bemidji State University who has used Obsidian in his courses in the past. He frequently writes about related topics on his Substack channels. One can also find related videos about reading, writing, and research process as well as zettelkasten on his YouTube channel. In addition to this, Dan has a book on note taking and writing which focuses on using a card index or zettelkasten centric process.
Shawn Graham has both a blog as well as a prior course on the history of the internet using Obsidian. In the course materials he has compiled significant details and suggestions for setting up an Obsidian vault for students interested in using the tool.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a significant blog which covers a variety of topics centered around her work and research. Her current course Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing (2024) focuses on writing, note taking (including Zettelkasten) and encourages students to try out Obsidian, which she's been using herself. A syllabus for an earlier version of the course includes some big name bloggers in academia whose sites might serve as examples of academic writing in the public. The syllabus also includes a section on being an academic blogger and creating platform as a public intellectual.
Morganeua is a Ph.D. candidate who has a fairly popular YouTube channel on note taking within the academic setting (broadly using Obsidian, though she does touch on other tools from time to time).
Chris Aldrich is independent research who does work at the intersection of intellectual history and note taking methods and practices. He's got an active website along with a large collection of note taking, zettelkasten, commonplace books, and sense-making related articles. His practice is a hybrid one using both analog and digital methods including Obsidian and Hypothes.is.
Bob Doto is a teacher and independent researcher who focuses on Luhmann-artig zettelkasten practice and writing. He uses Obsidian and also operates a private Discord server focused on general Zettelkasten practice.
Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, had an influential blog on note taking practices and culture from 2007 to 2018 on Blogspot. While he's taken the site down, the majority of his work there can be found on the Internet Archive.
Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who is working at the intersection of learning, knowledge management, reading and related topics. He's got a Patreon, YouTube Channel and a public wiki.
Broader community-based efforts
Here are some tool-specific as well as tool-agnostic web-based fora, chat rooms, etc. which are focused on academic-related note taking and will have a variety of people to follow and interact with.
Obsidian runs a large and diverse Discord server. In addition to many others, they have channels for #Academia and #Academic-tools as well as #Knowledge-management and #zettelkasten.
Tinderbox hosts regular meetups (see their forum for details on upcoming events and how to join). While their events are often product-focused (ways to use it, Q&A, etc.), frequently they've got invited speakers who talk about their work, processes, and methods of working. Past recorded sessions can be found on YouTube. While this is tool-specific, much of what is discussed in their meetups can broadly be applied to any tool set. Because Tinderbox has been around since the early 00s and heavily focused on academic use, the majority of participants in the community are highly tech literate academics whose age skews to the over 40 set.
A variety of Zettelkasten practitioners including several current and retired academicians using a variety of platforms can be found at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/.
Boris Mann and others held Tools for Thought meetups which had been regularly held through 2023. They may have some interesting archived material for perusal on both theory, practice, and a wide variety of tools.
Others?
I've tried to quickly tip out my own zettelkasten on this topic with a focus on larger repositories of active publicly available web-based material. Surely there is a much wider variety of people and resources not listed here, but it should be a reasonable primer for beginners. Feel free to reply with additional suggestions and resources of which you may be aware.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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You should read with a pen in your hand andenter...short hints of what you feel...may be useful; forthis be the best method of imprinting [them] in yourmemory. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
original source?
it's Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.<br /> see: https://hyp.is/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA/www.gutenberg.org/files/40236/40236-h/40236-h.htm
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peculiargenres.commons.msu.edu peculiargenres.commons.msu.edu
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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But, to rephrase my concern, I am not really interested in creating a set of broadly shared or minimum required characteristics by which to define a Zettelkasten in general, rather I would be interested in coming to agreement on what the essential characteristics of the specific Luhmann Zettelkasten are in particular. Then, would be able to compare those essential criteria against other kasten both analog and digital to discern the differences and deficiencies.
reply to JasperMcFly at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19282/#Comment_19282
I've been working towards this goal for some time. The idea isn't simply delineating the characteristics of Luhmann's system and its comparison to others, but to discern what the broadest characteristics of all of these systems are and what sorts of affordances those pieces and forms provide as tools for organizing and thinking. This will allow a broader range of people with different needs and different abilities to pick and choose which characteristics and methods might work best for them to reach those particular goals. Too many are approaching zettelkasten with a surface level understanding and somehow hoping that it will magically solve all their problems. When it doesn't, "consequently," as Luhmann would say, "just like in porn movies, they leave disappointed." [ZK II note 9/8.3]
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www.x17.de www.x17.de
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Über die Karteikartentechnik wurde sogar ein wunderbares Buch geschrieben: Karteikunde, Das Handbuch der Karteikartentechnik von Dr. Walter Porstmann.
A wonderful book has even been written about the index card technique: Index Cardology, The Handbook of Index Card Technique by Dr. Walter Porstmann.
Looks like there's three editions from 1928 to the 1950s: Porstmann, Walter. Kartei - Kunde: das Handbuch der Karteitechnik. Stuttgart: Verlag für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, 1928. https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/58666432?limit=50&offset=1&orderBy=publicationDateAsc
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- Dec 2023
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Local file Local file
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“I do all my own research,” she said, “though reviewers have speculatedthat I must have a band of hirelings. I like to be led by a footnote ontosomething I never thought of. I rarely photocopy research materials because, for me, note-taking is learning, distilling. That’s the whole essence ofthe business. In taking notes, you have to discard what you don’t need. If you[photocopy] it, you haven’t chewed it.”
Sounds similar to Umberto Eco's admonition about photocopying: https://hypothes.is/a/U3Sg_r0ZEe25T2tD3U-nmw
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archive.org archive.org
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White highlights the ability to easily shuffle and reshuffle cards in a variety of orders (alphabetical, by source type) and this is one of the benefits of using note cards. (p51)
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Fry, Ron. Write Papers. 2nd ed. Ron Fry’s How to Study Program. Hawthorne, NJ: Career Pr Inc, 1994. https://archive.org/details/writepapers00fryr/page/46/mode/2up
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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735: _Nen_Kumi Name______ : 2006/03/04 (Sat) 23:35:55 ID:??? >>732 5×3 was used as a book search card. (Almost all electronic now) It 's a little smaller than the popular version of the productivity notebook, making it ideal for portable notes. Other purposes include memorization cards and information retrieval. However, B7 and mini 6-hole system notebooks are almost the same size, so they are being pushed out and are not widely used in Japan. How to do it in a book called How to Write an American-style Essay. 1.Write a tentative table of contents. 2.Write out the required literature on 5x3 cards. a Classification code in the upper right corner b Author name and book title in the middle. c Assign a serial number to the top left. d Below is where you can get information.Finally, write down all the information necessary for the paper's citation list. (4-a) 3. Rewrite the literature cards into a list. (It's a pain twice, but he says to do it.) 4. Write the information on 5x3 cards. a Prepare literature cards and literature. Finish your bibliography cards. (2-e) bWrite an information card ① One memo per card, information is the golden rule ② Write it in your own words ③ When copying, enclose it in quotation marks. ⑤ Serial number of the literature card in the upper left ⑥ Tentative table of contents and card keyword in the upper right 5. Once all the literature cards are checked, rearrange them in the order of the table of contents. Elaboration. 6. The rest is drafting, footnotes, reviewing, citing, proofreading, and finishing.
Apparently there is a Japanese text with the title "How to Write and American-style Essay" which recommends using classification codes in the upper right and an assigned serial number in the top left.
How was this related (or not) to Luhmann's practice or to the practices of the Dewey Decimal System? [Update: not related at all, see: https://hypothes.is/a/bDEoiqT3Ee6lAeNajBBsjw]
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I have summarized what is written about information cards in the book I have. ・Four Heavenly Kings Tadao Umesao, “Technology of intellectual production”, Iwanami Shinsho F93 Jiro Kawakita, “Idea method”, Chuko Shinsho 136 Shoichi Watabe, “Method of intellectual life”, Kodansha Gendai Shinsho 436 Hajime Itasaka, “Technology of thinking” "Writing Techniques", Kodansha Gendai Shinsho 327 /Derivative Yoshiyasu Ogasawara, "Report/Essay Techniques for University Students", Kodansha Gendai Shinsho 1603 Akira Aizawa, "Kyoto University Style Logical Thinking", Sunmark Publishing Nishio Tadahisa, "Word Processing Study Techniques" ”, Kodansha Gendai Shinsho 767 /Others Umberto Eco, “Essay Writing”, Jiritshobo Hayashi Nozomi, “Living with Mr. Limbaugh's Study”, Chie no Mori Bunko
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method is laid out visually in his Flickr account using photos of several of his cards along with descriptions of what each is for and how they work.
These include: 0. PoIC Format/Template 1. Record Card 2. Discovery Card 3. GTD Card 4. Cite Card 5. How to link between cards
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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How to link between Cards The "date" and "time" stamp of a cards define their "absolute name". This is why the time stamp must be unique, but not necessary to be accurate. In addition, it is easy to find a specific card, according to the stamp, if all cards are kept in chronological order. This technique was first introduced on the 2-channel.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/192480328/in/album-72157594200490122/
The PoIC system allows linking of cards using date/timestamps for indexing/finding. Interestingly they were all kept in chronological order rather than in idea order as in Luhmann's zettelkasten.
What are the pros/cons of this?<br /> - more searching and hunting through cards certainly is a drawback for lack of "threaded" ideas - others...
hawkexpress apparently learned this technique on the 2-channel.
(Edited 2022-10-13, 2023-12-27)
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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4. Cite Card Icon : Hat (something above you)Tag : 5th block Quotation, cooking recipe from book, web, tv, anything about someone else’s idea is classified into this class. Important here is distinguishing “your idea (Discovery Card)” and “someone else’s idea (Cite Card)”. Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/
Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.
Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.
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www.everand.com www.everand.com
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Summary
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📚 Second Edition Overview: This is the second, revised and expanded edition of the book. The first edition was titled "Como Fazer Anotações Inteligentes. Uma Técnica Simples para Impulsionar a Escrita, Aprendizado e Pensamento - para Estudantes, Acadêmicos e Escritores de Livros de Não Ficção".
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🖋️ Key Focus: The book emphasizes the importance of organizing ideas and notes for effective writing. It's a guide for students, academics, and knowledge professionals to enhance their writing, learning, and long-term knowledge retention.
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🧠 Smart Notes Methodology: It introduces the concept of Smart Notes, based on psychological insights and the proven Zettelkasten note-taking technique, offering a comprehensive guide in English for the first time.
