50 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. A book entry, which summarizes my thoughts on a book I’ve recently finished reading (see #917 in the image below).

      It looks like the Stephen King entry has a picture of the book cover taped into it. This is an interesting idea.

    2. And each Christmas he sets aside two weeks to meticulously index that year’s diary – proudly claiming he can find anything within three minutes.

      I very much like this idea! I have years of journals that I sometimes peruse, and have lamented that so many "good ideas" live in there, but I never use them, or much see them. This has me wondering if I can incorporate them into my zettelkasten.

  2. Mar 2024
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240307125758/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-is-the-dominant-emotion-in-400-years-of-womens-diaries-180983834/

      Women's diaries from 17th till now have frustration as recurring theme, analysis shows. Not a big surprise. I think journaling often is emerging when frustration rears its head. And women have had ages of deeply systemic reasons to be very frustrated by.

      I've only ever journaled when there was something wrong with me or my context, when I was frustrated, sad, depressed etc. Perhaps except for those who treat their being as action research and make daily notes for later data mining, or those in a public role journaling to maintain first hand observations before spin gets invovled (keep a journal is a sound advice for anyone getting politically active).

  3. Jan 2024
  4. Nov 2023
  5. Oct 2023
    1. 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.

    1. Watson, L.R., Fraser, M., & Ballas, P. (2019). Journaling for mental health. Retrieved from https://www.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentID=4552&ContentTypeID=1 Literacy Research and Instruction, 49(2), 194-208. doi:10.1080/19388070902947360

      dead reference? couldn't find; url gone and not archived; DOI was for the Wolsey article and not this

  6. Aug 2023
    1. (~10:00) "The context determines the meaning of the content."

      Thus reframing is very powerful as you recontextualize the past, and therefore see it in a whole new light; the meaning of the past changed.

      By asking what you have learned from the past, you become anti-fragile and flexible, as you turn the past into something useful; an asset.

      "The past happens for us, not to us."

      "How you frame the past influences your expectations for the future."

      "You can't disconnect your view of the future from your experience in the present."

      "You can't have meaning in the present without hope & purpose in the future."

    2. One of the powerful things about journaling is that you can control the past; reframe it. What is the meaning of the past gets determined by both the present and the future.

      Hardy recommends to often (even daily) reflect on the past and notice how different you are now compared to then. What you have achieved, what is possible now that was not possible then, etc.

      What did I learn today?

    3. (~4:00) We interpret reality in a (cognitive) schema. Reality exists only in the mind. We cannot view reality objectively because it is intertwined with perception and cognition (see also John Boyd's OODA loop).

      Sidenote; because of this, time is also holistic; in our schema, the past, present, and future are basically all-existent at once.

    4. Watch this video for much interesting information about journaling.

      Journaling is all about agency

      1. In the morning, prepare for the struggles of the day, by mentioning the possibilities.
      2. Write for oneself.
      3. Repeat what is most important.
      4. Process stress on paper, in a healthy and good way. (If need be, continue this in a Kolb's session; not in the video)
      5. Copy favorite quotes.
      6. Ask the tough questions, and answer them truthfully. (As Dr. Hardy says: "All progress starts by telling the truth") Remember Socrates.
      7. Review the day and the actions. Examine. "The unexamined life is not worth living."
  7. Jul 2023
    1. "I keep a dated diary of sorts on index cards, though they rarely go past one card a day."This is something I haven't heard of before. So, you journal/diary on index cards, one per day?

      reply to u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto) at tk

      Yep, for almost a full year now on 4x6" index cards. (Receipts for the kids: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/wp-1688411021709-scaled.jpg)

      Previously I'd used a Hobonichi Cousin (page per day) journal for this. (Perhaps I should have stayed with the A6 size instead of the larger A5 for consistency?) Decades ago (around 1988ish?) I had started using a 2 page per day DayTimer pocket planners (essentially pre-printed/timed index cards spiral bound into monthly booklets which they actually shipped in index card-like plastic boxes for storage/archival purposes). Technically I've been doing a version of this for a really long time in one form or another.

      It generally includes a schedule, to do lists (bullet journal style), and various fleeting notes/journaling similar to the older Memindex format, just done on larger cards for extra space. I generally either fold them in half for pocket storage for the day or carry about in groups for the coming week(s) when I'm away from my desk for extended periods (also with custom blank index card notebooks/pads).

      I won't go into the fact that in the 90's I had a 5,000+ person rolodex... or an index card (in the entertainment they called them buck slips) with the phone numbers and names of \~100 people I dealt with regularly when early brick cell phones didn't have great (or any) storage/functionality.

