If I had a dollar for every organizational system I have tried, I could treat myself to a steak dinner in a fancy restaurant. (Hey! That’s not a bad ideal!) I’ve tried notebook organizers, card files, flip charts, a stop watch, and numerous labeling gadgets. I’ve tried refrigerator magnets, the buddy system, lots of books, and a bunch of classes and seminars. All of these were good tools and some of them had great ideas, but none of them worked for me. (p27)

I accomplished a couple of other things on that first day back into reality. First, with an evil Grinch-like smile | uprooted every household management system | had ever tried, and tore up every single 3x5 card in them. Then one by one, | roasted and toasted them in the fireplace until they were gone, gone, gone. Next, with equally fiendish delight, | speared my $35 namebrand notebook organizer with a marshmallow fork, and | roasted it too. It melted into oblivion, all but it’s ugly metal spine. Next, | prayed for my attitude and for help. And finally, | marched myself into Wal-mart and bought my first clear plastic bin, a two pound sack of M&M's, and a loaf of white bread. For better or worse, we have been pretty happy campers at my house ever since. (p6)

Adler/Van Doren use the statement of unity of a work as an example of testing one's understanding of a work and its contents.

(Again, did this exist in the 1940 edition?)

Who do McDaniel and Donnelly 1996 cite in their work as predecessors of their idea as certainly it existed?

Examples in the literature of this same idea/method after this: - https://hypothes.is/a/TclhyMfqEeyTkQdZl43ZyA (Feynman Technique in ZK; relationship to Ahrens) - explain it to me like I'm a 5th grader - https://hypothes.is/a/BKhfvuIyEeyZj_v7eMiYcg ("People talk" in Algebra Project) - https://hypothes.is/a/m0KQSDlZEeyYFLulG9z0vw (Intellectual Life version) - https://hypothes.is/a/OyAAflm5Ee6GStMjUMCKbw (earlier version of statement in this same work) - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw (Ahrens' version of elaboration citing McDaniel and Donnelly 1996, this uses both restatement and application to a situation as a means of testing understanding) - https://hypothes.is/a/B3sDhlm5Ee6wF0fRYO0OQg (Adler's version for testing understanding from his video) - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA (Manfred Kuenh and Luhmann's reformulating writing)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568150/

Based on having watched the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and the depictions of Rivers' card index in the film and using her hands and a lateral file for scale, her cards seem to have been 3 x 5" index cards.

cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/RvLTZjCQEe2uuaNwpTBNuA

Robert Green's definition of creativity sounds like it's related to diffuse thinking processes. read: https://billyoppenheimer.com/august-14-2022/

Often note taking, and reviewing over those notes is more explicit in form for creating new ideas.

Come back to explore these.

Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts

Are there any other surfaces we're missing?

4.2 Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves—they are genetically programmed into us.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

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It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Great quote about what a zettelkasten isn't. This is also one of the reasons why I've underlined the amount of work that one must put into the box to get productive material back out the other end.

"To summarize, I am prepared to conquer all hurdles in my path to achieving the career of my dreams so that I may contribute to my society. I am a firm believer in the concept of dreams coming true."

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

Rowan Wilken admits that Cornelia Vismann's use of files for transmission, storage, cancellation, manipulation, and destruction are remarkable, but that the key feature of the card index as a file type is its use for creative production.

https://every.to/letter

A manifesto about what the Every platform is all about. They're trying to create a new(?) economic model for writers working together.

I'm not really sure how this is dramatically different from prior efforts or if the economic incentives are actually properly aligned here. Many writers without critically looking at the whole may be led here as much by marketing hype as anything else. It almost sounds like they're recreating The Huffington Post, but giving away some of the value up front instead of leaving all the value in one person's hand for a future sale.

Who owns the copyright of the created works? Are editors and proofreaders just work for hire here? What about their interests?

It was diction who created the kinetoscope and other Mashona and Edison took credit.

The article is found in this scholarly journal.

A suggestive paragraph that may have had currency at the time you put together the story - but really, pretty much irrelevant.

With all this unnecessary detail - it's no wonder you never got round to the teeny weeny task of counterbalancing the grand crusade of George Simon to put an end to to the event, with the fact that it failed. Spectacularly!

And if you had just a bit more time, you probably would have been able to also include there was another similar attempt prior to his, from one of his factional colleagues, that was also punted by council.

What is the work-for-hire rule? (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201)

The music we listen to highly impacts our decision making, especially as adolescents. Adolescents are extremely impressionable, and the music they listen to has a great impact on how they decide to live their day to day lives. Popular musicians are seen as role models by the people who idolize them, and adolescents may try to represents the songs in which they favor through their actions every day.

Recent studies have found that adolescents who listen to music that supports substance abuse and violence have a greater chance to act upon what they listen to. What young adults and teenagers listen to through music and popular media will affect their decision making process. Specifically with substance abuse, and there is a direct uptake in use of illegal substances by adolescents who listen to music that promotes such activities. This can cause a whole societal problem considering most of todays popular music among adolescents touches upon substance abuse and violence. Adolescents are extremely impressionable and the music they listen can shape how a person tries to act, or represent themselves.

Another test to run with R!

The author claims here that Emma was inspired by the 1814 novel Discipline by Mary Brunton, which surely is not part of the male literary canon laid out earlier in the article. The author outlines the main themes of Discipline and explains the relationship between the two authors.

I feel like a broken record here, but again, this seems to be a very tenuous point without computational analysis. The author's own language belies this tenuousness as she says that the novel's inspiration "seems to have been a straightforward reaction" to another novel. The word "seems" does not inspire confidence.

Another test to run - Emma as compared to other quixotic novels, especially The Female Quixote!

Another possible tie for DH work - running comparisons on these sentimental novels and Emma.

I would like to perform quantitative analysis on Emma and these texts, in addition to other 18th century texts such as Evelina.

Once again, here is another point that I believe it could almost be irresponsible to make without quantitative analysis. I don't know that it is empirically true that Emma is "unique" in its "obsession" with other texts and "stock elements of the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era novel."

I believe that DH work could be instrumental in accomplishing this vision. Since the literature of this time is in the public domain, it is indeed possible to run tests of influence and similarity on all existing manuscripts.

an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog. It provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment. It is created during the Sprint Planning meeting. The Sprint Goal gives the Development Team some flexibility regarding the functionality implemented within the Sprint. The selected Product Backlog items deliver one coherent function, which can be the Sprint Goal. The Sprint Goal can be any other coherence that causes the Development Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.