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🎯 Target Audience: The book is particularly useful for students and academics in social sciences and humanities, non-fiction writers, and anyone engaged in reading, thinking, and writing.
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⏳ Time Efficiency: Focuses on saving time spent searching for notes, quotes, or references, allowing more time for thinking, understanding, and developing new ideas in writing.
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👤 Author's Background: Written by Dr. Sönke Ahrens, a writer and researcher in education and social sciences, known for the award-winning book "Experimento e Exploração: Formas de Revelação do Mundo" (Springer).
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🌍 Global Reach: Since its initial release, "Como Fazer Anotações Inteligentes" has sold over 10,000 copies and has been translated into seven languages.
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ideaflow.app ideaflow.appIdeaflow1
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https://ideaflow.app/
Audio transcription notes with AI
2023-12-12 Released on PruductHunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideaflow
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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I don't use private personal wikis, so my interpretation is: Zettelkasten is the private work space, personal wiki is a form of publication. Maybe not polished for publishing, but edited and redacted where needed, so I can trust that I can be stupid in my Zettelkasten without anyone noticing.
reply to ctietze at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/15201/#Comment_15201
I can be stupid in my [private] Zettelkasten without anyone noticing.
I too have a private space exactly for this purpose. On the other hand, writing and publishing in public spaces forces me to do some additional thinking/polishing work that I might not otherwise, and that often provides some spectacular results as well as useful feedback for improvement over time.
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help.obsidian.md help.obsidian.md
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https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote
Given the recent state of Evernote and their beginning to charge larger amounts and close off their free tiers, I've moved copies of my data over to Obsidian just in case.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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orgmode.org orgmode.org
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A GNU Emacs major mode for convenient plain text markup — and much more. Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming and more — in a fast and effective plain text system.
A note taking tool discussed by [[Bastien Guerry]] at I Annotate 2021.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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fortelabs.com fortelabs.com
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Test-Driving a New Generation of Second Brain Apps: Obsidian, Tana, and Mem
I'm a bit surprised at the conclusion: Evernote still the best and can't be supplanted easily. Seriously?
But there are some naked truths about Tana and Mem (and Mem X). The Second Brain guy didn't mince words.
I think he is too harsh on Obsidian. You can't have your cake and eat it. If local-first philosophy is of utmost importance to you, you've got to learn where the vaults are stored locally. Duh!
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- Nov 2023
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Local file Local file
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The ‘size’ of facts served a dream of information recombination, and was served bythe card form. Other advocates of Zettelkasten like Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785)remarked that fairly small facts meant the mass of information was broken down to itsindividual components and thus could be constantly reshuffled in a ‘game of cards’(Krajewski, 2011: 53-5).
suggestion of recombination of individual notes using cards to create something new
(have I remarked on this in krajewski?) ᔥ Johann Jacob Moser commented on the ability to breakdown bodies of information into smaller pieces that might be reshuffled into new configurations as one might in a 'game of cards'.
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Reclaim Hosting / Reclaim Cloud has a one button installer for HedgeDoc
Friends of the Link uses this for collaborative note taking into the anagora.org.
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etherpad.org etherpad.orgEtherpad1
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A collaborative online editor
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thatsthenorm.com thatsthenorm.com
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Live-Roaming: Using Roam to teach students in college
I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.
Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.
Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3
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Local file Local file
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As to the mechanics of research, I take notes on four-by-six indexcards, reminding myself about once an hour of a rule I read long agoin a research manual, “Never write on the back of anything.”
Barbara Tuchman took her notes on four-by-six inch index cards.
She repeated the oft-advised mantra to only write on one side of a sheet.
What manual did she read this in? She specifically puts quotes on "Never write on the back of anything." so perhaps it might be something that could be tracked down?
Who was the earliest version of this quote? And was it always towards the idea of cutting up slips or pages and not wanting to lose material on the back? or did it also (later? when?) include ease-of-use and user interface features even when not cutting things up?
At what point did double sided become a thing for personal printed materials? Certainly out of a duty to minimize materials, but it also needed the ability to duplex print pages or photocopy them that way.
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Macaulay claimed that his memory was good enough to enable him to write out the whole of Paradise Lost. But when preparing his History of England, he made extensive notes in a multitude of pocketbooks of every shape and colour.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC, FRS, FRSE 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848. Macaulay's The History of England, which expressed his contention of the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, is a seminal example of Whig history that remains commended for its prose style.
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molodtsov.me molodtsov.me
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I Wish Bear Hadn’t Wasted Years<br /> by Yury Molodtsov
Some generic state-of-the-app in the note taking space.
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markgrabe.substack.com markgrabe.substack.com
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Grabe, Mark. “Student and Professional Note-Taking.” Substack newsletter. Mark’s Substack (blog), November 10, 2023. https://markgrabe.substack.com/p/student-and-professional-note-taking?publication_id=1857743&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=77i35.
Educator Mark Grabe looks at some different forms of note taking with respect to learning compared lightly with note taking for productivity or knowledge management purposes.
Note taking for: - learning / sensemaking - personal knowledge management - productivity / projects - thesis creation/writing/other creative output (music, dance, etc.)
Not taken into account here is the diversity of cognitive abilities, extent of practice (those who've practiced at note taking for longer are likely to be better at it), or even neurodiversity, which becomes an additional layer (potentially noise) on top of the research methodologies.
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With more notes, you have more to work with and what a learner does with this content is where the more significant benefits are produced.
Yes, this by itself, but note that it also requires that one put in additional work—something many don't want to do in the first place.
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Things that have no interest to you can be ignored without anxiety.
This is one of the primary keys.
When taking college-like courses now later in life, I can do so with a much broader perspective. I can focus on the broader shape of the course and the information that intrigues me and place less focus on the nitty-gritty details that a high school or college student might be expected to memorize.
Of course, some of this would depend on the professor and the evaluations they planned on giving. If it was a humanities course where creating a paper or two was primary over memorizing details, then students might be able to get away with something closer to "professional" notes versus "student" notes. Depending on a syllabus, there could definitely be some overlap between the two.
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sea.nathanstrait.com sea.nathanstrait.com
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http://sea.nathanstrait.com/journaling/
A lot of this looks surprisingly familiar... (even down to the ordering that it seems to have been discovered).
:)
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www.loc.gov www.loc.gov
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Arendt studied with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University
Did Karl Jaspers have a zettelkasten practice? Did he specifically pass it along to students, like Arendt?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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UnmutualOne · 3 days agoAnnotations are my map back into the book.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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One of the primary problems with note taking in most of the mid-twentieth century (and potentially well before, particularly as framed in most educational settings) was that students would take notes, potentially review them once or twice for a test, but then not have easy access to them for later review or reuse.
People collected piles of notes without any ability to reuse or review them. Perhaps we should reframe the collector's fallacy as this: collection without reuse has dramatically decreasing returns. Certainly there may be some small initial benefit in writing it down as a means of sense making, but not reviewing it past a short period of two weeks or even several months and not being able to reuse it in the long term is a travesty, especially in a world of information overload.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.comYouTube1
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A lot of info here on Protolyst, the tool I'm developing, to help you take and organise your notes so that you can retrieve and apply your knowledge to your personal and collaborative projects
Protolyst (collaborative note taking tool) is a product that Dr. Maddy is developing and showcasing in her YouTube Channel playlists.
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Protolyst <br /> https://protolyst.org/
- Freemium model
- Focus on group collaboration over individual use
You can export Pages in your workspace as PDFs with more export formats to be added in the future (I did see one other snippet that indicated .csv format export, but it doesn't appear to have .md support to dovetail with all the other tools which use this as a baseline)
Found ᔥDr. Maddy in the description from Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners
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Local file Local file
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The same information could have been recordedin a notebook or on slips of paper and then heaped togetherhaphazardly, but this would not have accomplished the samething.
I take issue with this statement from the translators. Do they come about it themselves or does it stem from Eco?
The general affordances of many modalities are very similar, though the ease of use and speed in arrival at a destination may be slightly different. (That is, cards can be ordered more quickly perhaps, but a similar function can be done using notebooks or slips.)
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zotlit.aidenlx.top zotlit.aidenlx.top
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An interesting looking Obsidian/Zotero plugin
ᔥTon Zijlstra (@ton@m.tzyl.eu) on Nov 01, 2023, 04:15
@richardcarter @geffrey I 2nd Richard here, prefer to keep them separate. I currently use https://zotlit.aidenlx.top/ as a plugin in both Zotero and Obsidian to handle the copying of annotations into Obsidian, rather than copy/pasting by hand. Outside of Zotero I also use hypothes.is for annotations that I grab into Obsidian through the h. API.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Do digital note taking tools extend the ranges of affordances versus their analog counterparts with respect to the SAMR model?
On the augmentation front, they allow one to capture things faster, but may do so at the loss of understanding due to the lack of active learning (versus passive as the tool may be robbing them of the interaction with the material).
There may be some workflow modification, but it's modest at best. Is it measurably better?
I'm unaware of anyone talking about technological redefinition of digital note taking affordances, though some of the surface level AI-related things may emerge here.
In some sense, I still think that the ease of remapping and rearranging/linking/relinking/outlining ideas in digital spaces doesn't exist, so digital note taking tools aren't doing very well even at the root substitution level.
I suspect that some people weren't exposed to the general process of good note taking and their subsequent use for linking, developing, and then creating and as a result of learning this, they're attributing their advances to the digital nature of their tools rather than the original analog process which was always there and isn't necessarily improved measurably by the digital modality.
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- Oct 2023
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www.craft.do www.craft.do
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Ran across a reference to this in the Obsidian #academia Discord channel
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Here is Alter’s version of the well-known opening of Genesis 21, part of the story of Isaac, the miracle baby of 90-year-old Sarah, and her 99-year-old husband, Abraham: “And the Lord singled out Sarah.” The word Alter is translating as “singled out” is pakad. The King James, and most others after it, translate it as “visited.” The Jewish Publication Society has it as “remembered.” Others translate it as “kept his word,” “took note of,” “was gracious to,” “was attentive to” or “blessed.” A good literal version, provided by the canny contemporary translator Everett Fox, has it as “took account of” — and there is something numerical and even administrative about pakad. (Elsewhere in the Bible, in the context of describing a public census, pakad means “to number”; in modern Hebrew, it is related to the words for “officer,” “clerk” and “roll-call.”) Weaving together its numerical dimensions with a thread of bureaucratic banality, Alter yields the anxious verb “singled out” and with it, reveals new layers of tension in this story.
translation of pakad, an administrative word literally translated as "took account of" as "took note of"
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www.thenewatlantis.com www.thenewatlantis.com
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the Stream replaces topology with serialization.