  8. May 2023
    1. A major limitation of gratitude apps & journals is once you write in them, they are out of sight and mind for the rest of the day. One of our goals at 3x5 Life is to create an analog product that you interact with all day. When you pull out your card to view your tasks, you cannot help but to see your gratitude list on the opposite side.

      3x5 Life productivity cards have the usual to do lists on one side, but have a split AM:Gratitude and PM:Wins section on the back for tracking general progress.

  9. Apr 2023
  10. Mar 2023
    1. I’m not sure I need a system around, for example, the best way to surface the minutiae from interstitial journaling. In fact, just using the phrase “interstitial journaling” is a dead giveaway that I’ve already been overthinking it. Settle down, Jack!

      🤪

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVHhwyx-Cg

      An overly complex method of commonplacing, though oddly with absolutely no mention of indexing of any sort.

      reply: <br /> If academia doesn't work out, then perhaps you could shill for "Big Notebook"? Seriously though, this is a pretty heavy/complex method of commonplacing. Do you index any/all of it somehow so you can find the pieces you know you've worked through in the past? A card index perhaps? John Locke's commonplacing method? I do something similar, but use slips or index cards the way Wittgenstein or Walter Benjamin did.... Perhaps one day I'll go more visual like https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/ ?

  11. Feb 2023
    1. 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.

    2. I keep a wholly separate section of one of my boxes as a journal/diary as well, but it's less significant and is ordered only by date with very sparse indexing and an almost non-existent amount of linking. I have a bit of @Sascha's practice going on there, though certainly not as deep as his excellent description. I would caution newcomers to the practice of ZK to be very conscious of what, how, and why they're integrating a journaling practice into their workflow so that they don't risk what I call "zettelkasten overreach". Guarding against this sort of overreach can very easily be seen in my separate/distinct "journal on index cards" versus Sascha's more explicitly thought out "journal within a zettelkasten".

    3. One might have considered some of this part of his (Roland Barthes') fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.

    4. reply lifted from my notes:

      Henry David Thoreau kept both a commonplace book (essentially a traditional (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten in notebook form) and a separate writing journal where he did what most would consider typical 'journaling', but where he also tried out phrasing, writing, and other experimental work that would ultimately become part of his published written output. This may be a useful model for some. His journals ran to multiple volumes, but a good edited version with a nice introduction to some of his work and methods can be found in:

      • Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal: 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Original edition. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009.

      Similarly Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary. Published posthumously on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.

    5. The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)

      —Sasha Fast https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/Sascha

      I love the deeper definition and distinction of self-care here.

  12. Jan 2023
    1. A few months ago, during an insomnia-inducing crisis of confidence about where the hell I should be going next with my writing, I suddenly remembered my journal. I hadn’t written in it for a while. Although it was 1:30 in the morning, I got out of bed, went into my study, opened up my journal, and simply began to write. I wrote about being unable to write, the things I thought were preventing me from writing, and what I thought I should do about it. The simple act of writing these thoughts down meant that I no longer felt the need to rehearse them over and over in my head, so I could return to bed and sleep the sleep of the effortlessly talented. When I woke next morning, my crisis of confidence had reduced to a mild concern. My late-night journal session had put things in perspective. It had shown me a way forward.

      Example of someone getting the crap and worries out so that their writing can begin apace. Its sort of like writers' therapy and closely akin to those who talk about morning pages.

      Also similar to teachers of young children who encourage their students to get their "wiggles out" so that they can focus on the classwork at hand.

    1. Like any journal, Thoreau’s is repetitive, which suggests naturalplaces to shorten the text but these are precisely what need to be keptin order to preserve the feel of a journal, Thoreau’s in particular. Itrimmed many of Thoreau’s repetitions but kept them wheneverpossible, because they are important to Thoreau and because theyare beautiful. Sometimes he repeats himself because he is drafting,revising, constructing sentences solid enough to outlast the centuries.

      Henry David Thoreau repeated himself frequently in his journals. Damion Searls who edited an edition of his journals suggested that some of this repetition was for the beauty and pleasure of the act, but that in many examples his repetition was an act of drafting, revising, and constructing.


      Scott Scheper has recommended finding the place in one's zettelkasten where one wants to install a card before writing it out. I believe (check this) that he does this in part to prevent one from repeating themselves, but one could use the opportunity and the new context that brings them to an idea again to rewrite or rework and expand on their ideas while they're so inspired.


