https://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/

Of course this is the basis of keeping a zettelkasten for writing as well. When you can pull up prior ideas as a bank of information to work from, you're never starting from scratch, which is difficult not only for ChatGPT, but for people in general.

Cross reference research on naming "white" things versus naming with a more specific prompt like "white" things in your refrigerator.

Title brainstorm idea: Chromatic 3rd Relationships (Mediants)

This points to AI providing the best time savings in draft generation, which fits with the idea of having the AI generate the drafts based on the professional's queries.

For UX designers, this points to AI in a design tool being most useful when it generates drafts (sketches) that the designer then revises. Where UX deliverables don't compare easily to written deliverables is the contextual factors that influence the design, like style guides or design systems. Design too AI assistants don't yet factor those in, though it seems likely it will, if provided style guides and design systems in a format it can read.

Given a draft of sufficient quality that it doesn't require longer to revise than a draft the designer would create on their own, getting additional time to refine sounds great.

I'm not sure what to make of the reduced time to brainstorm when using AI. Without additional information, it's hard not to assume that the AI tool may be influencing the direction of brainstorming as professionals think through the queries they'll use to get the AI to generate the most useful draft possible.

—Will via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2519/ideas-im-grappling-with-february-23-2023#latest

One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.

Just as using a text for writing generative annotations (having a conversation with a text) is a useful exercise for writers and thinkers, creative writers can stand to have similar textual creativity prompts.

Compare Wordcraft affordances with tools like Nabokov's card index (zettelkasten) method, Twyla Tharp's boxes, MadLibs, cadavre exquis, et al.

The key is to have some sort of creativity catalyst so that one isn't working in a vacuum or facing the dreaded blank page.

The idea of expressing the worst possible idea first in brainstorming can often often be helpful.

Example: when brainstorming restaurant suggestions for a group, suggest McDonalds first to subtly pressure people to create better ideas to prevent the lowest common denominator from winning.

Reply to:

Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

The "bad" side of brainstorming

It's tough to do your own marketing and naming is hard. If you have an obscure short title, be sure to have a sharply defined subtitle, both for definition but to hit the keywords you'll want for discovery and search (SEO) purposes. Though be careful with keyword stuffing, if for no other reason than that Luhmann had a particularly sparse index.

Zettelkasten doesn't have much value for for native search (yet). Who besides a student that doesn't really want to buy it searches for a book on note taking?! Creativity, Productivity, and Writing are probably most of your potential market, so look at books in those areas for words to borrow (aka steal flagrantly). Other less common keywords to consider or throw into your description of the book, though not the title: research, research methods, literature review, thesis writing, Ph.D., etc.

Perhaps you've limited the question Scott. Instead ask everyone: What title would you want to see on such a book that would make you want to buy and read it? Everyone should brainstorm for 3 minutes and write down a few potential titles.

I'll start:

Antinet Method: Thought Development for Creativity and Productive Writing

Antinet Zettelkasten: A Modern Approach to Thought Development

Antinet: The Technique of Unreasonably Productive Intellectual Work (and Fun) [h/t F. Kuntze]

Mix and match away...

Tiago Forte frames the creative process in the framing of divergence (brainstorming) and convergence (connecting ideas, editing, refining) which emerged out of the Stanford Design School and popularized by IDEO in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this is just what the more refined practices of maintaining a zettelkasten entail. It's the creation of profligate divergence forced by promiscuously following one's interests and collecting ideas along the way interspersed with active and pointed connection of ideas slowly creating convergence of these ideas over time. The ultimate act of creation finally becomes simple as pulling one's favorite idea of many out of the box (along with all the things connected to it) and editing out any unnecessary pieces and then smoothing the whole into something cohesive.

This is far less taxing than sculpting marble where one needs to start with an idea of where one is going and then needs the actual skill to get there. Doing this well requires thousands of hours of practice at the skill, working with smaller models, and eventually (hopefully) arriving at art. It's much easier if one has the broad shapes of the entirety of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Donatello's works in their repository and they can simply pull out one that feels interesting and polish it up a bit. Some of the time necessary for work and practice are still there, but the ultimate results are closer to guaranteed art in one domain than the other.

Commonplacing or slipboxing allows us to take the ability to imitate, which humans are exceptionally good at (Annie Murphy Paul, link tk), and combine those imitations in a way to actively explore and then create new innovative ideas.

Commonplacing can be thought of as lifelong and consistent practice of brainstorming where one captures all the ideas for later use.

Link to - practice makes perfect

Brainstorming can be a miserable way to start a creative process. Without a pre-existing source of ideas (one's own notes) it can be the only place to start, but it suffers from being unreliable and having no objectivity. It is tremendously difficult to plumb the depths of one's memory for great ideas, questions, or interesting places to start an endeavor, but if you've been collecting these for ages, it becomes much easier to span a space and see tangential spaces.

DOI: Fluent - this refers to a thinkers ability to generate a mulittude of ideas and concepts.

I feel like I am a fluent thinker, I finally found a word to describe what I have felt all my life. I can generate so many solutions to problems yet many may be far-fetched or unreasonable, but in my mind it is a solution.

This is great for brainstorming I have realized over my life.

My ideals for all of my regular processes and servers:

• Centralized configuration and control - I want to go into a folder and configure everything I'm running everywhere.
• Configuration file has the steps needed to set up from scratch - so I can just back up the configuration and data folders and not worry about backing up the programs.
• Control multiple machines from the central location. Dictate where tasks can run.
• [nice to have] Allow certain tasks to running externally, e.g. in AWS ECS or Lambda or similar
• Command-line access for management (web is great for monitoring)
• Flexible scheduling (from strict every minute to ~daily)
• Support for daemons, psuedo-daemons (just run repeatedly with small delays), and periodic tasks.
• Smart alerts - some processes can fail occasionally, but needs to run at least once per day - some processes should never fail. A repeating inaccurate alert is usually just as bad as no alert at all.
• Error code respect (configurable)
• Logs - store the program output, organize it, keep it probably in a date-based structure
• Health checks - if it's a web server, is it still responding to requests? Has it logged something recently? Touched a database file? If not, it's probably dead.
• Alerts support in Telegram and email
• Monitor details about the run - how long did it take? How much CPU did it use? Has it gotten slower over time?
• Dashboard - top-level stats, browse detailed run stats and logs

So much of the configuration/control stuff screams containers, so more and more I'm using Docker for my scripts, even simpler ones.

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is accomplished by existing Docker orchestration tools. Been delaying that rabbit hole for a long time.

I think the key thing that makes this not just a "cron" problem for me, is I want something that monitors and manages both itself and the tasks I want to run, including creating/setting up if not already. I also want to ideally focus my mental energy into a single controller that handles my "keep this running" things all together, be they servers or infrequent tasks.

Doesn't have to be a single project. Might be multiple pieces glued together somehow.

Hey all, this is Michael – I am writing to test out this platform and to begin to build something in this document. I realize it’s slightly obscure at the moment how this pad will come to be useful during Publishing Sphere – I believe this will be come clearer in the coming days as we begin to roll out some of the sites, info, and programming for the gathering.

Danny and I will be meeting tomorrow (Thursday, the 2nd of May) to discuss the publishing apparatus we have been discussing, and will begin to introduce it to the group as something to work off, develop in new directions, or to create publication systems concurrent to this one. Once we have this initial formulation mapped out, I’ll let him introduce it to you all to begin to discuss and edit.

Shortly, I’ll post some info that I think is relevant to the gathering more generally, and then some additional information about you all so that you might begin to become more aware of the other members of the group. I’m truly looking forward to witnessing how you might all begin to work with one another.

More soonest~

M.