How do we experience the zettelkasten with respect to the garden and the stream metaphor?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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What is it with index cards ? .t3_17ck5la._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } So I posted a while ago about my journey into the zettlekasten and I have to admit I still enjoy using this system for notes.I must say, I am an avid note taker for a long time. I write ideas, notes from books, novels, poems and so much more. I mainly used to use notebooks, struggle a while with note taking apps and now I mainly use two kind of things : index cards (A6) and an e-ink tablet (the supernote) for different purpose of course, the index cards for the zettelkasten and the e-ink tablet for organization and my work. To be honest I used to consider myself more a notebooks kind of person than an index cards one (and I am from France we don't use index cards but "fiche bristol" which are bigger than A6 notecards, closer to an A5 format)Still, there is something about index cards, I cannot tell what it is, but it feels something else to write on this, like my mind is at ease and I could write about ideas, life and so many stuff covering dozens of cards. I realize that after not touching my zettelkasten for a few week (lack of time) and coming back to it. It feels so much easier to write on notecards than on notebooks (or any other place) and I can't explain it.Anyone feeling the same thing ?
reply to u/Sensitive-Binding at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17ck5la/what_is_it_with_index_cards/
Some of it may involve the difference in available space versus other forms of writing on larger pages of paper. Similarly, many find that there is less pressure to write something short on Twitter or similar social media platforms because there is less space in the user interface that your mind feels the need to fill up. One can become paralyzed by looking at the larger open space on a platform like WordPress with the need to feel like they should write more.
With index cards you fill one up easily enough, and if there's more, you just grab another card and repeat.
cross reference with Fermat's Last Theorem being easier to suggest in a margin than actually writing it out in full.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_6BjUzwJX8
via https://everbookforever.com/
Leather sheet folded into four sections onto itself like a book cover. It holds six folders of pieces of paper (most of them folded in half making mini-booklet pages): - blank paper for future note taking use - templates (project pack, weekly schedule/to do template, project list, project templates) - logbook, journal like, dated, - contains notes, outlines, brain storms, and scratch pad - next actions/workstation (to do lists for email, home, work, calls ) - Project Pack (9 projects for the quarter, each has their own page or mini folder with details) - Work Week or the Weekly Review Folder (areas of focus/project list, yearly calendar on a page for planning, whatever folder, wild ideas,
When done, all the pages of folders are packed up and wrapped with an elastic band for easy carrying. It's like a paper (looks like A5) notebook deconstructed and filed into paper folders and wrapped in a pretty leather cover.
As sections are finished/done they can be archived into small booklets and presumably filed.
This looks shockingly like my own index-card productivity system based on a variety of Memindex/Bullet Journal/GTD.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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It's been burning in my mind all day: you're right that too often, for reasons likely hidden in the folds of of educational reform, some of our most powerful methods of working, researching, and writing are lost or seem like magic when they're rediscovered. Rarely are classes on the subject taught, thereby leaving the student to find their own way in the dark. Thank you for pulling back the curtain covering the proverbial proscenium arch on Act I of research methods.
For those flailing in the dark, Keith Thomas's brief essay (2010) discusses some of the basic problem along with solutions, while Adler and Van Doren (1972) talk about the levels of reading which are now rarely taught or reached (and how to reach them), and finally, imminent scholars/researchers like Umberto Eco or Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff reveal alternate versions of what you're already doing. Others certainly exist, often in piecemeal form, but this short set in combination with your YouTube channel for examples provides one royal road to the destination many seek.
- Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010.
- Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
- Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
- Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957.
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FULL note-taking session for my PhD with DETAILED commentary! by morganeua https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf4T2MuOI8I
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github.com github.com
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zeti.space zeti.space
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https://zeti.space/
A zettelkasten tool with potential AI functionality for linking. Cloud and local storage available.
heard about via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/173ryxu/we_built_a_novel_tool_just_for_zetelkasten_with/
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Father emptied a card le for Margot and me and lled it withindex cards that are blank on one side. This is to become ourreading le, in which Margot and I are supposed to note down thebooks we’ve read, the author and the date.
Anne Frank (June 12, 1929-1945)<br /> Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927-1998)
Niklas Luhmann was a year and a half older than Anne Frank who received her first card index file in February 1943 (likely between the 27th, the date of her diary entry mentioning it and the prior diary entry on February 5th), from her father at the age of 13. She was intended to use it as a "reading file" to note down the books she'd read along with the author and the date.
One can only wonder at how many entries she would have made over the span of her life had it not come to such an abrupt end.
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github.com github.com
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https://github.com/flengyel/Zettel
An interesting looking and complete template example.
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aboard.com aboard.com
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A card-based collaboration tool that leverages information visualization. Pinterest for collaborative teams with expandable data.
Looks interesting and I've got a beta invite, but not sure if it fits any of my needs, particularly with an eye toward note taking.
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In these instances, he could outsource partsof the work process to his personal amanuenses, his youngest children,Martha and Friedrich, who acted as scribes and copied book passagesthat he had marked.
Many writers and excerpters had amanuenses as helpers to copy out passages or to copy material over for them. Theodor Fontane would mark passages in books for his children to excerpt and copy over for him.
Compare this manual labor to that of more modern tools like Hypothes.is which allow one to digitally highlight and then excerpt almost automatically.
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To this end, the study follows Fontane into theengine room of his text production.
In industrial terms and fashion, Petra McGillen describes Fontane's "workshop" containing his sixty-seven notebooks, cardboard boxes, file folders, and envelopes the "engine room of his text production".
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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How to get started with ZK and Obsidian .t3_16wgq4l._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/Rampage_user at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wgq4l/how_to_get_started_with_zk_and_obsidian/
Perhaps what I've done in Obsidian may help: I've created several folders for individual pieces:
- Zettels folder - contains permanent/atomic/evergreen notes which broadly stand on their own; I give them decimal numbers so that alphabetical sorting within the folder provides me with neighborhoods of ideas without needing to provide direct links from one idea to another on each and every note.
- Bibliography folder - contains individual notes for details about sources (books, articles, videos, etc.) which also contains the fleeting notes related to them (each can have from one to sometimes hundreds of short, not fully formed notes and excerpts);
- Index folder - contains 26 notes, one for each letter of the alphabet each of which has index entries that lead to notes in the zettels folder; Like Luhmann's my index is sparse and I rely on the neighborhoods around the notes that link from the index.
While I do have a few tags, I broadly eschew them as they don't scale well with time in my experience.
Some literature is unspecific about it, but you should know that NOT EVERY FLEETING NOTE NEEDS TO BECOME A PERMANENT NOTE. Only split out the most interesting and potentially future useful ones. Some of my book notes have hundreds of fleeting notes, highlights, etc. and I've only pulled out 3 or 4 permanent notes from them. (The side benefit is that if you need them, you've got links to those fleeting notes for later if you need to review over, use, or convert them.)
Really the best advice is to practice. A Lot. Experience will help you know when your fleeting notes should become permanent ones and how much work they need to become permanent notes. You can always adjust things in the future if your experience helps you simplify things further for you. If you make three permanent notes a week, you're doing better than most. I add 1-5 bibliographic sources a day and average about 50 fleeting notes with only one, or maybe two permanent notes on a good day.
Good luck. Now go practice...
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- Sep 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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ID's or Common names for Notes? .t3_16vgxy7._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/pakizh at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16vgxy7/ids_or_common_names_for_notes/
Keyword search was definitely available in Luhmann's lifetime. Here's the link to the digitized version of Luhmann's keyword index: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V. Versions of this sort of indexing go back at least to John Locke's method for indexing commonplace books in 1685 (in French) and 1706 (in English). See: https://archive.org/details/13925922180LockeCommonplaceBook/mode/2up for the 1706 version. In a zettelkasten context, instead of indexing page numbers, one simply numbers their index cards and the method works exactly the same. (One could also think of it as creating a library card catalog for one's ideas instead of their books—again, using a personalized numbering system instead of the standardized Dewey Decimal System which is used for books.)
In paper versions, the numbers serve two purposes:
- Allowing the ideas to be indexed and searched for and found again. Full text search in digital contexts may be easier in some instances, but these sorts of searches may not scale well over thousands of notes and may return hundreds of results which need to be looked through to find the correct one. As a result, even good indexing in digital can pay off well in the long run.
- Placing similar ideas next to each other (when filed using numbers) allows areas of interest to build up in one's note collection. This also creates what one might call "soft links" between ideas (versus more direct, hard links using [[WikiLinks]] or explicit links to specific numbered cards). These neighborhoods of ideas eventually build up to something interesting in aggregation. Without these sorts of (decimal or alpha-numeric) numbers, it's more difficult to create this affordance in digital applications (and one has to be more vigilant for orphaned notes). One can use tags or category names in Obsidian along with the graph view to approximate some of this affordance, but it requires more work on the part of the user. Prepending sortable numbers onto the titles of notes can allow these neighborhoods to be more visible in the sidebar folder view found in many digital tools.
Some will suggest or use some sort of date/timestamp number as a unique identifier, but doing this generally has little or no value and most digital systems will automatically add date/time creation and modification timestamps to notes anyway if those are of interest or value.
More details: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/
Knowing these potential affordances, try things out for a while to see how they work for you and then decide to continue or change your practice to suit your own needs.
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I'm a huge fan of digital over paper but what would you want on the custom stationary. A typical paper Zettle has:A unique identifier line or boxA content section (I'd assume that can be most of the front and all the backA related notes section.I'd think a typical 5x7 index card with (3) in the top area, (1) in the lower left and (2) on all the rest does the trick.The main place I could see stationary helping is if you want the identifier to have distinguished sections. For example lots of people are using the Dewey Decimal System or Britanica Propedia classification for simplicity ... while I think Library of Congress classification makes more sense since it is available and agreed by the publisher. You could potentially use both in the ID section.
reply to u/JeffB1517 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ulsye/comment/k2mb8s2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I've only seen some modest discussion of DDC and outside of Joseph Voros, vanishingly little discussion (much less usage) of Propædia as classification systems for zettelkasten id numbering. I'm wholly unaware of anyone actively using the Universal Decimal Classification, but would love to see examples of it in action if they exist. From where are you drawing your sampling of "lots of people"? Do you use Library of Congress classification for your own, and if so, can you provide an example of numbers and titles of half a dozen cards to demonstrate your specific method? Given the prevalence of its use in filing/ordering, I'd more likely place the ID at the top of the card over the bottom and put other links at the bottom. Is there a particular affordance that would encourage you to do it the opposite?