      Thoreau's repetition may have also served the idea of spaced repetition: reminding him of his thoughts as he also revised them. We'll need examples of this through his writing to support such a claim. As the editor of this volume indicates that he removed some of the repetition, it may be better to go back to original sources than to look for these examples here.

      (This last paragraph on repetition was inspired by attempting to type a tag for repetition and seeing "spaced repetition" pop up. This is an example in my own writing practice where the serendipity of a previously tagged word auto-populating/auto-completing in my interface helps to trigger new thoughts and ideas from a combinatorial creativity perspective.)

    2. Jan. 22. To set down such choice experiences that my own writingsmay inspire me and at last I may make wholes of parts. Certainly it isa distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentimentsand thoughts which visit all men more or less generally, that thecontemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmoniouscompletion. Associate reverently and as much as you can with yourloftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is anest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentallythrown together become a frame in which more may be developedand exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, ofkeeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulateourselves. My thoughts are my company. They have a certainindividuality and separate existence, aye, personality. Having bychance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought theminto juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it waspossible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.

      !!!!

      Henry David Thoreau from 1852

    1. Journaling in GPT-3 feels more like a conversation, so you don’t have to stare at a blank page or feel silly because you don’t know what to say.

      Is this part of the generative (and sometimes frustrating) part of journaling?

      In general, this article seems rather utilitarian in its understanding of journaling. But I don't journal regularly so maybe I'm not one to talk.

  13. Dec 2022
    1. https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

      He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

      Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

      Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

    1. Putting those thoughts into a journal moves them from feelings that secretly rule my decisions to rational concepts that I can analyze and solve.

      The "productivity" tone of the article made it pretty hard to read (as happens with me with all the "productivity" literature that doesn't account for structural imbalances that require productivity or made some populations more "productive" than others). But here passing from it to reflectivity conveyed the possible real value of interstitial journaling

    1. Sometimes, dedicating time to activities that fulfill a value reveals surprising truths, such as that a value is not as significant as you once thought. Giving time to our perceived priorities helps us learn about ourselves.

      Insight comes from doing.

  14. Oct 2022
    1. Occasionally he noted down what he heard and saw aswell as what he read, and sometimes what he said and did, althoughhe also kept a diary in separate form.

      In addition to an extensive note collection, Paxson kept a separate diary, indicating a different practicing in a different form.

  15. Sep 2022
    1. I'm not just talking about journaling. I'm talking about writing down the first few thoughts you have after you've arrived at work but before you've started on the day's tasks. Draw a picture or doodle an idea. It's a way to figure out what is important, and what is stressing you out. It is a record of your preparation and a way to help you look back and see, for these seven minutes, what was really important. Make sure you don't get too focused on the writing and not enough on the thinking.

      I love this practice and may have been doing it wrong. Pluswhich, I no longer GO to the office (unless walking down the stairs is that). But mostly, I've made it too routine. More doodling is in order!

  16. Jun 2022
    1. By asking students to share their annotations openly, we help students to see a wide range of annotation practices, thus demystifying what has often been a private, individual practice.

      Teachers can model their own reading and annotating practices for students, but this can be expanded when using social annotation. This will allow students to show each other a wider variety of potential note taking and annotation strategies which help to reinforce the teacher's own modeling. This can be useful modelling of a practice in public which has historically been done privately.

      By featuring notes which might be reused for papers or developing later research, teachers can also feature the portions of the note taking process which can be reused for developing new ideas. How might annotations within a text be linked to each other outside of the particular flow of the paper? Might there have been different orderings for the arguments that may have been clearer?

      What ideas in the broader class might the ideas within a particular text be linked to? What ideas outside of the class can be linked to those found within the text?

      In less experienced groups, teachers might occasionally call out individual annotations in discussion to ask the group for what purposes a student might have annotated specific portions to highlight the various methods and reasons.

      What are the list of particular note types here? - Paraphrasing segments to self-test for understanding - Creation of spaced repetition type notes for memorizing definitions and facts - Conversations with the text/original author and expansion of the ideas - Questioning the original text, do we agree/disagree? - Linking ideas from the text into one's broader knowledge base - Highlighting quotes for later reuse - others??


      Link to - double-entry journaling in Bruce Ballenger<br /> - types of questions one might ask within a text, Ballenger again

    1. There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts inwriting can lead to benefits for our health and well-being. 11 One ofthe most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that“translating emotional events into words leads to profound social,psychological, and neural changes.”