Perhaps you're including it in the idea of "related notes", but I also keep a separate reference section on each card for the source or related context of the main idea or excerpted quotation.
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(Separate from https://www.napkin.one/)
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Pulling this back on topic by querying my own zettelkasten...
I've got versions of most of @Will's excellent list in my notes as well, but here are a few other metaphors (and analogies) which I don't think have been mentioned:
- child rearing; perhaps @Sascha will have an experienced perspective on this now?
- Digestion / Diffusion / Filtering / Distillation
- Niklas Luhmann compared his zettelkasten to a septic tank. On Zettel 9/8a2 Luhmann called the Zettelkasten "eine Klärgrube" or a "septic tank;" (perhaps even "cesspool"). Waste goes in, and gets separated from the clearer stuff. You put in a lot of material, a lot of seeming waste, and it allows a process of settling and filtering to allow the waste to be separated and distill into something useful.
- Ruminant machines
- Barbara Tuchman used the ideas of chewing and distillation
- Grist mills and crucibles
- @Will has previously suggested relationships with flywheels before
- Statistical mechanics
- a "wooden life partner"
- woodworking has been mentioned before, but here's an extended one on wood chips in a workshop.
- Paths through forests
- Thought clouds
- avalanches/whirlpools
- Manfred Kuehn analogizes a Zettelkasten to a library
- idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society (see: https://hypothes.is/a/nTNZRGb2EeyZys9wX_gNTQ)
- @Sascha has previously analogized the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars.
- Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.
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Local file Local file
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t may be that in using his system hedeveloped his mind and his knowledge of history to the point wherehe expected his readers to draw more inferences from the facts heselected than most modern readers are accustomed to doing, in thisday of the predigested book.
It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.
Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.
There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.
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jhiblog.org jhiblog.org
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Merchants have their waste book, Sudelbuch or Klitterbuch in German I believe, in which they list all that they have sold or bought every single day, everything as it comes and in no particular order. The waste book’s content is then transferred to the Journal in a more systematic fashion, and at last it ends up in the “Leidger [sic] at double entrance,” following the Italian way of bookkeeping. […] This is a process worthy of imitation by the learned.”(See Ulrich Joost’s analysis in this volume, 24-35.)
I've seen this quote earlier today, but interesting seeing another source quote it.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16ilfgj/my_antinet_zettelkasten_setup/
A great walkthrough of the physical pieces that a zettelkasten user is using.
It almost borders on some of the productivity porn that is seen in the planner/productivity space.
Not seen before: some pre-made templates for placing data on physical cards.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I don't know why I can't do Evergreen and Atomic Notes.. .t3_16r8k0b._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/SouthernEremite at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16r8k0b/i_dont_know_why_i_cant_do_evergreen_and_atomic/
If you're not using your notes to create or write material and only using them as a form of sensemaking, then perhaps you don't need to put as much work or effort into the permanent notes portion of the work? Ask yourself: "Why are you taking notes? What purpose do they serve?" Is the form and level you're making them in serving those purposes? If not, work toward practicing to make those two align so that your notes are serving an actual purpose for you. Anything beyond this is make-work and you could spend your time more profitably somewhere else.
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Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in GermanI believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell,messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, whereeverything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entryafter the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts witheach man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitatedby scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everythingas I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be enteredin another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, andthe ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connectionsand explanations of the material that flow from it. [46]
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776
In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.
Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.
It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.
Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.
Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?
Tags
- waste books
- Sönke Ahrens
- numbering systems
- intellectual history
- idea links
- quotes
- open questions
- accounting influence on note taking
- zettelkasten transmission
- fleeting notes
- Dewey Decimal System
- note taking advice
- academic writing
- John Locke
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- zettelkasten numbering
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- Konrad Gessner
Annotators
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bobdoto.computer bobdoto.computer
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For note makers who find themselves creating an unwieldy amount of so-called "orphan notes," the folgezettel sounds the alarm. When faced with a sea of parents without children (9A 9B 9C 9D 9E, etc) it makes these "empty nesters" all the more apparent as the note gets added to the stack.
There's an interesting dichotomy which seems to be arising here. It's almost as if he's defining a folgezettel note in opposition to orphaned notes, most often seen in digital settings when importing lots of "stuff" but which Doto indicates can happen in analog systems as well.
Orphaned notes in an analog space, however are still linked by proximity even though they're not as densely linked (even from a mathematical topology perspective.)
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"Using the Folgezettel to capture some connections and hope that their nature will reveal themselves later on is just another form of Collector’s Fallacy." I can tell you for a fact that, in my experience, the above quote is fundamentally false. I often find myself doing exactly what's expressed here—using the folgezettel to capture "some connections" in order to get the note-making process started—and am consistently rewarded having done so.
Strong agree with Bob here.
Quite often collecting can create huge value in slowly building a substrate for serendipity to do its work. Some of the key to overcoming this is in the affordances of one's system to find or discover these tidbits in one's collection.
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folgezettel pushes the note maker toward making at least one connection at the time of import.
There is a difference between the sorts of links one might make when placing an idea into an (analog) zettelkasten. A folgezettel link is more valuable than a simple tag/category link because it places an idea into a more specific neighborhood than any handful of tags. This is one of the benefits of a Luhmann-artig ZK system over a more traditional commonplace one, particularly when the work is done up front instead of being punted to a later time.
For those with a 1A2B3Z linking system (versus a pure decimal system), it may be more difficult to insert a card before other cards rather than after them because of the potential gymnastics of numbering and the natural tendency to put things into a continuing linear order.
See also: - https://hypothes.is/a/ToqCPq1bEe2Q0b88j4whwQ - https://hyp.is/WtB2AqmlEe2wvCsB5ZyL5A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Introduction-to-Luhmanns-Zette---Ludecke-Daniel-h4nh8.pdf
Tags
- scaling problem of categorization
- note taking affordances
- folgezettel
- orphaned notes
- zettelkasten affordances
- categorization
- commonplace books vs. zettelkasten
- educational substrates
- serendipity
- types of notes
- note taking topologies
- idea links
- folgezettel notes
- collector's fallacy
- topology of zettelkasten
- work timing
Annotators
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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21:30 notes as ongoing thinking process, not collection (& comment on student essays) + lack of own ideas (notes as starting this process)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I’ve been flitting around loads of note taking platforms - each time, I bask in the glory of a new tool then about 3-4 weeks later I’m done.The one lasting tool is Roam, which I still like despite it being tossed aside by many for other tools. I use TickTick for my task management.I’ve recently returned to journaling or writing things down for that I’ve done and what I want to achieve. I still have an online and mobile task list but I really find writing useful for reflecting.Getting into Zettkekasten, I’m about to use a paper card based approach to do a spell of studying. Im looking forward to the analogue experience but almost feel like I’m being disloyal to the modern digital way. I’m looking forward to seeing if this method helps digest the learning and seeing where this takes me.
reply to u/FilterGrad6 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16iwdep/newbie/
Digital is just a tool. Why necessarily chose it over analog unless you can specifically identify affordances which dramatically improve your experience or output?
As you've discovered, shiny object syndrome may prevent you from collecting enough into one place to be truly useful and valuable. Pick one that seems to work for you and build from there.
If paper was good enough for the practices and outputs of Carl Linnaeus, Konrad Gessner, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, John Locke, Hans Blumenberg, Roland Barthes, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun, Niklas Luhmann, Gertrud Bauer, Marcel Mauss, Phyllis Diller, and so many others is there any reason it shouldn't work just as effectively for your work?
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www.buildingasecondbrain.com www.buildingasecondbrain.com
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A Comprehensive Collection of Second Brain Tools
A .csv downloadable list of note tools and related productivity applications
Airtable link: https://airtable.com/appip8TXg2OuHTati/shr1KApA0zHtZRdzd/tbl7OoiJ2jtMCpM5Q?backgroundColor=yellow&layout=card&viewControls=on
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Even though I commented earlier i have to side with Chris. A ZK is best suited for argumentative and essay like work, not creative one like poetry.Maybe this is something that we need to discuss as a community as hole: it’s seems that a lot of people try to fit their needs to a system that (in my opinion) it’s neither intended or works for those kinds of projects.
reply to Efficient_Eart_8773 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ad43u/comment/jzaas4l/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Though depending on your needs and desires, you can really do both to effectuate the outcomes you'd like to have. The secret is knowing which affordances, structures, and methods suit your desired outcomes. (Of course if you're going to dump your box out and do massive rearrangements or take large portions out and want to refile them for other needs, then you're going to have to give them numbers and do that re-filing work.)
I've seen snippets of saved language in Thoreau's journal (commonplace) which were re-used in other parts of his journal which ultimately ended up in a published work. As he didn't seem to have a significant index, one can only guess that he used occasional browsing or random happenstance delving into it to have moved it from one place to another.
As ever, what do you need and what will best get you there?
Link to:<br /> What Got You Here Won't Get You There
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Anyone thriving with a paper based GTD system?
I've been using a mixture of methods focused around 4 x 6" index cards for a while after having previously done a traditional bullet journal, Day-Timer, etc. and attempting to something similar in a variety of digital contexts including TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, Logseq, etc. (More details/discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/bulletjournal/comments/15av66m/a_year_of_bullet_journaling_on_index_cards/) Somehow paper always seems to win out for the tactile nature and the decreased probability of things going lost (being out of sight and thus out of mind which happens for me in digital), or dealing with a never-ending list of overwhelming pop up reminders.
I've written a bit about the history of some of these methods, which includes links to some of the bigger examples of each if it helps to see some variety about what each system suggests or photos of them at work. One of the oldest methods from which most of the rest seem to stem is the Memindex from circa 1903.
My current go-to is a Memindex/bullet journal method adapted to index cards rather than a notebook. I've got a card every day for events and to do lists as well as cards for "Future", planned purchases/groceries, etc. I keep a top level card with short lists of what I want to read, watch, listen to, and learn. I also keep a sectioned Eisenhower matrix group of cards for the areas: crisis, productivity, distraction, and low priority. I also have a Projects section with descriptions and lists for each and based on priorities, I'll take individual steps from the project cards and place them onto my daily cards as I go.