      11 James W. Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (May 1997), 162–66

      Did they mention any pedagogical effects in this work?

      How does this relate to the ability to release thoughts from working memory because they're written down and we don't need to spend time and effort trying to remember them? What are the references for this work? I suspect I've got them linked around somewhere...

      What other papers/work cover these intersections?

  17. Jan 2022
  18. Oct 2021
    1. What I'm interested in is doing this with visual artefacts as source material. What does visual pkm look like? Journaling, scrapbooking, collecting and the like. The most obvious tool is the sketchbook. How does a sketchbook work?

      It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

      The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

      For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

  19. Sep 2021
    1. https://briansunter.com/blog/five-minute-journal/

      Lists of prompts for writing/journaling:

      For a potential template:

      • # Morning Questions
        • [[Morning Questions]] #daily
          • [[What Am I Grateful for?]]
          • [[What Would Make Today Great?]]
          • [[What Am I Worried About?]]
          • [[What Am I Thinking of?]]
      • # Evening Questions
        • [[Evening Questions]] #daily
          • [[How Am I feeling?]]
          • [[What's Something Good That Happened Today?]]
          • [[What Did I Do Well?]]
          • [[What Could I Have Done Better?]]
    1. e Nandi an

      Among the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved covering not only each hour but half hours of the day.

      This reminds me of hearing attorneys journaling their day down to 7 1/2 minute increments for billing their clients.

      But based on science and with computers, we're now able to discriminate things down to the time it takes atoms to vibrate and we can date and timestamp things in our worklives to the nth degree. Even this post will have a timestamp on it down to the thousandth of a second.

    1. To use your brain well, get out of your brain. Paul calls this offloading. To think well, she says, “we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world” (243).

      This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.

      What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?

      Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.

      This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".

    1. https://nesslabs.com/plus-minus-next

      The big benefit of this is that it tacitly gets you focused on planning the next thing instead of dwelling on the past.

    2. draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked, “–” for what didn’t go so well, and “→” for what you plan to do next.

      The basic prescription of plus, minus, next journaling.

    3. Future-focused. Instead of dwelling too much on stuff that didn’t work, Plus Minus Next journaling is about acknowledging the negative in a productive way. Didn’t finish that project you were planning on shipping last week? Don’t beat yourself up, just make it a priority next week.
    4. Every area of our lives is interconnected, so should be the way we journal.

      I generally take this approach, but it can be useful to compartmentalize things.

    1. The important thing, C.Wright Mills argues, is that you keep a journal, a place for ‘fringe-thoughts’, where you “will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person” as part of learning “how to keep your inner world awake.” While we might think of such journaling as merely a step towards the ‘real’ intellectual work of writing papers or publishing blog posts, crucially Mills argues that “the maintenance of such a file is intellectual production.” That message should be just as inspiring as the idea that we can all blog because we have stories to tell.
  20. Jul 2021
    1. Refer to the research of Rimé et al, _Social Sharing of Emotion (see references) who have found people talk about troubling topics like emotions a lot. Some suggest this is an indicator that talking will clarify your understanding. 

      I've heard that keeping a journal can also be helpful for sorting out and expanding on emotions. This is assuredly related. More often it's framed from the perspective of getting things out rather than working them out.

      This could be useful research to read.

  21. Dec 2020
    1. Some suggestions:   -Interrogate your life           Who are your heroes?           Who are your villains?           Where did you come from?           Who are your people? - Contemplate your own life story and those concerning your family. - Write down your life story.   - Identify your family rituals (birthdays, marriage, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.). - Write down your dreams and the impact they’ve had on your life.   - Religious beliefs and how they have affected your life. - Identify how your family recognizes the changes in life status, e.g., the passage from adolescence to adult, "coming of age". Note any differences between the way women and men are treated. - Identify any conflict resulting from the change in life status and its resolution. - How does religion or philosophy of life fit into your personal myth? - What major events have influenced your life? In what way have these events been the hinges whereby the story of your life swings? - Think about the story elements in your own life, then look for the meaning beneath the surface. - How does your interpretation of events differ from that of others who witnessed them?

      Prompts for journaling.

    1. The act of putting your observations into specific word choices and then reflecting on them, whether through conversation or rereading your journal entry, is an important part of the process,” she adds. “This is why, while I like apps like Calm and Headspace, I really recommend that people find some way to verbalize their experiences after using the app.”

      Verbalizing your feelings and thoughts after meditation is very important in helping ourselves observe our thoughts and feeling.

      This verbalizing can be done out loud or through journaling