Some of the bigger projects may have a top level card followed by cards which breakdown or outline parts of larger processes. I can then lay them out on a table (Gantt chart style) to determine dependencies and create a pseudo schedule. When I'm done, I'll clip them all together in the most appropriate order and number them. As necessary, I'll take some of these cards out and "schedule" them for individual days by placing them behind or attaching them to the appropriate daily cards with a paper clip. (If you do this, make sure the project name and a potential order number designator is on them, so that you can refile them with the project as necessary.)
The key is doing weekly and bigger monthly or quarterly reviews of all the major cards and moving/scheduling what you need to do from either old cards or project cards each week. Going through my entire collection of immediate cards is usually incredibly fast. When I'm done with cards, they get archived away in my card index for future consultation if necessary. I'm also usually making further notes on the cards as I go and cross indexing them, so that if I don't have the notes for a particular project in the project section, it's being written on the individual daily cards; at the end of the week I'll update the project cards and write down the dates of those notes into the project file so that if I need them later they're available (but importantly I don't have to copy over all the notes). After doing this it's usually pretty easy to work on planning the next steps for the coming week/month.
For lower priority projects and to do items, if things sit around too long undone they slowly move down the priority list from crisis to low priority or they slowly move to the back of my projects section where they get reviewed less often.
For those who prefer some visualization, here are two photos which may help in terms of the physical arrangement I'm using: - https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/wp-1693596706707-scaled.jpg (alt text: Display of two columns of index cards with only the titles on each showing. Column one: Planning Daily, Planning Weekly, Weeks 31-35 August 2023, Sept 02 2023, September 03 2023, Crisis: Urgent/Important, Productivity: Not Urgent/Important, Low Priority: Not Urgent/Not Important, Distraction: Urgent/Not Important, Someday. The second column: Project Priorities Spring 2023, Reading Priorities, Writing Priorities, Learning Priorities, Listening Priorities, Watching Priorities, Purchases Planning, Groceries.) - https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/wp-16935967219588251569559254031730-scaled.jpg (alt text: My card index for productivity featuring sections for an Eisenhower Matrix, Projects, and tabs for the upcoming 12 months and 31 days in the current month.)
On a day-to-day basis, I keep most of it in an Acrimet card file on my desk, though the longer term storage is in a nearby Singer Card File Cabinet. (I'll often have a full drawer removed from the big cabinet on my desk while I'm working on a particular section.) While travelling about, I store the most important daily use cards in a King Jim Flatty Works case which is about the size of a small notebook or which fits easily into my shoulder bag. If you're all-in on index cards and you need ideas for storage, I've been compiling a relatively comprehensive list of index card storage options.
Having done notebooks and other paper-based planners (Hobonichi) before, I appreciate that the cards are easily moveable and re-orderable, I don't waste any paper or space if I miss days, I'm not as precious about screwing up a new notebook, and I don't have to carry either multiple notebooks, or worry about recopying project pages from one notebook to the next when I'm done. I also don't have to worry about losing large parts of my planning if I lose a whole notebook. It's always easy to have today's card on me at all times or to take small sections on the road as needed. Additionally cards are very cheap. If you're of the sort of camp that having pre-laid out stationery with finer stock, perhaps try Notsu who pre-prints a variety of productivity cards, though only in 3 x 5 inch sizes. There are a few other smaller companies who still do this, but they tend toward the more expensive side.
There are many ways to do variations on these, so take a look at some examples of how others use them and then attempt to evolve a practice which works for you. For example, if having an Eisenhower Matrix section doesn't make sense to you, then drop that part and adopt what does work instead.
For those who are deep into this sort of rabbit hole, I'll also mention that I keep a separate zettelkasten "department" within my collection for notes related to reading/research. (I had to fill that massive Singer card index up with something besides extra wine storage.)
Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/gtd/comments/15pfz8o/comment/jypt023/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
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- Aug 2023
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Write short sentences. They are understandable. They may not be pretty. You will thank yourself later, though. Don’t write long sentences which are packed with subordinate clauses and with a buttload of extra flashy and forceful adjectives, just because you think that you’d enjoy a more pleasing style. It won’t work.
It is not easy to start, but it is the survival skill for better writing.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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This is a way to make check lists that are more useful. You only fill the box when your all the way done with the task, when you are about half way done you fill the box half way. I learnedabout this from Adam Savage in his book, "Every Tool is a Hammer". He learned about it when he worked at Industrial Light & Magic.Does it have an official name? (screen shots from his book)
Adam Savage's book Every Tool is a Hammer shows a checklist which has square bullets which can be partially filled in to show the level of completion. He learned the method when working at Industrial Light & Magic.
via u/AZORIAN_K129 at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/15zgbvr/does_this_technique_have_a_name/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'm not convinced that a Luhmann-style ZK is the right note-making method for school notes. Though, I'd be fine having my mind changed.
reply to u/taurusnoises and u/Leander_znsnsj at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/
I'm generally in the same boat as u/taurusnoises and don't think that a Luhmann-artig ZK is necessarily the right way to go—particularly at the lower levels.
I would suggest that if interested students look closely at the overall set up, they'll find that the literature note portion is almost identical to that of the Cornell note-taking method. The primary differences between them are placing more emphasis on follow-up and review, forcing yourself to answer questions, and doing spaced repetition. (Of course, naturally, there's nothing wrong with doing all your Cornell Notes on index cards despite every version I've ever seen recommending sheets of paper!)
If you do ultimately choose to go with the expanded zettelkasten workflow, I would recommend you spend more time focusing on your own thoughts on the facts and ideas as they relate to the the Cornell portion. Focus more on the area of your major (or particular interests if you're still unsure of your major) in which you're most likely to need to create writing or other particular outputs. One or two good main cards a day with a full class load is a solid start.
Keep in mind that as you enter new areas, you will likely make lots of basic, factual, low level notes while you're learning. Don't worry about this (and don't ignore it either) as working with these ideas will help you to scaffold your knowledge and understand it better. You may not have lots of high quality main notes which will usually come as you get deeper into the nuances of your subject. You should still expect to find and generate insights though and these may be highly valuable as you need to execute projects or write papers.
Good luck!
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americanhistory.si.edu americanhistory.si.edu
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Although Diller generated a lot of her own material, she elicited some gags from other writers. One of her top contributors was Mary MacBride, a Wisconsin housewife with five children. A joke obtained from another writer includes the contributor’s name on the index card with the gag.
Not all of the jokes in Phyllis Diller's collection were written by her. Many include comic strips she collected as well as jokes written by others and sent in to her.
One of the biggest contributors to her collection of jokes was Wisconsin housewife Mary MacBride, the mother of five children. Jokes contributed by others include their names on the individual cards.
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www.dtsheffler.com www.dtsheffler.com
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https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/ archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220124223433/https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/
ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 12:00:07)
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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Writing on small cards forces certain habits which would be good even for larger paper, but which I didn’t consider until the small cards made them necessary. It forces ideas to be broken up into simple pieces, which helps to clarify them. Breaking up ideas forces you to link them together explicitly, rather than relying on the linear structure of a notebook to link together chains of thought.
A statement of the common "one idea per card" (or per note). He doesn't state it, but links to an article whose title is "One Thought Per Note".
Who else has use this or similar phrasing in the historical record? - Beatrice Webb certainly came pretty close. - Others?
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However, I strongly recommend trying out Zettelkasten on actual note-cards, even if you end up implementing it on a computer. There’s something good about the note-card version that I don’t fully understand.
Another advising to use the analog method for learning even if one is going to switch to a digital zettelkasten.
He uses the word "good" here while others may have potentially used the word "magic", but writing in a space that values critical thinking, he would have been taken to task for having done so. In any case he's not able to put his finger on the inherent value of analog over digital.
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Might we coin "zettelkastenly" as a function of (box) composed with (manually+cerebrally)?
hand:manually::brain:cerebrally::box:zettelkastenly
I would use the LaTeX \boxtimes symbol for this composition I think....
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I want to start studying zettelkasten, advise books, video, courses, articles, web pages, please!
Zettelkasten advice:
- Have a goal in mind
- Really... have a goal. Write it down.
- Practice at it, a lot
- When stuck, read some of the bits below
- Practice, practice, practice.
Here are a list of some of the strongest books which focus on the topic or cover things from various interesting perspectives: - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (Specifically the first half of the book.) - Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. - Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html. - Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Especially chapter seven). - Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.
Read one (or two) and then dive in and actually practice (and practice and practice some more) things for a while.
For some of the smaller subtleties which aren't covered in books, try one of the two following collections for individual bits of advice and insight: - https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/ - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/
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www.attorneyatwork.com www.attorneyatwork.com
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magic of index cards
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Jillian HessAug 7AuthorI make my own journals too! I found it totally elevated my note-taking experience.
Jillian Hess makes her own journals as a means of elevating her note-taking experience.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Zettelkasten for Normies: What Normies Really Need to Know .t3_15sqiq2._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/SunghoYahng at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15sqiq2/zettelkasten_for_normies_what_normies_really_need/
u/SunghoYahng, some of your article sounds like a pared down digital version of a commonplace book which allows for links, so it fits into the older zettelkasten tradition, just not into the more Luhmann-artig version on which this subreddit is generally more focused. Perhaps yours is closer to a digital version of the analog commonplace using index cards that Billy Oppenheimer describes having learned from Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene?
Often people focus too much on Luhmann's prodigious output and then immediately imply or say you should adopt his very specific system without describing what his system did or why it worked so well for him and his particular needs. Very few focus on what it is that they want to accomplish and how they might use his system or the thousands of variations on it throughout history to come to those goals as quickly and easily as they can.
You commit a version of this sin in your opening lines:
The content about Zettelkasten is mostly too long and practically useless. The purpose of this text is to write only what normies really need to know.
Who are these so-called "normies" and what specifically are they trying to accomplish? You don't define either of them, and possibly worse do it in a negative framing. The system you're describing might be a great one, but for whom? What do you expect them to use it for? What will they get out of it?
Many people talk about the "magic" of a zettelkasten and then wave their hands at some version of a workflow of what they think it is or what they think it should be. Perhaps what we all really need is a list of potential affordances that different methods allow and how one might leverage those affordances. How might they be mixed and matched? Then users can decide what outcomes they wish to have (writing, thinking, aggregation, bookmarking, collecting, creativity, artificial memory, serendipity, productivity, wiki, spaced repetition, learning, time wasting, etc., etc.) and which affordances are necessary within their workflow/system to effectuate those specific goals? Finally they can pick and choose a specific version of a methodology/workflow and either an analog substrate (index cards, notebooks, memory palace, etc.) or digital tool/application (Obsidian, Roam Research, The Archive, etc.) to save it all in. Of course once you've chosen that analog or digital tool, does it actually have the affordances you want or need in actual practice? Are they easy to use? Practical? Do they save you time? Are they simple or over-engineered? What happens when they scale to a year of regular use or even a lifetime?
As a simple example, many writers would love a seriously good outliner functionality in their system to pull out the materials they want to work with and then appropriately order them for a potential final written output. In practice, index cards on a big table are fantastic for this process while most (all?) current digital tools are miserable at it. And of course once you've gotten the outline you like in an analog space you have to type it all out to print/publish in a final form, something which the digital affordance of cut and paste would make much simpler. Who wouldn't love a tool that could give you all of these affordances, presuming you needed them?
While we're on outlining, very few talk about the ease-of-use that some professional outliners like Dave Winer's Drummer or Little Outliner have versus some of the more text-editing focused tools like Obsidian which are generally poor as outliners (if you could even call them that) in comparison.
If you're interested in folgezettel and outlining, you might appreciate some subtleties in Bob's piece: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-is-not-an-outline-luhmanns-playful-appreciation-of-disfunction/
cross reference https://hypothes.is/a/OhcWSjxyEe6V8DP9P6WNQQ
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Why is the index card half full?
reply to u/ManuelRodriguez331 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15ehcy5/why_is_the_index_card_half_full/
There has been debate about the length of notes on slips since the invention of slips and it shows no signs of coming to broad consensus other than everyone will have their personal opinion.
If you feel that A6 is is too big then go down a step in size to A7. One of the benefits of the DIN A standard is that you can take the next larger card size and fold it exactly in half to have the next size smaller. This makes it easier to scale up the size of your cards if you prefer most of them to be smaller to save space, just take care not to allow larger folded cards to "taco" smaller cards in a way they're likely to get lost. If you really needed more space, you could easily use an A1 or A2 and fold it down to fit inside of your collection! (Sadly 4x6 and 3x5 cards don't have this affordance.)
Fortunately there are a variety of available sizes, so you can choose what works best for yourself. Historically some chose large 5x8", 6x9", or even larger "slips". Some have also used different sizes for different functions. For example some use 3x5 for bibliographic cards and 4x6 for day-to-day ideas. I've seen stacked wooden card catalog furniture that had space for 3x5, 4x6, and 8.5x11 in separate drawers within the same cabinet. Some manufacturers even made their furniture modular to make this sort of mixed use even easier.
One of the broadly used pieces of advice that does go back centuries is to use "cards of the same size" (within a particular use case). This consensus is arrived at to help users from losing smaller cards between larger/taller cards. Cards of varying sizes, even small ones, are also much more difficult to sort through. Slight of hand magicians will be aware of the fact that shaving small fractions of length off of playing cards is an easy way of not only marking them, but of executing a variety of clever shuffling illusions as well as finding some of them very quickly by feel behind the back. Analog zettelkasten users will only discover that smaller, shorter cards are nearly guaranteed to become lost among the taller cards. It's for this reason that I would never recommend one to mix 4x6, A6, or even the very closely cut Exacompta Bristol cards, which are neither 4x6 nor A6!
I once took digital notes and printed them on paper and then cut them up to fit the size of the individual notes to save on space and paper. I can report that doing this was a painfully miserable experience and positively would NOT recommend doing this for smaller projects much less lifelong ones. Perhaps this could be the sort of chaos someone out there might actually manage to thrive within, but I suspect it would be a very rare individual.
As for digital spacing, you may win out a bit here for "saving" paper space, but you're also still spending on storage costs in electronic formatting which historically doesn't have the longevity of physical formats. Digital also doesn't offer the ease of use of laying cards out on a desktop and very quickly reordering them for subsequent uses.
There are always tradeoffs, one just need be aware of them to guide choices for either how they want to work or how they might work best.
Personally, I use 4x6" cards because I often write longer paragraphs on them. Through experimentation I found that I would end up using two or more 3x5 cards more often than I would have had mostly blank 4x6 cards and used that to help drive my choice. I also find myself revisiting old cards and adding to them (short follow ups, links to other cards, or other metadata) and 3x5 wouldn't allow that as easily.
As ever, YMMV...
See also: [[note lengths]] and/or [[note size]].
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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How do you refer from and to multiple sources? .t3_15eljnf._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/15eljnf/how_do_you_refer_from_and_to_multiple_sources/
Usually if I find a quote somewhere, I'll try to track down the original source, check the context and excerpt it from the original. If it's something mission critical, I might note that it was excerpted and used in other sources and whether it was well excerpted for their case or not. Sometimes, quoting can also help to make a solid case about the influence a work had and notes on that can be a useful thing. If I make multiple notes about the same sort of idea, that's fine, though I typically try to file them all next to each other for easy consultation and comparison, if necessary. As an example, I have quotes from multiple sources about note taking indicating that one should only write on one side of a(n index) card. Some quote earlier sources, some state it without attribution, some say they've learned to do so over time and with experience. Some give reasons why and some don't. The only way to track these practices over time is to note them all together for comparing and contrasting. It wasn't until I'd seen the third mention that I realized the practice was an interesting/important one and worth tracking, so I had to go back and dig up the originals which I had written briefly on their bibliographic cards with page numbers, so it made things easier to create main cards out of them. Because they're all stored together, there's only one index entry for them (for the first one), under "note taking" with the subheading "write only on one side". Alternately I might have made a single note card about the idea of the practice and created a list with pointers of those who used it (or didn't) and links to the sources where I originally found them. Do what makes most sense for you for tracking based on your own situation and needs. You may also find that these things happen frequently when doing literature reviews and things are repeated often within a field. Sometimes it's helpful to figure out who said a thing first and whether or not others are repeating/quoting them or coming to the same conclusion on their own. Is it a solid conclusion? What is the evidence or lack thereof? The only way to know is to start keeping track of these patterns in your reading and notes. Where and how you choose to track it in your zettelkasten is up to you. Sometimes it may be in brief notes with the original source, sometimes in a "hub note", and still others broken out into primary cards collected together.
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- Jul 2023
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Local file Local file
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Does he actually touch on the idea of "modern magic" explicitly? He talks about modern technology, but does he frame it as "magic"?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Hello! I've recently encountered the Zettelkasten system and adore the emphasis on connecting ideas. However, I don't want to use the traditional index card way, seeing as I have a ring binder with 90 empty pages thus I don't want it to go to waste. I've researched a lot of methods using a notebook, where some organize their zettels by page number, while others write as usual and connect and index the ideas for every 30 pages or so. But considering that the loose-leaf paper can be in any order I chose, I think there can be a better workaround there. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
reply to u/SnooPandas3432 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158tzk7/zettelkasten_on_a_ring_binder_with_looseleaf_paper/
She didn't specify a particular dimension, but I recall that Beatrice Webb used larger sheets of paper than traditional index-card sized slips in her practice and likely filed them into something akin to hanging files in a filing cabinet.
For students, I might suggest using the larger sheets/3-ring binder to make Cornell notes for coursework and then later distilling down one or two of the best ideas from a lecture or related readings into index card form for filing away over time. You could then have a repository of bigger formatted literature notes from books/lectures with more space and still have all the benefits of a more traditional card-based zettelkasten for creativity and writing. You could then have the benefit of questions for spaced repetition for quizzes/tests, while still keeping bigger ideas for writing papers or future research needs.
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blog.ayjay.org blog.ayjay.org
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https://blog.ayjay.org/unanswered-questions/
The index-card based notes pictured in this post certainly makes me think that Alan Jacobs has the sort of note taking/commonplace book sort of practice I thought he would.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Overloaded with notes .t3_15218d5._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } A few years ago I moved from Evernote to Obsidian. Evernote had this cool web clipper feature that helped me gather literary quotes, tweets, Wikipedia facts, interview bits, and any kinds of texts all around the web. And now I have a vault with 10k notes.I am trying to review a few every time I open Obsidian (add tags, link it, or delete) but it is still too much.Did someone have the same experience? How did you manage to fix everything and move to a bit more controllable system (zettelkasten or any other)?Cus I feel like I am standing in front of a text tsunami
reply to u/posh-and-repressed at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/15218d5/overloaded_with_notes/
Overwhelm of notes always reminds me of this note taking story from 1908: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/ If you've not sorted them, tagged/categorized them or other, then search is really your only recourse. One of the benefits of Luhmann's particular structure is that it nudged him to read and review through older cards as he worked and filed new ones. Those with commonplace books would have occasionally picked up their notebooks and paged through them from time to time. Digital methods like Obsidian don't always do a good job of allowing or even forcing this review work on the user, so you may want to look at synthetic means like one of the random note plugins. Otherwise don't worry too much. Fix your tagging/categorizing/indexing now so that things slowly improve in the future. (I'm sitting on a pile of over 50K notes without the worry of overwhelm, primarily as I've managed to figure out how to rely on my index and search.)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Converting Commonplace Books? .t3_14v2ohz._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/
Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across https://www.indxd.ink, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Inserting a maincards with lack of memory .t3_14ot4na._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Lihmann's system of inserting a maincard is fundamentally based on a person's ability to remember there are other maincards already inserted that would be related to the card you want to insert.What if you have very poor memory like many people do, what is your process of inserting maincards?In my Antinet I handled it in an enhanced method from what I did in my 27 yrs of research notebooks which is very different then Lihmann's method.
reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14ot4na/inserting_a_maincards_with_lack_of_memory/
I would submit that your first sentence is wildly false.
What topic(s) cover your newly made cards? Look those up in your index and find where those potentially related cards are (whether you remember them or not). Go to that top level card listed in your index and see what's there or in the section of cards that come after it. Find the best card in that branch and file your new card(s) as appropriate. If necessary, cross-index them with sub-topics in your index to make them more findable in the future. If you don't find one or more of those topics in your index, then create a new branch and start an index entry for one or more of those terms. (You'll find yourself making lots of index entries to start, but it will eventually slow down—though it shouldn't stop—as your collection grows.)
Ideally, with regular use, you'll likely remember more and more, especially for active areas you're really interested in. However, take comfort that the system is designed to let you forget everything! This forgetting will actually help create future surprise as well as serendipity that will actually be beneficial for potentially generating new ideas as you use (and review) your notes.
And if you don't believe me, consider that Alberto Cevolini edited an entire book, broadly about these techniques—including an entire chapter on Luhmann—, which he aptly named Forgetting Machines!
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Webb, Beatrice P. (1926). My Apprenticeship. Longmans, Green & Co.
urn:x-pdf:d46f7c2791538c32a5ef76b13cdb9fe8
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Ad46f7c2791538c32a5ef76b13cdb9fe8
Available at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/myapprenticeship0000beat/page/n7/mode/2up
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- Jun 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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What I love and appreciate from Metivier, he will cite his sources. He makes it super easy to go back to his sources and mine those materials myself. He gives credit to other memory experts and is transparent throughout his books and course about where he is in his own process of growing and learning. In summary, we don't need originality, we need what works and in the scholarly world- syncretizing multiple sources and distilling them into a process IS original even if every building block is coming from another source. We're all standing on the shoulders of the giants before us.
My note-taking method is informed by the commonplace book and zettelkasten: why reinvent a wheel that needs no reinventing (it is only, really, about translating things from one medium to another)
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I just can't get into these sort of high-ritual triage approaches to note-taking. I can admire it from afar, which I do, but find this sort of "consider this ahead of time before you make a move" approaches to really drag down my process.But, I do appreciate them from a sort of "aesthetics of academia" perspective.
Reply to Bob Doto at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14ikfsy/comment/jplo3j2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 with respect to PZ Compass Points.
I'll agree wholeheartedly that applying methods like this to each note one takes is a "make work" exercise. It's apt to encourage people into the completist trap of turning every note they take into some sort of pristine so-called permanent or evergreen note, and there are already too many of those practitioners, who often give up in a few weeks wondering "where did I go wrong?".
It's useful to know that these methods and tools exist, particularly for younger students, but I would never recommend that one apply them on a daily or even weekly basis. Maybe if one was having trouble with a particular idea or thought and wanted to more exhaustively explore the adjacent space around it, but even here going out for a walk in nature and allowing diffuse thinking to do some of the work is likely to be just as (maybe more?) productive.
It could be the sort of thing to write down in your collection of Oblique Strategies to pull out when you're hitting a wall?
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translate.google.com translate.google.com
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https://translate.google.com/?sl=ja&tl=en&text=%E6%B3%A8&op=translate
注 (Chū), Japanese for note
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www.uclaextension.edu www.uclaextension.edu
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Nick Milo is offering a remote digital note taking and writing course for $485 for UCLA Extension in late summer 2023.
Nick Milodragovich
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www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
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I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory, where they will be ready either for practice on some future occasion if they are matters of utility, or at least to adorn and improve your conversation if they are rather points of curiosity.
Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.
Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Todd Henry in his book The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice (Portfolio/Penguin, 2011) uses the acronym FRESH for the elements of "creative rhythm": Focus, Relationships, Energy, Stimuli, Hours. His advice about note taking comes in a small section of the chapter on Stimuli. He recommends using notebooks with indexes, including a Stimuli index. He says, "Whenever you come across stimuli that you think would make good candidates for your Stimulus Queue, record them in the index in the front of your notebook." And "Without regular review, the practice of note taking is fairly useless." And "Over time you will begin to see patterns in your thoughts and preferences, and will likely gain at least a few ideas each week that otherwise would have been overlooked." Since Todd describes essentially the same effect as @Will but without mentioning a ZK, this "magic" or "power" seems to be a general feature of reviewing ideas or stimuli for creative ideation, not specific to a ZK. (@Will acknowledged this when he said, "Using the ZK method is one way of formalizing the continued review of ideas", not the only way.)
via Andy
Andy indicates that this review functionality isn't specific to zettelkasten, but it still sits in the framework of note taking. Given this, are there really "other" ways available?
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- May 2023
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www.nicksantalucia.com www.nicksantalucia.com
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Santalucia, Nick. “The Zettelkasten in the Secondary Classroom.” Blog, July 6, 2021. https://www.nicksantalucia.com/blog/the-zettelkasten-in-the-secondary-classroom-k12.
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getupnote.com getupnote.com
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Suggested by Cato Minor<br /> Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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@Will Thanks for always keeping up with your regular threads and considerations.
I've been keeping examples of people talking about the "magic of note taking" for a bit. I appreciate your perspectives on it. Personally I consider large portions of it to be bound up with the ideas of what Luhmann termed as "second memory", the use of ZK to supplement our memories, and the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. I've traced portions of it back to the practices of Raymond Llull in which he bound up old mnemonic techniques with combinatorial creativity which goes back to at least Seneca.
A web search for "combinatorial creativity" may be useful, but there's a good attempt at what it entails here: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/
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The magic comes from the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly.
Will Simpson feels that the magic of note taking stems from "the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly".
I think it sems more from the serendipitous connections and resultant combinatorial creativity.
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Links are where the magic happens.
cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/QLyD4P6mEe2uC4O7z2QOOQ
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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It is unfortunate that the German word for a box of notes is the same as the methodology surrounding Luhmann.
reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921
I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.
Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.
To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.
Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.
Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.
Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.
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archive.org archive.org
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https://archive.org/details/myapprenticeship0000beat/page/412/mode/2up
Appendix C: The Art of Note-Taking in My Apprenticeship (1926)
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I get by when I work by accumulating notes—a bit about everything, ideas cap-tured on the fly, summaries of what I have read, references, quotations . . . Andwhen I want to start a project, I pull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind of operation, where chance plays arole, helps me revive my failing memory.16
via: Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii–viii; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 129f.
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system was described by Charles Darwin:I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labeled shelves, intowhich I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought manybooks and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work.Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a generaland classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all theinformation collected during my life ready for use.13
via Nora Barlow ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1958), 137.
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get.mem.ai get.mem.ai
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I've had this on a list for ages, but never put into my digital notes...
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www.ploter.io www.ploter.ioPloter1
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Modern all-in-one reader Read EPUBs, PDFs and audiobooks on all of your devices. Reading progress and highlights synced seamlessly.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Physical vs Digital Note Systems
There's a lot of useful detail hiding in this 15 minutes as an overview, but nothing new/interesting for me.
I will say that he completely misses a lot of the subtleties of indexing and multiple storage within the analog space, but it's likely because he's not done it personally or doesn't have enough experience there.
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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Evergreen notes should be atomicEvergreen notes should be concept-orientedEvergreen notes should be densely linkedPrefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomiesWrite notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience
Deben ser de una forma en la que pueda tomar el concepto de lo que quería anotar solo con leer la nota, (como si fuera un guía definitiva en YT) tienen que estar enlazadas con otros conceptos (como el ejemplo de guía definitiva de YT) para tomar una idea más completa y amplia sobre la nota tienen que estar categorizadas por el concepto que estoy tratando, no sobre autor, libro, fecha. Tiene que sobre concepto general, evitamos tener millones de notas de diferentes categorías y las metemos todas en una categoría madre (sleep en vez de andrew huberman, o youtube) tengo que hacer notas para mi sin pensar que las voy a compartir, (que también puedo hacer) Y que puedan crecer, verlas como una red muy compleja como celulas o neuraonas en un cerebro que se concetan entre si hacer este tipo de notas con cada cosa interesante que encuentre y me gustaría guardar
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patrickrhone.com patrickrhone.com
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https://patrickrhone.com/dashplus/
referenced via Simon Woods at micro.camp https://hypothes.is/a/_GvLrPczEe2T-tfEqnLNhw
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https://xtiles.app/en
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www.marginnote.com www.marginnote.com
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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During his imprisonment, Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, writer, politician, and linguist, was imprisoned from 1926 until his death in 1937 as a vocal critic of Benito Mussolini. While in prison he wrote more than 3,000 pages in more than 30 notebooks. His Prison Notebooks comprise a fascinating contribution to political theory.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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people are great at the collecting and categorizing pieces, but we're less good at going back in and connecting or expressing and this is where the value increases exponentially
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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More than just taking notes - Learning exhaust by Nicole van der Hoeven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L24rKggMX8
Nice framing to broadly define note taking as a form of learning exhaust, but broadly nothing new here for me.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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An Inside Look into Obsidian Book Club
Several nice mentions of me throughout...
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Requesting advice for where to put a related idea to a note I'm currently writing .t3_13gcbj1._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Hi! I am new to building a physical ZK. Would appreciate some help.Pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/WvyNVXfI have a section in my ZK about the concept of "knowledge transmission" (4170/7). The below notes are within that section.I am currently writing a note about how you have to earn your understanding... when receiving knowledge / learning from others. (Picture #1)Whilst writing this note, I had an idea that I'm not quite sure belongs on that note itself - and I'm not sure where it belongs. About how you also have to "earn" the sharing of knowledge. (Picture #2)Here are what I think my options are for writing about the idea "you have to earn your sharing of knowledge":Write this idea on my current card. 4170/7/1Write this idea on a new note - as a variant idea of my current note. 4170/7/1aWrite this idea on a new note - as a continuation of my current note. 4170/7/1/1Write this idea on a new note - as a new idea within my "knowledge transmission" branch. 4170/7/2What would you do here?
reply to u/throwthis_throwthat at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13gcbj1/requesting_advice_for_where_to_put_a_related_idea/
I don't accept the premise of your question. This doesn't get said often enough to people new to zettelkasten practice: Trust your gut! What does it say? You'll learn through practice that there are no "right" answers to these. Put a number on it, file it, and move on. Practice, practice, practice. You'll be doing this in your sleep soon enough. As long as it's close enough, you'll find it. Save your mental cycles for deeper thoughts than this.
Asking others for their advice is fine, but it's akin to asking a well-practiced mnemonist what visual image they would use to remember something. Everyone is different and has different experiences and different things that make their memories sticky for them. What works incredibly well for how someone else thinks and the level of importance they give an idea is never as useful or as "true" as how you think about it. Going with your gut is going to help you remember it better and is far likelier to make it easier to find in the future.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Jared Henderson writes excerpted ideas in block capital letters and his own observations and thoughts in small print as a means of distinguishing his own ideas from others.
Others might do this using other means: fonts, color, writing instrument, etc.
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librarian.aedileworks.com librarian.aedileworks.com
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The promise of using machine learning on your own notes to connect with external sources is not new. Andromeda Yelton’s HAMLET is six years old.
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howaboutthis.substack.com howaboutthis.substack.com
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Enter the venerable composition notebook. For $1.507, I get 180 pages at that composition book size (larger than A5) with a reasonably durable hard cover. The paper is quite acceptable for writing and I really don’t care if I make a huge mess within because it’s relatively inexpensive8.
At Mark Dykeman's rate, to convert to cheap composition books, he's looking at $26/year for the equivalent paper consumption. On a per day basis, it's $0.071 per day in paper.
This can be compared with my per day cost of $0.421 per day for index cards, which is more expensive, though not $1-2 per day for more expensive notebooks.
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I take a lot of notes during my day job. More like a huge amount of notes. On paper. As an experiment I started using several Dingbats* notebooks during the day job to see how they would work4 for me. After about 9 weeks of trials, I learned that I could fill up a 180 page notebook in about 3 weeks, plus or minus a few days. Unfortunately, when you factor in the cost of these notebooks, that’s like spending $1 - $2 per day on notebooks. Dingbats* are lovely, durable notebooks. But my work notes are not going to be enshrined in a museum for the ages5 and until I finally get that sponsorship from Dingbats* or Leuchtuurm19176, I probably need a different solution.
Mark Dykeman indicates that at regular work, he fills up a 180 page notebook and at the relatively steep cost of notebooks, he's paying $1-2 a day for paper.
This naturally brings up the idea of what it might cost per day in index cards for some zettlers' practices. I've already got some notes on price of storage...
As a rough calculation, despite most of my note taking being done digitally, I'm going through a pack of 500 Oxford cards at $12.87 every 5 months at my current pace. This is $0.02574 per card and 5 months is roughly 150 days. My current card cost per day is: $0.02574/card * 500 cards / (150 days) = $12.78/150 days = $0.0858 per day which is far better than $2/day.
Though if I had an all-physical card habit, I would be using quite a bit more.
On July 3, 2022 I was at 10,099 annotations and today May 11, 2023 I'm at 15,259 annotations. At one annotation per card that's 5,160 cards in the span of 312 days giving me a cost of $0.02574/card * 5,160 cards / 312 days = $0.421 per day or an average of $153.75 per year averaging 6,036 cards per year.
(Note that this doesn't also include the average of three physical cards a day I'm using in addition, so the total would be slightly higher.)
Index cards are thus, quite a bit cheaper a habit than fine stationery notebooks.
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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’ve been studying notebooks for over a decade and I still haven’t landed on a perfect organization method. I have, however, found the perfect pen: uni-ball signo, .38mm. I discovered them while teaching in Korea in 2008 and haven’t looked back.
It can't be a good sign that an academic who has spent over a decade studying notebooks and note taking still hasn't found the "perfect" organization method.
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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4/20/52[Keime.] Murder by mental nagging. Woman nags her husband to suicide, which he does so it looks like he has been murdered. Poison, which he puts in her desk drawer, her fingerprints on it.
Jillian Hess noted that Patricia Highsmith uses the German word Keime, meaning "germ of an idea" in her cahiers to indicate ideas which might be used in her novels or short stories.
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I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day, a larger one if one has the luxury of staying at home.
from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Write down all these slender ideas. It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you’re ready to write a short story. — Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks
quote is from Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
I love the concept of "slender ideas" as small, fleeting notes which might accumulate into something if written down. In saying "Close the notebook and think about it for a few days" Patricia Highsmith seems to be suggesting that one engage in diffuse thinking, passive digesting, or mulling rather than active or proactive thinking.
She also invokes the magic word "presto!" (which she exclaims) as if to indicate that magically the difficult work of writing is somehow no longer difficult. Many writers seem to indicate that this is a phenomenon, but never seem to put their finger on the mechanism of why it happens. Some seems to stem from the passive digestion over days with diffuse thinking, with portions may also stem from not starting from a blank page and having some material to work against instead of a vacuum.
From Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 (Swiss Literary Archives)
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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What's with the bees? by [[Jillian Hess]]
A tipping out of Hess' zettelkasten on the theme of bees (apes) in note taking.
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As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands. —The Adages of Erasmus
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The bee plunders the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment — The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Cross reference with Seneca's note taking metaphors with apes.
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Besides the metaphor of the honeybee, Seneca also compares this method to a stomach digesting food as well as a choir that produces one sound from many harmonized voices.
In addition to the honeybee metaphor, Seneca compared note taking and collecting sententiae to a stomach digesting food and a choir producing a harmonized sound out of many voices.
(Sources from these last two? Potentially Epistle LXXXIV?)
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Looking forward to being notespired!
notespired
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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It’s great that there’s interest in this stuff. Your articles are inspiring, as is Jillian Hess’s NotesSubstack, team Greene/Holiday/Oppenheimer, and the German scholars who focus on the technology of writing, such as Hektor Haarkötter. But I don’t see this as nostalgia. For me it’s history in service of the present and the future.
reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/comment/jjkwc05/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Definitely history in service of the present and the future. Too many people are doing some terribly hard work attempting to reinvent wheels which have been around for centuries.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Note taking should serve a specific purpose; it should be a means to some end.
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Note taking can also be done to create a database (a la Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking).
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Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***.
The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.
Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.
Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.
For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.
Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.
If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.
If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?
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The few notes I did refer back to frequently where checklists, self-written instructions to complete regular tasks, lists (reading lists, watchlists, etc.) or recipes. Funnily enough the ROI on these notes was a lot higher than all the permanent/evergreen/zettel notes I had written.
Notes can be used for different purposes.
- productivity
- Knowledge
- basic sense-making
- knowledge construction and dispersion
The broad distinction is between productivity goals and knowledge. (Is there a broad range I'm missing here within the traditions?) You can take notes about projects that need to be taken care of, lists of things to do, reminders of what needs to be done. These all fall within productivity and doing and checking them off a list will help one get to a different place or location and this can be an excellent thing, particularly when the project was consciously decided upon and is a worthy goal.
Notes for knowledge sake can be far more elusive for people. The value here generally comes with far more planning and foresight towards a particular goal. Are you writing a newsletter, article, book, or making a video or performance of some sort (play, movie, music, etc.)? Collecting small pieces of these things on a pathway is then important as you build your ideas and a structure toward some finished product.
Often times, before getting to this construction phase, one needs to take notes to be able to scaffold their understanding of a particular topic. Once basically understood some of these notes may be useless and not need to be reviewed, or if they are reviewed, it is for the purpose of ensconcing ideas into long term memory. Once this is finished, then the notes may be broadly useless. (This is why it's simple to "hide them with one's references/literature notes.) Other notes are more seminal towards scaffolding ideas towards larger projects for summarization and dissemination to other audiences. If you're researching a topic, a fair number of your notes will be used to help you understand the basics while others will help you to compare/contrast and analyze. Notes you make built on these will help you shape new structures and new, original thoughts. (note taking for paradigm shifts). These then can be used (re-used) when you write your article, book, or other creative project.
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I used Apple Notes, Evernote, Roam, Obsidian, Bear, Notion, Anki, RemNote, the Archive and a few others. I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal. I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.
Example of someone falling prey to shiny object syndrome, switching tools incessantly, then focusing on too many of the wrong things/minutiae and getting lost in the shuffle.
Don't get caught up into this. Understand the basics of types of notes, but don't focus on them. Let them just be. Does what you've written remind you of the end goal?
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- note taking is learning
- note taking affordances
- note taking process
- permanent notes
- note taking advice
- examples
- note taking why
- types of notes
- evergreen notes
- card index as database
- note taking as aide-mémoire
- personal knowledge management
- note taking for paradigm shifts
- shiny object syndrome
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'm not actually setting a productivity goal, I'm just tracking metadata because it's related to my research. Of which the ZettelKasten is one subject.That being said, in your other post you point to "Quality over Quantity" what, in your opinion, is a quality note?Size? Number of Links? Subjective "goodness"?
reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/comment/jjcu3cn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I'm curious what your area of research is? What are you studying with respect to Zettelkasten?
Caveat notetarius. Note collections are highly idiosyncratic to the user or intended audience, thus quality will vary dramatically on the creator's needs and future desires and potential uses. Contemporaneous, very simple notes can be valuable for their initial sensemaking and quite often in actual practice stop there.
Ultimately, only the user can determine perceived quality and long term value for themselves. Future generations of historians, anthropologists, scholars, and readers, might also find value in notes and note collections, but it seems rare that the initial creators have written them with future readers and audiences in mind. Often they're less useful as the external reader is missing large swaths of context.
For my own personal notes, I consider high quality notes to be well-sourced, highly reusable, easily findable, and reasonably tagged/linked. My favorite, highest quality notes are those that are new ideas which stem from the combination of two high quality notes. With respect to subjectivity, some of my philosophy is summarized by one of my favorite meta-zettels (alt text also available) from zettelmeister Umberto Eco.
Anecdotally, 95% of my notes are done digitally and in public, but I've only got scant personal evidence that anyone is reading or interacting with them. I never write them with any perceived public consumption in mind (beyond the readers of the finished pieces that ultimately make use of them), but it is often very useful to get comments and reactions to them. I'm only aware of a small handful of people publishing their otherwise personal note collections (usually subsets) to the web (outside of social media presences which generally have a different function and intent).
Intellectual historians have looked at and documented external use cases of shared note collections, commonplace books, annotated volumes, and even diaries. There are even examples of published (usually posthumously) commonplace books, waste books, etc., but these are often for influential public and intellectual figures. Here Ludwig Wittgenstein's Zettel, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Ronald Reagan's card index commonplace, Stobaeus' Anthology, W. H. Auden's A Certain World, and Robert Southey’s Common-Place Book come quickly to mind not to mention digitized scholarly collections of Niklas Luhmann, W. Ross Ashby, S.D. Goitein, Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, and Aby Warburg's notes. Some of these latter will give you an idea of what they may have thought quality notes to have been for them, but often they mean little if nothing to the unstudied reader because they lack broader context or indication of linkages.
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Why are folks so obsessed with notes per day? Perhaps a proxy for toxic capitalism and productivity issues? Is the number of notes the best measure or the things they allow one to do after having made them? What is the best measure? Especially when there are those who use them for other purposes like lecturing, general growth, knowledge acquisition, or even happiness?
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www.napkin.one www.napkin.one
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https://www.napkin.one/
Yet another collection app that belies the work of taking, making, and connecting notes.
Looks pretty and makes a promise, but how does it actually deliver? How much work and curation is involved? What are the outputs at the other end?
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